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Re: "Creature Features" - May 10, 2019

Posted: Mon May 13, 2019 7:20 pm
by DrTom
Lots of comments on the Narwhal being a whale, but I've also seen it listed as a large porpoise so that did not trip me up. I also have been fooled so many times that when I saw "creature with 5 letters" and 6 clues I knew there had to be a repeat letter (I got burned on "answer is 6 letters" QWERTY) since it was not stated that it was a 5 letter word.

Where I almost got tripped up was viewing the long tusk as a pole and lunging for PORE, but RALEEN just did not cut it. I agree that WINGS was a bit weak, but hey I managed to get it so I'm not complaining.

What does make me wonder is (1) IF you consider a Narwhal other than a whale and (2) IF as some legends have it they are live forever, can Matt be accused of creating a crossword for immortal porpoises? Sorry, that has been running around my head for a day or two and I got to a point where I just had to PUNt.

Re: "Creature Features" - May 10, 2019

Posted: Mon May 13, 2019 8:03 pm
by Stim100986
MikeMillerwsj wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 1:55 pm Here's this week's contest report:
We heard from almost every possible 5-letter animal. Any ideas why TIGER (18), CAMEL (11) and SABLE (10) were particularly popular? Also LLAMA (5), SNAKE (5), PANDA (4) HUMAN (4), SKUNK (4) and many others.

In all we had 1451 entries, an impressive 90% correct.
Congrats to this week's winner, Charlie Lewis of Livonia, Mich.!
I could totally see Sable if you got bale and couldn't figure out Starling and took a wild guess. Camel could have been along the same lines with less confidence. Tiger.. huh.. somehow getting line and thinking stripe? Good question!

Re: "Creature Features" - May 10, 2019

Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 8:04 pm
by sgabig
Mike Miller asked on the WSJ blog why some people guessed "llama" & my theory is that there were a number of double ll answers in the grid: quell, scallop, allah, snell, pulla so people might have supposed the contest answer also had two lls