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

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is SCOOP. There are five U’s in the answer grid, all in numbered spaces. Doubling those numbers (as suggested by “double-U”) and taking the letters in the corresponding numbered spaces yields the contest answer.

Well, last week I wrote that the contest was one of the toughest ever, but this week really was one of the toughest ever. It's been three very challenging ones in a row if you're keeping score. We are pretty sure that's not part of a nefarious plan--Mike and Matt don't coordinate that way and in fact from time to time they're both surprised by how easy or hard a contest is. But this one was hard! We had just 361 entries and slightly less than 1/3 correct, way below our usual success rate of around 75%.

Other answers included WHERE (45), STORY (29), MEDIA (9), PRESS (6), EMOJI, WALDO, MOPED, FACES, many many other stabs in the dark. Hang in there muggles, the pendulum is bound to swing back to easier contests...

Congrats to this week's winner, Henry Burt of Princeton, NJ!

[Dplass]

So many red herrings. Like many, I figured the 5 Ws in the title referred to the journalistic ones (who, what, when, where, why) and tried to include them in the mechanism.
1. In the solution to the previous day's puzzle, an entry, WHO+D, but nothing corresponding to the other four. Also, next to the WHO+D was the word UNIT, and UNITS was in today's grid -- could that relate somehow. (Also, the previous day's solution included ON ICE, which is very close to NO ICE, which was an important element in the Trick or Treat meta two weeks ago). But I realized that if you solve online, you don't see the previous day's solution, so that can't be it.
2. One entry, UNDER, forms a compound word with a homophone of WHERE, but again, nothing corresponding to the other four.
3. Looked for entries with two Us (double-U), but didn't find any, just two diagonally adjacent.
4. Three entries relating to journalism - EDITORIALS, TYPESET and PRESS AGENT, but nothing more came of that
5. Looked for entries where a W can replace a letter to form a new word: Plenty of those (FLAP>FLAW, SPED>SPEW, OATER>WATER, etc.), but none that do so in two directions.
6. There are 4 Ws in the shaded box ("The answer to this week's contest . . ."), plus one in the title, but . . . what could that mean?

Those long entries were big pointers. Wish I’d factored that in.

Wait what? The long entries were completely unrelated to the meta.

[Nlobb]

I think everyone who sent in the correct answer should get a mug. After all, that wouldn’t be very many people…. Just kidding…

[boharr]

So many red herrings. Like many, I figured the 5 Ws in the title referred to the journalistic ones (who, what, when, where, why) and tried to include them in the mechanism.
1. In the solution to the previous day's puzzle, an entry, WHO+D, but nothing corresponding to the other four. Also, next to the WHO+D was the word UNIT, and UNITS was in today's grid -- could that relate somehow. (Also, the previous day's solution included ON ICE, which is very close to NO ICE, which was an important element in the Trick or Treat meta two weeks ago). But I realized that if you solve online, you don't see the previous day's solution, so that can't be it.
2. One entry, UNDER, forms a compound word with a homophone of WHERE, but again, nothing corresponding to the other four.
3. Looked for entries with two Us (double-U), but didn't find any, just two diagonally adjacent.
4. Three entries relating to journalism - EDITORIALS, TYPESET and PRESS AGENT, but nothing more came of that
5. Looked for entries where a W can replace a letter to form a new word: Plenty of those (FLAP>FLAW, SPED>SPEW, OATER>WATER, etc.), but none that do so in two directions.
6. There are 4 Ws in the shaded box ("The answer to this week's contest . . ."), plus one in the title, but . . . what could that mean?

Those long entries were big pointers. Wish I’d factored that in.

Wait what? The long entries were completely unrelated to the meta.

To me the long entries confirmed that a newspaper term was fitting.

[hayburner]

I've been enjoying reading about everyone's rabbit mines so much that I wanted to reproduce the message I sent to DrTom and Darth to request some nudges:

1. We initially went for the 5Ws of journalism (who-what-where-why-when), but with so many "who"s and not really any "when"s, along with the relative wobblyness of assigning stuff to each W, we decided to abandon it.
2. There are a fair number of journalism-y sorts of answers EDITORIALS, TYPESET, PRESS(AGENT), SLIT OPEN (maybe), but nothing obvious jumps out from these.
3. We realized that not only are there no Ws in the grid, but there are no Ws in the clues.. which had to have been on purpose, but that purpose and whether crucial to the meta or not eluded us.
4. We also noticed that there are only 5 U's and 5 M's in the puzzle, but doubling the U words or flipping the M words over also didn't really give us anything to work with (although it turns out that "dooms" flipped 180 degrees can be "swoop")
5. There are a number of clues with two U's in them.. but there were about 9 of them, so mostly a no-go.
6. Tungsten's chemical symbol is W... this rabbit hole was pretty shallow.
7. Then we saw that there are a fair number of clues that could have alternative answers that start with W:
   1. 32A Horse opera > WESTERN
   2. 36A Attacks > WARS
   3. 46A Car-collecting celeb > WYCLEF JEAN
   4. 60A Unhealthily pale > WAN
   5. 5D Entice > WOO
   6. 25D Punts, eg > WAITS
   7. 30D Oreo layer > WAFER
   8. 31D Really minute > WEE
   9. 48D Dolphin's kin > WHALE
   But there are altogether probably too many of these. We were able to anagram COMBO, EPOCH, and BLOOP from the answers and CHORD, CHORE, and CODER from the clue beginnings, but these also seemed pretty wobbly.
8. As a last ditch effort, I thought about how maybee you could make a W out of a crossword grid by going from a square NE, SE, NE, SE, NE again, but couldn't come up with any words from these (because crosswords generally have to alternate vowels and consonants, so you end up getting longish strings of either)

