"Inner Turmoil" - April 8, 2022

[BarbaraK]

OK, I'm still not getting the mechanism on KNOCKOUTPUNCH. The clue says 4 letters between the letter pairs. All other theme words follow this mechanism to a T. but there are 6 letters between the K and P so it seems to fail (in my clearly misunderstood brain).

Knockout is one word. LMNO are between K and P.

OK, I see this now. It threw me for a loop because the other theme words seemed to follow a more consistent rule, but I see how this works now. I still wouldn't have gotten it. I spent Saturday in Augusta instead.

Did you win? (Not a golfer, but heard there was something going on there;)

[JetStream]

Congrats to the solvers! I was out of my league on this one.

[Notbitter]

I really need to develop the willpower to cut my losses. I SAY that I’ve spent enough time trying to solve but I keep coming back.

[BarbaraK]

I really need to develop the willpower to cut my losses. I SAY that I’ve spent enough time trying to solve but I keep coming back.

Been there, done that.

[Bob cruise director]

OK, I'm still not getting the mechanism on KNOCKOUTPUNCH. The clue says 4 letters between the letter pairs. All other theme words follow this mechanism to a T. but there are 6 letters between the K and P so it seems to fail (in my clearly misunderstood brain).

Knockout is one word. LMNO are between K and P.

OK, I see this now. It threw me for a loop because the other theme words seemed to follow a more consistent rule, but I see how this works now. I still wouldn't have gotten it. I spent Saturday in Augusta instead.

I went to the Wednesday practice round the year before Covid and it was great. What amazed me was how hilly the course was. We walked the 18 holes and then the par 3 course and my legs were sore the next day.

Too bad that they did not have the peach ice cream sandwiches this year. they are really good.

[Bob cruise director]

I got the split between the four letters right away. What threw me was that in 43A and 54A, there were not one but two such combinations.

In 43A I saw N to S in Elvin Jones first and that led me to OPQR

and in 54A I saw O to T in Knock Out Punch and that gave me PQRS.

So I was left trying to make something with not one, but two sequences that had a Q in them.

I knew the rabbit hole has to include the real letters between the gaps but trying to squeeze something out of that with the two wrong sequences was a total dead end.

[SusieG]

Apparently the alphabet is too complicated for me to recognize. I tried a lot of different pairs, but never considered that one. Kudos to those of you who solved!

[Ben B]

This was a family effort on our part this week. We went camping, but I did manage to complete the grid on Saturday afternoon. A few quick looks and I saw nothing. I didn't get to concentrate on the contest until late Sunday night, but Son was buried in homework so I was on my own. I stared at the grid and went down many rabbit holes above, especially trying to find pairs of letters in the grid and wondering what could that title actually mean? Finally, after about an hour, almost giving up, I decided the key was 70A, and I would focus on that only. I parsed, re-parsed, and read it out loud several times before the light went on that the alphabet was the go-between, not the grid (I even tried the clues to find four letters!). Once I made that discovery, I had no idea what to do next. I was running out of time and energy, so went to ask Son to please look for just a second, and he saw LIMO (LMO substituting I for N, but could not take it further). It was his non-puzzle addicted brother who came to see what the excitement was about who found CRUST and CUBED, and we submitted with 30 minutes to spare. I think we may have 3 on our team from now on!

[HunterX]

This was a family effort on our part this week... I think we may have 3 on our team from now on!

It's great having the puzzle be a family effort! I spend all week looking forward to my Friday evening zoom with my two distantly-located kids. I even enjoy the hour they spend talking about video gaming or the strategies used on the "Survivor" TV show. I'm lost in those conversations. But I love listening to them interact. Then, when we get around to the puzzle, I like showing them how clever I can be about solving metas.

Well, I did until they both started getting good at it. Now I'm playing catch-up and trying not to be the dead-weight on the team. They may vote me off the zoom!

[Barney]

My wife and I spent a couple of hours over the weekend getting nowhere. Convinced I would never solve it, I cut my losses and figured that failure wouldn't hurt so bad if I didn't put in the effort. So while I watched the Masters final round, my wife silently drank her Chardonnay while getting nowhere on the puzzle.

Then at 10pm CDT, right before getting into bed, I took another look. Rather than staring mindlessly at the grid, I stared at the clue for 70 across. And it finally hit me and I blurted out: what if "between" referred to the alphabet and not the grid? It was all downhill for both of us from there.

I have finally won my wife's admiration!

How many decades did this take?

