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

[Abide]

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.

I really hope you win the mug!

[C=64]

I found an astounding rabbit hole after not making headway with who/what/where/when/why and also discarding the five U's and M's in the grid as useless.

There are five clues that begin with a singular team member of a major four sport: Capital, Bull, Jazz, Dodger, Dolphin. Jaylen Waddle plays for the Dolphins, and he's embedded in 46A JAYLENO. Tom Wilson plays for the Capitals, and he's embedded in his own entry, 21A, SAOTOME. Obviously, I didn't find Hassan Whiteside or any other W players who popped up when I searched the Bulls, Jazz, and Dodgers rosters.

So then I decided that it required too much Googling to find these W players, so the W must represent a win. Maybe there are ten teams, because I also saw the [Jon Bon Jovi-owned arena football Philadelphia] Soul. I squeezed out the [Oklahoma City] Thunder from the BHUTAN clue (and the entry contains UTAH, although anagrams are almost always wrong). After scouring the lists of teams for arena football, WNBA, NSWL, MLS, etc., I got the [Sacramento] Republic, the [defunct Washington] Freedom, a [New York] Dragon, and a misspelled [Philadelphia] Flyer. Some of these entries crossed each other, although from different sports, and they gave me A, H, C, and maybe T if a lowercase and abbriviated [St. Louis / Arizona] "card" was in the mix. Maybe this could spell COACH, or CATCH, or [GAME, SET, ] MATCH?

But nothing was crossing the Bull entry and I put the puzzle aside for a couple of days and didn't bother to PM anyone looking for confirmation of my [clearly inconsistent and admittedly insane] mechanism.

[Darth]

I agree that "double" often means "two of one kind, two together, or two at a time." So when dealing with letters and words in a grid, we are thinking in terms of double function rather than looking for numbers to do the easy math of "2x".

This puzzle was "double trouble" for most of us, but totally fair! (Well, fair enough... )

Note to future self: Consider the numbers in the grid and be open to numerical possibilities.

(And after overcomplicating things for more time than needed, following many of the same routes others have mentioned -- including back solving on a hunch -- I did eventually get that AHA and find the simple answer! )

[MamaE]

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 ...

Me too!

[Barney]

Damn.

First thing I wrote down was who, what, where, when, why: the old five rules of reporting.

We then saw the five U’s, and remarkably NO W’s. Obviously did not find where to take it.

Simple and brilliant.

ALSO! Rather famous old book (haven’t read it) by Evelyn Waugh on Fleet Street in the 1930s.

SCOOP.

[Plymouthrock]

After George Bush, is there any other way to pronounce W than Dubya? Not for me.

[Georgeall]

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.

I really hope you win the mug!

The S is at the end: "Flier Assignment" (Seat) is Window. That's how I got SCOOP. The alternate answers for Oater, Orca, and Pasty just seemed too obvious.

[wisconsin jim]

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.

I noticed that as well and looked at the U’s but unfortunately did not do the math. Well done.

[ky-mike]

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.

We got it the same way, except used "went" instead of "whizzed". However, we back solved from a guess to get the answer. That is why I had stated in an earlier post that I don't like to back solve as it leads you to see things that were not intended by the constructor to be part of the meta.

Another thing that seemed (for us) to help solidify our answer is that the original answers all seemed to have one or both elements of black/white (but not read all over )

I agree with the blind squirrel statement.

[CPJohnson]

After George Bush, is there any other way to pronounce W than Dubya? Not for me.

I think the many ways that "W" is pronounced may have been part of the difficulty for this meta. Some say DOUBLE-YOU, some say Dubya, some say dubba-you, etc. So if you aren't a DOUBLE-YOU person, it was hard to "hear" the instruction.

[Bob cruise director]

The two zoom calls were fun. We had about 15 on Friday and 25 on Saturday. We had two who had solved the contest but stayed silent. They would answer via chat questions that we asked. You will see a lot of the same rabbit holes that have been mentioned above

The main thing that came out of session 1 on Friday at 5 pm in a positive way was the importance of the "U"s.  Add that the U's were in the upper half and there was something in the lower half of the grid that is important.

A few other things that people brought up that I needed to clarify
1) there are 5 M's (W upside down) in the grid - are they important
2) the fact that all five U's start a word

Some things that are not important
1) the long answers and the fact that there are 10 letters in each long answer
2) tie in to publishing - editorials, typesetting, etc.
3) the 41A clue implying removing a letter
4) symmetry of any kind with the U's
5) Jay Leno and the commonality with Leon Uris (same letters in Leno and Leon)
6) all the oddly worded clues and minutia like 49A clue
7) anagrams of the words that begin with U and substitutions with the words that begin with U

After Session 2 at 1 pm Saturday where 25 of us struggled and had to be led by the nose to the answer

The mechanism was straight forward but there were a ton of red herrings and rabbit holes that showed promise so until you ran out of rabbit holes getting to the right answer was very elusive.

