"We'll Have Waters All Around" - March 26, 2021

[burak]

Hellooooo....helloooooo!.... HEY! Is anyone still on this ship!? HELLOOOOOOO!!!

Yup still here. Closing it down

Well at least let's head out to sea... see how long those shorebirds can last without food. Ha!

I'm up for any activity that doesn't involve counting or adding or basically any math.

[Joe Ross]

[Joe Ross]

[Tripod]

That was a meta...

[Laura M]

Oh good grief.

[joequavis]

Welp that's one thing I definitely didn't try.

[Al Sisti]

Two things:

1. Kudos to everyone who solved it
2. My hail mary should have counted, had I sent it in: "Java To Go." (Java and Togo are islands)
3. Jangler still hasn't solved MGWCC

and that should tell you all you need to know about how well I count.

[PQ63]

Huh? I get the Thousand. And I get the Island. But where’s the Dressing?

Sorry to be a party pooper but that’s not a phrase. It’s a noun. I submitted “Bread and Butter” because that’s definitely a phrase.

[EVJ]

I feel bad for all the people who’s winning streaks were broken by this meta.

[ajk]

Ha. Thought to add the separate digits and I think I might even have started doing this, but I wouldn’t have gotten to the end because I’d be thinking it had to refer back to the grid numbers somehow. Oh well, Isaac turns out to be good company.

[HunterX]

The tricky part was adding the 26 and 27 twice, once for across and once for down. Fortunately, my daughter is a math major in college. As we tried different adding methods on the islands, they said, "I'm going to add all the numbers, just for fun." Bingo.

The irksome part was the additional word, "dressing," which doesn't seem to be indicated anywhere. (That I know of.)

But MY pet peeve was, I can't imagine I would ever actually ASK for thousand island dressing in a restaurant. Pu-LEEZE...

[Homer Buckle]

I blush, but that was the first thing I thought of after filling in 1A and 1D. I circled all of the answers that were islands, and was happily ashore quickly. Next week, I expect to be lost at sea for most of Easter weekend.

[hcbirker]

On a whim I counted the clue answers. Got 1000, got the islands, and dressing was simply implied.

[burak]

Argh. If I weren't fatigued from all of the complex additions and looking for their letter components in the grid, I could have solved it but I was really fed up at the end. Here is a partial list of the things I've tried.

- Group the islands by letters and add and look for corresponding letters in the grid.
- Group them by geographical position and add and look.
- Add their grid positions to the number of letters in their clues and add.
- Do the above with ony the first word of the clue and add.
- Individually add the numerical values of the letters in the island names and look.
- Repeat all the steps above but now look for a sequence that comes after each answer instead of the grid position.

It feels like a groaner but I know that's because I didn't solve it ahah. I guess Matt thought it would have been too easy if he asked for a food item instead of a "three-word phrase that you might ask for at a restaurant" which is a very convoluted way of describing thousand island dressing.

[ImOnToo]

I would like 1+ hours of my life back trying to confirm “dressing”!

Realized that the fact that the clue specifically said “a three-word phrase” nudged that dressing was the implied ending.

Had the clue read simply, “something you might ask for...”, it would have confused the exact right answer.

[Colin]

Oh boy! Very nice. The logic and direct instructions fooled me!
It would have been crisper and cleaner if DORA wasn’t also an island. And then there are the GOTO islands, or the GOTOS as they might be known. Just saying. No sour grapes in my restaurant!

[JeanneC]

Nope, my streak is definitely over. My “hello WSJ puzzle guys” email answer was “Rabbit stew, please”. On to the Monday Muggle meta. And whoever wins the mug deserves it.

At least I learned another method of meta construction. .

[steveb]

I would like 1+ hours of my life back trying to confirm “dressing”!

Realized that the fact that the clue specifically said “a three-word phrase” nudged that dressing was the implied ending.

Had the clue read, “something you might ask for...”, it would have confused the exact right answer.

I submitted the correct answer based on the implied ending (what else could it have possibly been?), but I also spent a few minutes trying to confirm "dressing." The closest I could come was three clues/answers that involved clothing: 72A, 21D, 30D.

[Abide]

My shore leave was delayed for 2 days because I had added the numbers by hand, and came up with 998. I discarded that as another rabbit hole. This morning I thought about using a calculator and it all “added up”.

[oldjudge]

All I can say is thank goodness the answer wasn’t Minnesota. BTW, a stretch answer might have been “The grand total”