"The Five W's" - November 12, 2021

[Al Sisti]

Well dang... there it was, about an hour into my journey...

[GTIJohnny]

+1 on pursuing news theme. I ended up with MEDIA which was naively incorrect. I also noted zero W's in the grid and thought about putting 5 of them in. Congrats to the correct solvers!

[meowmiao71]

OOOOF! That was a tough one! Ironically I thought of SCOOP as the answer, but certainly not because I figured it out; I just thought it fit the reporting angle. Respect to anyone who got this!

[Al Sisti]

Joe - they're waiting for you over at Fiend!

[escapeartist]

I was stuck on the 5 up-side down W's in the grid (the 5 M's) - didn't think about the U's ...

[BethA]

Wow. Nowhere close. I guess I didn’t get the instructions!

It seemed to me that 3D was important. And possibly 41A. No wonder I made no progress!

And to think, one of the few murder mystery dinners we hosted, my character name was SCOOP! And IRL my mom was a proofreader for the Beaver County Times!

[Joe Ross]

Joe - they're waiting for you over at Fiend!

Post for me, Al!

[TeaJenny]

Looks like I'm on the wrong beach, after all!

My solution:

Four 3-letter words in longer answers can have one letter changed to a W to make a new word:

20A - TYPESET - SET - SEW - T
21A - SAO TOME - SAO - SAW - O
36A - HAS AT - HAS - HAW - S
46A - JAY LENO - JAY - JAW - Y

The clue to 39A is "The fifth element," and changing the R in BORON to W yields BOW - R.

Anagram all five letters to STORY, which is something that needs The Five W's (who, what, when, where, why).

It never occurred to me that the clue NUMBERS were significant.

Congrats to everyone who got the right answer!

[Al Sisti]

20211111-WSJCC-5_Ws-reveal.png

Joe - they're waiting for you over at Fiend!

Post for me, Al!

That's stolen valor, brother...

[TeaJenny]

My solution:

Five Double U's

Alt grid answers, all with double Us

21A: Mauritius
32A: Equus
40A: Usurps
49A: Fugues
56A: South Sudan

Anagram to fumes. Which is alt to 1A.

One definition is effluvium. With double Us

I went down a similar rabbit hole. I couldn't stop thinking EQUUS for "Horse opera." Not many other words with UU, but I tried valiantly to make CONTINUUM, MUUMUU, TRIDUUM, AND VACUUM work.

[Colin]

Oh boy! Way easier than I made it!

[ADS]

I may have missed if someone pointed this out, but in addition to no W anywhere in the grid, there is also no W anywhere in the clues. That was what nudged me toward the Us.

[Jace54]

I actually circled the five “U” in the grid, but did not come up with that as the “double” mechanism. I also saw the five “M” and turned the grid upside down to make them “W”, but nothing there.

My other thought was that 17A “slanted columns” referred to the shape of a W that was hidden in the grid, and that “first” in 26D and “fifth” in 39A were hints to the position.

[Conrad]

Well dang... there it was, about an hour into my journey...

Resized_20211115_000556.jpeg

I noted the five U's and had double U's in my notes, but thought it was a dead rabbit hole and not worth mentioning in my Crosswordfiend writeup.

Which is the nature of rabbit holes (dead or alive)

Congrats to everyone who go it!

[oldjudge]

Looks like I'm on the wrong beach, after all!

My solution:

Four 3-letter words in longer answers can have one letter changed to a W to make a new word:

20A - TYPESET - SET - SEW - T
21A - SAO TOME - SAO - SAW - O
36A - HAS AT - HAS - HAW - S
46A - JAY LENO - JAY - JAW - Y

The clue to 39A is "The fifth element," and changing the R in BORON to W yields BOW - R.

Anagram all five letters to STORY, which is something that needs The Five W's (who, what, when, where, why).

It never occurred to me that the clue NUMBERS were significant.

Congrats to everyone who got the right answer!

LOL, there are worse rabbit holes than that. The fifth element in Chinese medicine is WATER. Change the O in OATER to a W and you have——-WATER. State of agitation can be answered by changing the M in STEM to a W to get STEW. That was good for a few pleasant hours.

[Abide]

Just to expand on my "unsatisfying" comment: I agree the mechanism is both simple and deviously sneaky. But the overall puzzle contained a lot of white noise for ten thematic squares. Mike Shenk has said the objective is for the solver to ultimately win the battle, and I don't think he intended this to play so tough. (I guess the test solvers had no trouble with it.)

With the minimal theme squares, a helper entry would have been nice (maybe DOUBLE in place of BHUTAN). The actual answer was also a bit of a letdown, because I had been trying to backsolve with CLONE (double-you). And I liked my answer better.

[BEACHEDWHALE]

I always start with the title and counted the W's in the answer and found none. So then I went to the Who, What, Where When Why route, but nothing immediately clicked. Based on the recent contest solutions I decided to see if there any were hidden vowel pronunciations. I started with Who = U. So then I counted the U's and there were only five. That's weird, so when I looked at the title again I saw the Five dubba U's. dubba= double. After that the solution was easy but it only worked because SCOOP made sense as an answer. Again, not the best route but there it is.

[Jeremy Smith]

I noted both the lack of Ws in the grid, and the clues. I also noted the five Us in the grid, suspected that they were related to the five-letter meta answer, and noticed that they were all in the upper portion of the grid. I never thought about relating them to the numbers. The furthest I got was trying to add an extra U somewhere else in those grid entries. Yes, as Joe mentioned earlier, SAD.
Three weeks with Isaac. Thank goodness for this week’s MGWCC.

[TeaJenny]

Looks like I'm on the wrong beach, after all!

My solution:

Four 3-letter words in longer answers can have one letter changed to a W to make a new word:

20A - TYPESET - SET - SEW - T
21A - SAO TOME - SAO - SAW - O
36A - HAS AT - HAS - HAW - S
46A - JAY LENO - JAY - JAW - Y

The clue to 39A is "The fifth element," and changing the R in BORON to W yields BOW - R.

Anagram all five letters to STORY, which is something that needs The Five W's (who, what, when, where, why).

It never occurred to me that the clue NUMBERS were significant.

Congrats to everyone who got the right answer!

LOL, there are worse rabbit holes than that. The fifth element in Chinese medicine is WATER. Change the O in OATER to a W and you have——-WATER. State of agitation can be answered by changing the M in STEM to a W to get STEW. That was good for a few pleasant hours.

Right there with you. I spent way too much time trying to change various letters to W. I wanted OATER to be WATER. I really did.

What I posted here was only my solution. There were many rabbit holes before that. So many rabbit holes...

[mheberlingx100]

I got SCOOP, but in a different way. I looked at clues that could have alternative answers starting with W:
- sped (whizzed)
- crème (wafer)
- oater (western)
- orca (whale)
- pasty (wan)

Had to back solve for the S.

Not correct methodology, but got the same result by dumb luck. As the saying goes, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every once in a while.