[LadyBird]

I (incorrectly) thought 70A was telling me to look for pairs of letters that were two letters together--then four letters--then another pair of two letters. I did manage to find:
auDIofilES >> DIES
elVInjonES >>VIES
knockOUtpunCH >> OUCH

but nothing was going to work with queenvictoria. I just couldn't move beyond that misinterpretation of the hint. Hopefully I can redeem myself this Thursday.

[Joe Ross]

Too many people are incorrectly selecting the FOUR "letters between certain pairs of letters in this puzzle" :

70 Number of
letters in our
contest answer—
and the number
of letters
between certain
pairs of letters in
this puzzle

The FOUR letters are the sequential letters of the alphabet that run between the initials of the two words in each theme entry, aka the "certain pairs of letters in this puzzle."

The coincidence that the first three of the four theme entries also have four grid letters between these same "certain pairs of letters" - with the last having 6 - is only a coincidence, not a mistake, nor a poorly-constructed meta.

[MatthewL]

Check out the clue for 48A and the corresponding grid entry in Tuesday's WSJ crossword. Sometimes I think Mike just likes to troll people.

[zach]

I (incorrectly) thought 70A was telling me to look for pairs of letters that were two letters together--then four letters--then another pair of two letters. I did manage to find:
auDIofilES >> DIES
elVInjonES >>VIES
knockOUtpunCH >> OUCH

but nothing was going to work with queenvictoria. I just couldn't move beyond that misinterpretation of the hint. Hopefully I can redeem myself this Thursday.

I also struggled to interpret 70A and thought that the clue wording for 70A was too ambiguous, especially the word “pairs” which could be interpreted as two non-adjacent letters forming a pair or two pairs of letters. I believe more people would have sussed out step 1 of the mechanism had the clue been written clearer. Also, in my opinion, the “alphabet trick” should have been built into the puzzle title. I feel that “Inner Turmoil” is too unrelated to the mechanism. I haven’t been posting this year, but this puzzle ended my 18-week streak, so it was a major bummer to miss it. Maybe I’m just being a sore loser, and I certainly don’t blame Matt or Mike, because others figured it out, and the mechanism was fair, but there were definitely opportunities to make the path clearer without making the mechanism too easy.

[BrennerTJ]

I thought it was indeed cute wordplay.

[RDaleHall]

OK, I'm still not getting the mechanism on KNOCKOUTPUNCH. The clue says 4 letters between the letter pairs. All other theme words follow this mechanism to a T. but there are 6 letters between the K and P so it seems to fail (in my clearly misunderstood brain).

Agree that there might be a slightly more elegant grid answer than KNOCKOUTPUNCH... One that preserves the distance between the starting K and then gets to P in the sixth letter similar to QUEENVICTORIA. I would nominate "Backup catcher for the Boston Red Sox"...KEVINPLAWECKI. But kind of hard to create that clue. I'm sure there might be other good KEVINPLAWECKI substitutes?

"Brownish-yellow horse enclosures"... KHAKI PADDOCKS
"Keeping felines calm"... KITTY PACIFISM

[Char]

Our Friday afternoon Zoom Group Solve was astonishing. One Muggle, Charlotte, broke the whole thing wide open when she suggested that maybe we should be looking for letter pairs that are four letters apart in the alphabet rather than in the grid. Over Peter's objections (he REALLY wants a mug), I gave an enthusiastic "thumbs up," and minutes later almost everyone had solved. Upon questioning, Charlotte said she is a "lurker" and doesn't post on the Forum, but here's hoping she joins us. She saved the day for lots of Muggle solvers!

Thanks, Wendy, for the shout-out and for nudging me off my lurking perch onto the Forum.

[OliviaL]

I was initially very focused on the words “(I hope)” in the meta instructions and “OUR contest answer” in 70A because I don’t remember references to the puzzle creators usually being included. That led me to focus on 49D, which was “the reader of these words: YOU.” I never got anywhere with it and ended up finding the correct path, but I felt that the wording was strange.

[Cindy N]

OK, I'm still not getting the mechanism on KNOCKOUTPUNCH. The clue says 4 letters between the letter pairs. All other theme words follow this mechanism to a T. but there are 6 letters between the K and P so it seems to fail (in my clearly misunderstood brain).

That was EXACTLY my problem! It wasn't until I solved I realized that while all the other theme words had exactly four letters in the grid between them, as well as four letters in the alphabet, it was only the alphabet letters the were to be counted.

Huge fail with me. With some help, I did solve, but I couldn't get past that it didn't fit the pattern which was very un-Gaffney-like.

[pjc]

One other thing I should have mentioned - all the 'turmoil' words at the bottom of the grid: FIGHT, RILE, MESSY, STIR. I spent little time with them, but they were sitting there gnawing at the back of my mind.