"Inner Turmoil" - April 8, 2022

[PQ63]

Even with the explanation I don’t understand how this mechanism works.

[hoover]

I found part 1 soon enough, but then had no idea what to do with what I had found.

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I went down a lot of rabbit holes with this one. The most interesting might have been seeing four instances of IV next to each other in the grid and thinking IV as Roman numerals might represent the "number of letters" four. I stumbled across the right mechanism by repeating KO (from 'knockout', I had thought maybe we had to 'knock out' groups of four letters) to myself and then realizing LMN separated the letters, leading to the actual mechanism.

It was also funny how people had to avoid declaring that the solution was "cute" when posting their on shore messages. I think they should make a meta where the answer is ONSHORE FUN AND CLEVER and then see what the message board looks like.

[Abide]

4.9 stars, because the title should have been Central Havoc instead of Inner Turmoil

[Inca]

Didn't have a clue. I'm really amazed at how clever so many of you are. What did inner turmoil reference?

[SewYoung]

O.K. Never would have gotten it in a million years.
Ran errands (grocery store run and picked up after show dinner for the band) but never saw Bob Dylan. Local workers were not allowed anywhere on the floor the stage is on while he was in the building and I never went out to peek through the doors to see part of the show.
Being in the chorus for the gospel show was a lot of fun and the duo and their pianist were the nicest people you would ever hope to meet. The Beethoven show/concert (mostly an educational show for kids) was very good. A very full weekend.

[DrTom]

I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of time on this one.

The clue in 70A was insanely vague.

Well, it kind of had to be. If it said that it was the 4 letter alphabetical span between a pair of letters this would have been a very easy puzzle.

[DrTom]

I actually happened upon the mechanism by thinking "what COULD this mean" and found instances of a 4 letter span in three of the theme answers:
auDIofiles
elvinJOnes
knockoutPUnch

Then got VERY frustrated because I could not find it in the QUEENVICTORIA, best I could do is a QU. When I finally was motivated to look broader I saw the V I had been searching for with the QU ("gosh if only that had been QV I's have had one in each themer, but QV would be difficult to work into a word..."

It still took some head banging after that since I wasn't sure what to do with the letters, and then I remembered CRUST that I had initially misfiled as SAUCE causing me a lot of erasing, and when I saw FGHI I recalled seeing FIGHT so that had to be the path.

Now the OTHER Gaffney this week-end, well that was a completely different story, could not see that for beans.

[31 Down]

What did inner turmoil reference?

The inner seemed to reference the four letters mentioned in clue 70A. And I assumed that turmoil meant disorder, thus anagram. Did anyone notice that 1A LIMO is an anagram for part of turmoil?

[otlaolap]

First major maison lapin (I'm in Paris, remember) was to notice that the theme answers all started with a five-letter word, thus leaving a string of four letters between their first letters. Much work, therefore, with UEEN, UDIO, LVIN, NOCK. Lapin number two led me around QV, AF, EJ, KO-or-KP. Finally noticed the RSTU BCDE FGHI LMNO possibility.

Worked with these a lot. Major rabbit here was the idea that, since we needed to derive a single letter from each sequence, one should find letters in the grid that were bracketed by the first and last letter of one of the sequences. This and other similar inanities led nowhere.

Finally, just before Sunday dinner, was giving the grid a final glance when CRUST tweaked my eye. Sixty seconds later, et voilà.

[Omnibus]

Glad I took the L this week - never would have gotten the answer and I spent my time better enjoying the beautiful weather this weekend. Thanks, Matt!

[Mister Squawk]

I started working on this puzzle in the Budapest airport on Friday morning, worked the grid on the plane from Munich to Boston, but got nowhere with the meta.

I it wasn't until Sunday that I thought to try alphabetical as opposed to spatial spacing by fours, but then got stuck again. Tried anagramming the interior letters in the grid, then the intervening alphabetical letters. It was BCDE to CUBED that got me going.

Happy to be able to solve.

[KayW]

I first started with the 4 pairs of initials of the words, and quickly noticed the alphabetic distance matched for the first three themes but not the fourth. For KNO-CKOU-TPUNCH I tried using O-PQRS-T so that the grid spacing in the themes matched the alphabetic spacing. But like @Mister Squawk , once I saw BCDE/CUBED I was off and running.

[MaineMarge]

OOOH! I love alphabet runs. And don’t try hiding one from an OLD 2nd grade teacher
Here 2 of our old meta solving friends were in play-
1. Looking at the first letters of words in the 4 longest answers
2. Scouring the other grid entries for likely matchups
FGHI/FIGHT was my first find.

Here’s right back atcha, Matt
A Fanny Kicking Puzzle! Uber Zowie!

[drbockel2]

This was a hard no/dead end for me. Even with the mechanism I don’t get it. And I must be dumb because I can’t apply the mechanism to KNOCKOUTPUNCH…. Thumbs down, I drowned.

[pjc]

Never got this. I was on the right track with the scrambled letters, but had the wrong sets of four.

What I noticed is that each long answer had a scrambled 4-letter word that overlapped the two words in the answer: for example, elvINJOnes has a scrambled JOIN. Looking through the grid I see, UNIT which with an added E becomes UNITE. So, I thought doing that for the four long answers would get me to a four-letter word with those extra letters. But it never happened.

Ah, well. Live and learn.

[Jace54]

This was a hard no/dead end for me. Even with the mechanism I don’t get it. And I must be dumb because I can’t apply the mechanism to KNOCKOUTPUNCH…. Thumbs down, I drowned.

It is the alphabet sequence (A through Z). LMNO are the four letters between K and P, and the “melon” grid answer provides the “e” part of the answer.

[Ergcat]

I was having a difficult time trying to understand the clue 70a “ letters between certain PAIRS of letters”. I kept trying to find 4 letters between pairs of letters…. I tried Between pairs of “IT” from “Inner Turmoil”, I tried between pairs of “IN” from INner in title, then I tried between pairs of double letters like “OO” ( there was scoop, poop, oops, tool, fools). But nothing worked. It took a nudge or two to clear my mind of using the title “Inner Turmoil” and concentrate again on the long theme answers to see the correct path.

[Bird Lives]

[Scott M]

Totally stumped on this one. Spent too much time looking for anagrams of the below, then looking for four-letter words going across blank spaces, then just floundering around and muttering some four-letter words of my own. Twelve week streak broken. Traveling next weekend; hope I get the chance to redeem myself.

QV - UEEN NO - VICT
UI - EENV VR - ICTO
EC - ENVI II - CTOR
ET - NVIC CA - TORI

AF - UDIO IE - OFIL
UI - DIOF OS - FILE
DL - IOFI

EJ - LVIN IE - NJON
LO - VINJ NS - JONE
VN - INJO

KO - NOCK KU - OUTP
NU - OCKO ON - UTPU
OT - CKOU UC - TPUN
CP - KOUT TH - PUNC