XWord Muggles Forum

Bob cruise director wrote: ↑Sun Sep 05, 2021 10:16 am

Scott M wrote: ↑Sun Sep 05, 2021 9:00 am Quick trip to shore after a very late start, and a bit of a struggle with the grid. I spent a few days hanging with friends and doing our 39th Fantasy Football draft (that's since 1983 for the math-challenged), then returning home for our first tailgate and college football game since pre-COVID days. I'll celebrate with a Marzen or three at today's music festival in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

Maybe weekends like this are why I struggled with the grid.

How many of the rookie first round QB''s were taken

All of 'em. But as backups. I got Justin Fields who will be a stud in our scoring system. Once he gets on the field.

Scott M wrote: ↑Sun Sep 05, 2021 9:05 pm

Bob cruise director wrote: ↑Sun Sep 05, 2021 10:16 am

Scott M wrote: ↑Sun Sep 05, 2021 9:00 am Quick trip to shore after a very late start, and a bit of a struggle with the grid. I spent a few days hanging with friends and doing our 39th Fantasy Football draft (that's since 1983 for the math-challenged), then returning home for our first tailgate and college football game since pre-COVID days. I'll celebrate with a Marzen or three at today's music festival in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

Maybe weekends like this are why I struggled with the grid.

How many of the rookie first round QB''s were taken

All of 'em. But as backups. I got Justin Fields who will be a stud in our scoring system. Once he gets on the field.

You should have gone with Mack as he will be on the field from the first play

Our final tally has 244 on the shore and 3 on the ship.

Latecomers to the shore are

Dave C
cheryl w
bread-girl
jhseeman
eemc
DrTom
dk letter
qvart
Rad26
PJM
Annabelle
JAQT
Lyman
pookie
Scott L
pjc
Christine
Steve Smith

Good luck with the long odds winning the mug.

I did make it ashore, just a late post! Hard grid but fun meta! Confused a person last night who asked why I was “taking notes” on my crossword puzzle haha.

regfish7 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 05, 2021 9:25 pm I did make it ashore, just a late post! Hard grid but fun meta! Confused a person last night who asked why I was “taking notes” on my crossword puzzle haha.

So suspicious!! lol. Did your explanation help much?

That’s why I shred my meta notes. Half the time they look like insane draft ransom letters or a cryptography exercise. Our janitor and garbage collector may not recognize them for what they are.

Bob cruise director wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 11:32 am

TeaJenny wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 11:03 am Ashore!

I don't often say this, but that was a fun meta!

We're visiting family this week, so I didn't start the grid until late last night, and worked out the meta this morning.

Maybe you can get them interested/addicted to meta solving

I've tried. *sigh* I appear to be the only crossword fiend in the family.

Edit: If/when the Muggle Spouse Support Group gets off the ground, I'm sure my husband would be eager to join.

Straggled ashore at the literal 11th hour. Oh well. At least I get a drink tonight. I'm 100% certain as to the meta answer, but still highly confused about other elements of the puzzle. I suppose I'll find out in an hour though.

The FUN NET TIC made me want to make the whole thing a lot harder – looking for patterns and three letter words. When saying it aloud I kept hearing "fanatic", making me think of the Philly Phanatic and the 12 letter words PHILADELPHIA and PENNSYLVANIA.

I think the issue for me is that I see the long O in "phonetic" (my regional accent tends to schwa most vowels anyway, so I overcompensate by reading vowels in a more exaggerated fashion). So I would read the first syllable of "phonetic" as homophonic with "phone", not "fun". Long winded way of trying to reason why I read those words out loud probably fifty times this weekend without ever hearing the right word.

The answer just from looking at the grid one more time and seeing DELL AWARE...then ILL ANNOY. Then some more staring before thinking "ah, INTERstate travel" and going to SIOUX PER JAI WEIGH.

Thinking about states, ARKIN was easy to spot, then SAW, then the other states, and finally SIOUX PER JAI WEIGH. Forgot about the FUN NET TIC "clues."

