XWord Muggles Forum

escapeartist wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:19 am "This puzzle's fives" threw me off - I had no idea what that meant.

Exactly! But I figured I *had* to figure out what meant:

The puzzle had things called "fives" and the vowels were removed. Had to figure what they could be. Well there are about four long strings of consonants. If there are four of them and they are each a string of five letters and if they occur in the theme answers that's clearly it!

And they are!

It was a very Patrick Berry puzzle. Once you understood the mechanism, of course 2 of the theme answers were staring at you in the middle of the grid.

Won’t you stop and take
A little time out with me…

Did anyone else go down a hole with that
Dave Brubeck classic Take Five? HALT nowhere to be
Found in the song! Good job, to you smarties who got it.

This was one where the tip/trick to look for unusual patterns in the grid was especially useful. 4 long answers, each with a 5 letter string of consonants could not be a coincidence. Fortunately mobster was the first clue that corresponded (per 1D) to duMBSTRuck, and I remembered thinking that HOOD was an unusual synonym/answer, so the rest fell into place quickly. A few months ago I would have not solved this one in time.

I couldn't escape from looking at the three entries without vowels DKNY, BMW, and VCRS. I tried to add vowels without any success. The strings of consonants in the correct mechanism flew right by me.

Schmeel wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:17 am It was pointed out to me that as a Hebrew speaker, I may have had a slight advantage solving this puzzle - I'm used to seeing vowels that aren't indicated!

ההה

Classic Patrick Berry puzzle. I know because I went back and studied his prior ones to try to figure out this one. (Thanks to the link to the Muggle archive posted earlier). Still could not put the pieces together but as in sports “wait till next week!” Thanks Mr Berry for a fun and clever challenge.

GTIJohnny wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 6:44 am I couldn't escape from looking at the three entries without vowels DKNY, BMW, and VCRS. I tried to add vowels without any success. The strings of consonants in the correct mechanism flew right by me.

That was one of my attempts, too. Kept looking for other such entries. Never got anywhere.

And here’s your five:

Dplass wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 7:05 am

Schmeel wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:17 am It was pointed out to me that as a Hebrew speaker, I may have had a slight advantage solving this puzzle - I'm used to seeing vowels that aren't indicated!

ההה

Exactly!
But in Hebrew that would be "חחח" these days - that's what my children reply to my corny dad jokes. Similar to LOL and its variants. It isn't necessarily pronounced with vowels, though - more like an extended gutteral 'ch'.

Well, I got halfway there, and even figured out Mobster and Touchable. I don't think I would have ever made it to the end, though. Tricky puzzle!

escapeartist wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:19 am "This puzzle's fives" threw me off - I had no idea what that meant.

I put together that there were four long answers with a four letter solution and then discovered the strings of five consonants - "the fives".

Very hard until that "AHA" moment.

Great meta construction but very tricky!

I saw the string of 5 letters in the middle of the long theme answers…. Couldn’t think of how to get a four-letter word without vowels. Then I studied the clues and saw the one-word ones “ mobster, rogue, untethered, touchable” but that didn’t lead to an answer. Luckily, my notes for these two attempts were near each other on my paper and “mobster” jumped out to be like “mbstr”… had to back solve for the “a” in “in a dither/ aboil” though!

I really enjoyed this puzzle. I did spend some time on the DKN and BMW rabbit hole and also looking at all the 5 letter words. When I focused on #1 down the first step came to me. I was a bit bothered by "in a dither" since the others clues with the vowels were single words. But there are always surprises in these metas.

Spent too much time on the 16 5-letter words in the grid, thinking that 16 of something could lead to a 4-letter answer. As did others, I finally checked the archive and went back to the long answers to find the strings of consonants. Outstanding construction!

Never did get it - the 5-consonant strings didn't occur to me.

As well as things already mentioned, '5' could be Roman numeral 'V' (only one of those, though - although adding vowels to VCRS produces VICARS, which gets one nowhere).

I know that we've seen the long entries used as new clue definitions in the past, but besides PITCH pointing at grid entry TAR, that went nowhere, too.

Ah, well; bring on Thursday!

Thank you @BarbaraK for this list of past Patrick Berry puzzles. Great timesaver for us.
I took this screenshot of it for future reference. This is useful too with the @Joe Ross Excel meta reveals for my files.

Very clever. I just couldn't figure out what were the "fives" that the first clue identified as missing vowels. I did look some at clues, but didn't pick up the correspondence to the consonant strings in the theme words.

Just. Stop.

"It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key." Winston Churchill, October 1939.
Didn't know that WC was a big fan of WSJ metas back then...

Spent a lot of time thinking about what the "fives" could be -- similarly listed out all the 5-letter answers to see if that was going anywhere. Noticed that HYDRO with vowels removed / reinserted could be HEADER, and that likely prompted thinking towards the solution. Also got stuck for a moment that in the middle of the long answers DUMBSTRUCK and WENTTHROUGH that you might be able to use BUS and TAT. I think the light came on first with "TCHBL" and something clicked to remember the TOUCHABLE clue. Rated this a 4 star puzzle but I'm likely always leaning 1/2 to a full star to the right of the average.