XWord Muggles Forum

Gotta love that Leaderboard.

Submitted. Very nice. Thanks for the puzzle!

Off the couch with a minor quibble, awaiting confirmation. Fun puzzle!

Edit: Confirmed!

That was entertaining! I agree there is no doubt once you get it. Thanks for the fun start to the week!

First time MMM attempt - off the couch with an assist/confirm from Dr. Tom. I wasn’t aware of this board until someone posted about it in last week’s WSJ puzzle, and I’m happy to know about it now. Thanks for the puzzle, Maddhatter5!

So Josh has asked me to give some nudges.

First off, TREEBEARD, the 37D from "The Lord of the Rings"

I thought that "shady" would be a pun as he was a tree creature. But in the prompt "shady" simply mean "disreputable" as one would have thought. Apparently neither "shady" nor "character" is a pun in the prompt. No puns in the prompt.

the three squares where the grid is only a letter thick, spell out a tree. I guess, that was entirely coincidental.

is probably assymetrical for a reason. I think. It'd be hard to do this mechanism with a symmetric grid. I think. Maybe, but... No, it'd be hard...

some controversy about a clue (see post #26 and #36). Apparently our parents' advice about what topics to avoid in polite conversation still holds.

by using the clue "Snooty cow villager in the video game Animal Crossing". No-one would have had any objection to that clue.

why would any-one have had any issue to the actual clue?

the whole controversy doesn't matter. And like all things that don't matter we should just erase it from our minds.

should be taken very literally.

have to spell it out for you?



By the way here a fan of 22A? He's a real character, isn't he? should we pay any attention to him?No. We shouldn't.Maybe we should just erase him from our minds.

(Okay, the first and third of those nudges aren't nudges at all so don't fret trying to find any hidden meaning in them; there is none.)

Awaiting confirmation that I am off the couch. Fun mechanism!

Edit to confirm that I'm off the couch.

Thought I was done but never got a response. If I’m wrong I like my answer better, so there!

@woozy i like your animal crossing idea.

sharkicicles wrote: ↑Thu Oct 14, 2021 12:40 am @woozy i like your animal crossing idea.

Except that would alter the beauty of the solution

Finally seeing the light instead of the shadows -- Wouldn't believe what I'd been trying to do.....

hoover wrote: ↑Thu Oct 14, 2021 2:50 pm

sharkicicles wrote: ↑Thu Oct 14, 2021 12:40 am @woozy i like your animal crossing idea.

Except that would alter the beauty of the solution

How so?

I think (?) I have the mechanism, but I'm not making heads or tails of it yet!

Needed a nudge from Cynthia, but finally got it!

Solution:

If you "shade" in all the *fictional* characters (per 42A) you spell out IAGO:

For those who were put off by my inclusion of NAOMI (of which there were quite a few), I offer my sincerest of apologies. It was of course a serious lapse of judgment to include a biblical character, and I was in no way trying to express any worldview or opinion. My only goal is to amuse and entertain, and divisive things like this certainly do not fit that spirit. Let me also just say that the fault is entirely mine here - Peter only saw the grid, not the clues.

And as it turns out, we weren't supposed to use that enigmatic ABACA entry to pick out the first, second and third letters from the names!
woozy's "Do I have to spell it out for you?" nudge only convinced me I was on the right road!

"And as it turns out, we weren't supposed to use that enigmatic ABACA entry to pick out the first, second and third letters from the names! "

That never even occurred to me!

My (almost certainly worthless) two cents:

NAOMI really tripped me up. I think if I'd gone ahead and worked more with the bottom, I would have seen the "G" and gotten the meta. But I could only see a "TA" on top and it never went anywhere.

My Masters in theology did me no favors this week. Even biblical scholars are split on the appropriate genre into which to place the book of Ruth. It actually is a fascinating topic, because how the story is classified has a profound impact on what it is actually about!

That was more than two cents. This puzzle was beautifully constructed and I really should have gotten it. GREAT work!