A place to discuss the weekly Wall Street Journal Crossword Puzzle Contest, starting every Thursday around 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. Please do not post any answers or hints before the contest deadline which is midnight Sunday Eastern time.
ZooAnimalsOnWheels wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 2:41 am
But the more important question of the weekend is: Is the board game Wingspan what @woozy meant by "The Bird Game"? (My friends and I also call it "the bird game".) And if so, have you and your wife agreed to remove the two ravens from the deck for being such game-breaking cards?
She gets *really* annoyed when I draw the ravens. But she likes it when she draws the ravens. But she's gets annoyed when the ravens come late in the game or are forced to be discarded in predation.
But we both like the ravens too much when we get them to take them out. And they don't *always* break the game. But dang... put the Chihuahan Raven in your grasslands and... just lay eggs and you *never* have to worry about getting the right food for your birds again! (Nothing worse than wanting certain foods but not having them show up in the bird feeder. Which is interesting. We came across a situation tonight, that in hindsight is surprising we didn't run across earlier. She had bird with a "take a worm from the birdfeeder" action in her forest so every time she took food she *always* remove all the worms and as half my cards needed worms I *never* got them)
But we hate many of the bonus cards. The backyard naturalist encourages you to play low cards... that's a winning strategy for sure. And the one where you have groups of four eggs for a measely 1 point each. Yeah like you can ever have more then two or three of those. If you have the european expansion then what about Tucked cards bonus card? It takes 4 different birds with tucked cards to get started and 7 to get the high score. It's a good game when we get three different birds with tucked cards.
GUAVA is not an anagram of VAGUE and PEPPER is not a palindrome.
florida_manatee wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 3:26 am
Another KLUDGE of a 'puzzle'.
Why indicate a 3 letter word with '3-' while indicating a 7 letter word with '(7 letters)?'
Rube Goldberg would have been proud.
The first number, the one with the hyphen after it, is the number of letters in the body part.
The number in parentheses is the number of letters in the synonym for the hyphenated phrase.
So 39A 3-________ (4 letters) is the 3-letter body part EAR, the word to be entered in the grid (SPLITTING) completes the adjective. The synonym (at 61D) is LOUD, which is four letters.
Your Rube Goldberg analogy is apt. The mechanism of a meta can involve two or three or more sequential steps leading to an answer. The point is to give the solver some delight in discovering those connections -- similar to the enjoyment that one gets in following the connections in a Rube Goldberg drawing.
In my opinion figuring that out was one of the most satisfying AHA ever! (number)-(x letters) was the most perplexing looking entries and neither number seemed to have anything to do with anything that decoding it was an awesome feeling.
And I needed it for THUMPING. Looking at the grid for 4 letter words probably but certainly beginning with V for a body part with 5 letters that is probably but not certainly HEART.... I needed those letters.
Also finding the first one (SPLITTING) wouldn't have really lead to any of the others if I hadn't realized "Hey EAR has three letters".
GUAVA is not an anagram of VAGUE and PEPPER is not a palindrome.
I, too, inferred "Heart Thumping", but as many times as I checked my list of four-letter answers, no joy. So I googled "5-letter body parts" and lo and behold, there's "CHEST." Hey. that works for "THUMPING"!
So I did the "first-letter of the appropriate answers" step and come up with "NAVEL." OK. Where's the next six letters? Back to Mr G. again. And there's "GAZING." Never heard of it, but I've got nothing better, so I went with it. Hey, my lucky day. Maybe (Mike?) my luck will continue.
We are always happy to get to know other muggles and help in any way! PM's are always welcome. The next best thing to winning a mug is helping a fellow muggle win a mug!
ship4u wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 7:11 am
I had never heard the term navel gazing and when I did, I assumed it was something indecent. I suppose I need to start reading more than Bill Bryson.
Not a big fan of 2-part inferred mechanisms. Two weeks ago the title gave it away; this time around I got the mechanism after some work but I was only able to solve after googling "to navel" (Gaffney told us it was an activity so it had to be a verb) wherein the first result was "to navel gaze"
As I suspected about 10 seconds after I submitted my (wrong) page 1 answer -- CONTEMPLATE -- I knew it was wrong, when I looked again at the prompt ("...an activity"). CON{EMPLATE is not an activity. I got the NAVEL part, and the self-reflection bit, and was counting the letters in "omphaloskepsis," but it had too many letters. Maybe I'm too old, but I've never heard of Navel-Gazing, and even if I caught on that the answer was probably going to take the form of "[body part]-___ ing," I would never have intuited "gazing."
I had one tiny gripe with the mechanism: chest-thumping is a noun (at least in the four dictionaries that I consulted) and vain is an adjective. All the other "body-part-ING words" were adjectives as were their corresponding synonyms in the grid. 74A SNOB is a noun but doesn't really fit the definition of "the act of boasting" or "conduct or expression marked by pompous or arrogant self-assertion". So I settled on VAIN for the "4 letters" because NAVEL-GAZING was just such a perfect answer and provided a chuckle and a great AHA moment!
Hail Mary from midfield... and complete! I was nervous about heart vs. chest and the like, but really needed VAIN to be part of the solution for wedging into the right answer. I was on the route to something like BODYPIERCING but fortunately that wasn't eleven letters, so needed a different path. Happy Chinese New Year... appropriately for some NFL fans it's the Year of the Tiger.
joequavis wrote: Sat Jan 29, 2022 10:04 am
What a great meta! I encountered exactly zero rabbit holes...well, other than the one that actually had the rabbit. Just took a lot of contemplating for me this week. Good luck, Muggles!
And now it seems safe to mention how much I appreciated the wording of this post!
Al Sisti wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 8:29 am
As I suspected about 10 seconds after I submitted my (wrong) page 1 answer -- CONTEMPLATE -- I knew it was wrong, when I looked again at the prompt ("...an activity"). CON{EMPLATE is not an activity. I got the NAVEL part, and the self-reflection bit, and was counting the letters in "omphaloskepsis," but it had too many letters. Maybe I'm too old, but I've never heard of Navel-Gazing, and even if I caught on that the answer was probably going to take the form of "[body part]-___ ing," I would never have intuited "gazing."
@Al Sisti
If you are too old and have not heard of navel gazing, I am in the same boat. I would have never gotten this without being told by MM and WW
Al Sisti wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 8:29 am
As I suspected about 10 seconds after I submitted my (wrong) page 1 answer -- CONTEMPLATE -- I knew it was wrong, when I looked again at the prompt ("...an activity"). CON{EMPLATE is not an activity. I got the NAVEL part, and the self-reflection bit, and was counting the letters in "omphaloskepsis," but it had too many letters. Maybe I'm too old, but I've never heard of Navel-Gazing, and even if I caught on that the answer was probably going to take the form of "[body part]-___ ing," I would never have intuited "gazing."
Very popular activity on the left coast, since at least the 1970s. This is what I intimated previously that might be a reason why some of you would struggle and others of us would squeal (with delight).
Might have been an obstacle for this puzzle, but in life Iโd say itโs an advantage.
I also had a hard time coming up with the body part for thumping. I googled heart thumping and it basically told me to go to the doctor. I even googled elbow thumping. I got my non-crossword boyfriend to take a look for ideas,and his first thought was that VAIN goes with heart thumping since it sounds like VEIN. As I was explaining why that wouldn't work, he said "what about chest thumping?" Another quick google search and got to let him know he was indeed correct with VAIN. The only reason I have heard of this activity is I once drank a beer called Navel Gazer at a brewery in Nashville. It's nice when my two favorite hobbies collide.
wording of this post!