I don't know if Mike had intended it to be that hard.  Normally it appears that the WSJ wants about 1000-1500 submissions and about 75% success rate.  More of either means it is too easy and you lose the veterans like in February.  Much less in either of the numbers means that you will lose new people.

[Dplass]

Too many red herrings in this puzzle...Wah.

[Dplass]

Oh also there were 10 clues with "double u" which led us astray...

[wisconsin jim]

Anyone else surprised at the high difficulty rating? If the last two weeks were 4.0, seems to me this should have been under 3.

[mheberlingx100]

Re: the five M’s.

I also saw the FLAP in the upper left and JACK in the lower left and thought you might have to flip the M’s into W’s, either one letter or entire words. I spent a fair amount of time digging into that and coming up with zilch.

[boharr]

SCOOP is also a great novel by Evelyn Waugh, a terrific sendup of the newspaper biz.

[CPJohnson]

The two zoom calls were fun. We had about 15 on Friday and 25 on Saturday. We had two who had solved the contest but stayed silent. They would answer via chat questions that we asked. You will see a lot of the same rabbit holes that have been mentioned above

The main thing that came out of session 1 on Friday at 5 pm in a positive way was the importance of the "U"s.  Add that the U's were in the upper half and there was something in the lower half of the grid that is important.

A few other things that people brought up that I needed to clarify
1) there are 5 M's (W upside down) in the grid - are they important
2) the fact that all five U's start a word

Some things that are not important
1) the long answers and the fact that there are 10 letters in each long answer
2) tie in to publishing - editorials, typesetting, etc.
3) the 41A clue implying removing a letter
4) symmetry of any kind with the U's
5) Jay Leno and the commonality with Leon Uris (same letters in Leno and Leon)
6) all the oddly worded clues and minutia like 49A clue
7) anagrams of the words that begin with U and substitutions with the words that begin with U

After Session 2 at 1 pm Saturday where 25 of us struggled and had to be led by the nose to the answer

The mechanism was straight forward but there were a ton of red herrings and rabbit holes that showed promise so until you ran out of rabbit holes getting to the right answer was very elusive.

I don't know if Mike had intended it to be that hard.  Normally it appears that the WSJ wants about 1000-1500 submissions and about 75% success rate.  More of either means it is too easy and you lose the veterans like in February.  Much less in either of the numbers means that you will lose new people.

This is one "veteran" who would not quit metas if they were ALL easy. Of course, I'm not an Expert Veteran....more a Sort-of-experienced-but-frequently-unsuccessful-solver Veteran.

[Flying_Burrito]

Keep them coming hard Mike and Matt. i prefer to learn something new and stretch my mind in places it never ventured before rather than solving the meta in 5 minutes (e.g. like Toyota a couple of months ago). Just like with many things in life, the fun is in the chase and not the prey. As for this meta the lack of Ws in the grid was utterly brilliant: I tried to embed phonetic answers that would add the why, where, who, when, why. So for instance 'made nice' became 'made aware' (that solved for 'where'); Jay Leno becomes 'Jay walk' (that solved for 'what' although my son told me that not even Eminem would justify 'walk' sounding like 'what'. My wife would say that all of it was a giant waste of time, but I reply back "Hold on, under the same logic then life is a giant waste of time"

[femullen]

There are five words in the grid in which a vowel can be replaced by the letter U to produce another word (thus doubling the U's, you see): 32A (OATER to OUTER), 19A (SPED to SPUD), 25D (BOATS to BOUTS), 41A (discounting SLIT and using OPEN to UPON), and 45A (a RAT to a RUT). Take the first letter of these words in which the replacement is made, and you get the letters in BOORS, which was to be my Hail Mary until #ship4u nudged me. (Fret not, actual solvers, your muggle odds are unchanged: I did not submit.)

I think, though, that had the potential vulgarity in 41A not given me pause, I'd have been strongly convinced of BOORS.

[KeithM]

First time poster.

We must be making a mistake or missing something here, but my wife and I came up with BLEAT.

I *think* there are five clues with two ("double") U's - 5A, 25A, 34A, 29D, 55D. Taking the first letter of the grid answers to these clues going left to right spells B-L-E-A-T. And what do "Ewes" do? They bleat. Thought that was it for sure.

The only asterisk that we could find are:
* 36D, which has four (not two) U's, and
* 16A, which has two U's in the clue, but this becomes 3 once the missing part of the quote "unto" is inserted.

Good puzzle, we really like these, we'll keep trying.