#695 - "Spider Dream"

[Joe Ross]

Title suggestion:

It's the next best thing to Matt's good meta, Bird Lives makes it good!

[BarbaraK]

Title suggestion:

It's the next best thing to Matt's good meta, Bird Lives makes it good!

Cause if Tilda is close enough to tilde, Swinton is close enough to Swanson.

[Joe Ross]

Title suggestion:

It's the next best thing to Matt's good meta, Bird Lives makes it good!

Cause if Tilda is close enough to tilde, Swinton is close enough to Swanson.

You're damned straight. Sing it, sister!

[mntlblok]

Strongly suspect that the "plural of octopus" has been hashed to death in these parts. Octopodes fan, myself. . .

[Bob cruise director]

I was not impressed with this one even after I was given the answer. (I did not submit by the way). From reading crosswordfiend, there was no AHA moment or "so that was the path I missed" but only the recognition that if you were Spanish speaking or close, you could translate all the words, notice the tilde N and then see it in the title.

Yes the grid said Spanish but clue 7A said Greek, 4D was from Italy (by the way, I agree that Florence is the most beautiful city in the world), 5D with implications for Sweden, 50D South African, and 52D Scotland (and if you find someone in Scotland with a brogue like they are from Aberdeen, you would swear that they are not speaking English).

[BarbaraK]

To be sure I wasn’t missing something, I looked at the rest of the grid words to see if there were others with a Spanish translation with a tilde. And I found two possibilities - GIRL and ODD. But looking closer at how they were clued, they actually didn’t. GIRL referenced the Larsson novels, and a girl of that age would be a chica, not a niña. And ODD was not clued as weird, which would be extraño but as an odd number, so impar.

When still desperately looking for any foothold, I’d noted “one” in the clue for ODD and also ONES in the grid. So I wonder if the clue for ODD was a late change to up the elegance.

[Laura M]

To be sure I wasn’t missing something, I looked at the rest of the grid words to see if there were others with a Spanish translation with a tilde. And I found two possibilities - GIRL and ODD. But looking closer at how they were clued, they actually didn’t. GIRL referenced the Larsson novels, and a girl of that age would be a chica, not a niña. And ODD was not clued as weird, which would be extraño but as an odd number, so impar.

When still desperately looking for any foothold, I’d noted “one” in the clue for ODD and also ONES in the grid. So I wonder if the clue for ODD was a late change to up the elegance.

It did seem like there were an unusual number of "everyday" words in the grid, GIRL, HOUR, SAME, GOOD... I looked up Spanish translations for a lot of things. Also, NINE was in the grid, and there were nine Ns (including the two in NINE), and I thought that must mean something! PIÑA AÑO is so close to PIANO, but nothing else fit like that. I tried for a long time to do something with a "cocoon" idea (related to the center entry), trying to find the letters either inside or outside the ñs in the grid or clues. So many rabbit holes in this one, even after you already (unknowingly) have the answer!

[jhseeman]

I would have had less trouble getting the answer if it had been a week one or week two. I kept looking for the "multiple steps" and the aha moment, thinking it couldn't be this straighforward/easy....all the while the answer was staring me in the face....which is often a recurring theme for me.

[Jeremy Smith]

I think I’ll crack this one open this evening.

[Guffman]

Based on the title I was convinced the meta was "World Wide Web." Spent the first day trying to shoehorn anything that would lead to that solution. That's what happens when you write gags all your life.

[cbarbee002]

Never got around to doing more than filling the grid, but once I looked at the "reveal", it was obvious that I saved a lot of otherwise wasted time. Would never have gotten this one.

[minimuggle]

OK, finished the grid quickly but never got far on this meta. Just read the reveal and even though I speak Spanish, I honestly would never have gotten this. Very happy I didn't waste any more time on it.

[Al Sisti]

I just read Matt's writeup on the MGWCC site, and I feel awful that he felt he let us down.

[HeadinHome]

^
Agreed - don't take it personally, Matt! The thing that had me wondering was that entry PIANO, which contained all the letters for both PINA and ANO, so it seemed like there should be a similar "paired" entry for all the others! That kind of thing might have been a nice confirmation in the grid... though how to accomplish that I do not know!

Also - the conundrum about how to write my answer was, should I put the adjective AFTER the noun, which is the correct way to do this if you're truly translating that (weird) phrase, or submit it in the word order given?? (arana sueno, or sueno arana ?) I submitted the first version, but I wonder if Matt would have accepted the other version too?

[mntlblok]

And I now know that "colada" means strained.

[mntlblok]

"1) Part of my rationale for the meta-click being strong for ARAÑA SUEÑO is that the tilde is a rare letter in Spanish; it only appears in a few dozen words. But this is probably not common knowledge so softened the click considerably."

Would never have guessed that it was uncommonly used. Heck, I've even learnt to make show up on iPhone texts!

[BarbaraK]

Matt did accept "sueño de araña" from me. I thought that was the correct way since it's the translation of the title as a phrase rather than as two unrelated words. But I was also confident he'd take it either way just because it's a crossword contest, not a Spanish test. And the leaderboard showing no wrong submissions by Sunday also was a pretty clear indication that he wasn't being picky.

[GTIJohnny]

Having subscribed to Matt's XWORDS a month ago, let me just say I am in a far inferior league to this point. I recognized that, although I solved the grid rapidly, that it was a WEEK 4 puzzle, and I gave up fairly soon thereafter (Gosh...Thankfully so).
My subscription still stands and I look forward to peering into his mind a bit more.