For some reason I thought to look for state postal abbreviations with a letter between them, like o between TX and I between NC and C between OK in the line that contained the clues. Of course it got me no where.

Gave up on that.

Saw Indie Anna and then looked again at the clues and was off to the races and found the rest.

I think this was really fun and an excellent meta. The 1,2, 3 clues did throw me off. Might have been better if they were not identified as clues.

I don't remember this meta construction before but could be wrong. Just when you think that there is nothing new they could do, they find something new to do.

I'm surprised I got this one after defacing the grid with circle marks around each state code - it made it sort of hard to see what was going on.

I will be awaiting my winning email, hopefully not stuck in the spam filter.

Gimme that mug!

escapeartist wrote: ↑Mon Sep 06, 2021 12:45 am I'm surprised I got this one after defacing the grid with circle marks around each state code - it made it sort of hard to see what was going on.

I will be awaiting my winning email, hopefully not stuck in the spam filter.

Gimme that mug!

I did the same thing. And I did not read the instruction carefully and only realized after I submitted the answer as two words instead of one.

I ... did not even SEE the Indie Anna, etc. I saw FUN NET TIC = PHONETIC immediately since they were numbered/called out. Then SIOUX PER JAI WEIGH just popped out at me. I thought it was an overly simple mechanism so I was a little bit worried, but now I see that it was overly simple because I skipped step 2 and went straight from step 1 to step 3.

I believe I may owe an apology to this group. Someone mentioned that my in sane/in Seine may have been a spoiler. In retrospect yes. I posted that at what I thought was two minutes from midnight, forgetting for a moment that I was in France and it would be 6 PM in the US. All the usual Muggles knew I was in France, and my thing has always been puns. Therefore I posted the insane/in Seine as a joke. I hope that it did not act as a spoiler since of course it was not only a pun but a fun net tic one. Désolé mon amis!

My smallest of quibbles was that the title implied travel between the states, whereas the phonetic clues to the final answer were located between the sounds of individual states. So maybe INTRASTATE might have been a better title. Of course, SUPERHIGHWAYS don't stay in one state or they wouldn't be interstate highways. Given the giant rabbit hole of trying to tie the four state names together, I learned a lot about the I-70 and I-57. After a day of thinking that I must be an idiot, I applied the rule of, if there a lot of people on shore by Friday PM and you can't make a convoluted rabbit hole work, maybe you should look for a different rabbit. After 20 seconds, there it was, white and fluffy with a giant pink nose. It's amazing how these answers can hide in plain sight.

hoover wrote: ↑Mon Sep 06, 2021 1:14 am I ... did not even SEE the Indie Anna, etc. I saw FUN NET TIC = PHONETIC immediately since they were numbered/called out. Then SIOUX PER JAI WEIGH just popped out at me. I thought it was an overly simple mechanism so I was a little bit worried, but now I see that it was overly simple because I skipped step 2 and went straight from step 1 to step 3.

The same happened to me - I didn't see the state names, just the superhighway running through the grid. I also wondered about the seemingly lacking mechanism, until the states were pointed out to me while I was showing the mechanism to a non-solving family member a couple of days after I 'solved' it. I guess I was otherwise occupied by work and just happy to get the answer and move on - luckily not to my detriment this time.

Rosh Hashana time again.
We should all have a healthy, happy, sweet new year!

Good morning! I cannot believe we did not see the state names after spending so much time staring at the grid. I finally did put together jai weigh which led my son to see Sioux per but we were unsatisfied that the per was not phonetic and thought there must be something else. Now I see it right in front of me! Classic KAS 2. And a smile that until now I could not understand.

Looking for state abbreviations first, this Chicagoan quickly spotted ILL-ANNOY and the others states soon followed. After solving, I went back to see what the heck those three "clues" had to do with anything and only then saw FUN-NET-TIC/PHONETIC. Fantastic construction.