There Goes Rhymin' Simon -- November 2021

[stmv]

As @rjy notes, there were a lot of "red herring" rhyming pairs in the grid, which clouded my mind until my wife pointed out the SIMON connection to the key five entries (though I was still unsure about Flora Simon). This was also hard because the answer song, Kodachrome, never quite hit #1, and so didn't appear on most of the lists of top 1970s songs that I was using. Once I saw Pete's hint and figured out that I needed a title that rhymes with YODA ROAM I was searching the string "OME" in web pages of top 1970s songs, and coming up empty, until Kodachrome popped into my head. In a post-mortem, the only page I had open that would have eventually revealed the right rhyming title was Wikipedia's top Billboard songs of 1973, which I had given up on since it was a pain to search all ten of those pages every time I wanted to try to find a title. This was a case where it helped that I'm old enough to have remembered when Kodachrome was a popular song.

[BethA]

This never came together for me. After reading the solution, I felt better though. It gave me a similar feeling I had back in July for RIOT GRRRL. That time, I had the meta answer but didn’t realize it, then managed to get it eventually. This time, I had the right method, but didn’t realize it. And unfortunately the hint confused me (that’s my problem, not criticism), I didn’t even recognize it as something I had already done and discarded. So, going for partial credit again, see attached.

I didn’t have confidence in the method because I got different numbers of letters from different rhyme pairs, made it seem sort of like grasping at straws. I also never thought the answer would be a Paul Simon, because the title would make it too obvious.

Seems like there should be a term added to the MUGgles Dictionary:

META BLINDNESS— when you get the right answer or are on the right track to solving, but just can’t see it!

[Joe Ross]

Pete's write-up & excellent cover of the meta answer.

[BarbaraK]

The mug winner hasn’t replied to Pete yet, so check your spam folders