The beach eventually slapped us in the face with the help of nudges so obviously didn't submit. Big thanks to Darth and DrTom for our nudges!

[Relic]

When I got up this morning I decided to take one more look before reading the solution, and guess what? Nothing!

Actually at this point I wondered if the title might refer to double u's wather than w's. Found the u's inthe grid but did not want to invest more time on another rabbit hole. Looked up the solution, and thought, " how sad!" I wish I had noticed the u's and stumbled upon the phonetic play on Saturday before I got burned out chasing the many red herrings. Congrats to the solvers and another interesting mechanism to save for future reference.

[clueless_solver]

I had also keyed in on the Us, but spent all my time looking at the other letters and crossing clues and such, but never the numbers. And then, as Barbara K said above, I thought the fact that they were all crammed into the top of the grid might mean they weren't important, when instead it was an essential feature.

I did the same thing, except because they were in the top half I said "AHA! The across answers are all numbered below 26! I must need to turn the grid numbers into letter!" That gave me DIRTS somehow, which made more sense than my previous idea from the synonyms rabbit hole which was EPOXY.

[BarbaraK]

The contest answer is SCOOP. There are five U’s in the answer grid, all in numbered spaces. Doubling those numbers (as suggested by “double-U”) and taking the letters in the corresponding numbered spaces yields the contest answer.

Well, last week I wrote that the contest was one of the toughest ever, but this week really was one of the toughest ever. It's been three very challenging ones in a row if you're keeping score. We are pretty sure that's not part of a nefarious plan--Mike and Matt don't coordinate that way and in fact from time to time they're both surprised by how easy or hard a contest is. But this one was hard! We had just 361 entries and slightly less than 1/3 correct, way below our usual success rate of around 75%.

Other answers included WHERE (45), STORY (29), MEDIA (9), PRESS (6), EMOJI, WALDO, MOPED, FACES, many many other stabs in the dark. Hang in there muggles, the pendulum is bound to swing back to easier contests...

Congrats to this week's winner, Henry Burt of Princeton, NJ!

@MikeMillerwsj You sometimes mention in your reports if you are stumped by one of these, as you did two weeks ago with "Trick or Treat". Does the absence of such a comment last week and this week mean you solved both of these? Congratuations! I know WSJ employees are not eligible for the mug, but if you all have an internal competition going, I'll bet you're at the top of the wall of fame.

[mntlblok]

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.

Guess I'll break down one of these days and read up on V's, U's, and W's. Sounds like a pair of "U"s, but looks like a pair of "V"s. And then there's the Spanish for "W". . .

Never mind. *Did* go to the trouble of re-checking the Spanish, and up pops *this* crap: "doble u", "doble ve" or "uve doble" - depending on the country. Oh, well. Only learnt the "doble ve".

[mntlblok]

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.

My theory is that after the past two weeks of hard solves, many folks (including myself) way overthought this one, resulting in the low solve rate and high difficulty rating.

I disagree. Knowing that you had to double the *clue number* is very non-intuitive. Doubling the letters, doubling the words, doubling the fun, but not doubling the numbers.

Been pondering about why this isn't one of the standard mechanisms. I don't have a history of doing a lot of crosswords in my word play. More of a scrabble, boggle, and punster sort. But, have now homed in on the fact that not every square has a numeral in it. Had never gone to the trouble of generalizing *specifically* why that is. Had noticed that it had something to do with "acrosses" and "downs" and black squares, but this clears it up, nicely.

Have seen a couple of references, I think, to the "U"s appearing at the junctions of "acrosses" and "downs". Don't letters pretty much *always* do that in crosswords?

[mntlblok]

So many red herrings. Like many, I figured the 5 Ws in the title referred to the journalistic ones (who, what, when, where, why) and tried to include them in the mechanism.
1. In the solution to the previous day's puzzle, an entry, WHO+D, but nothing corresponding to the other four. Also, next to the WHO+D was the word UNIT, and UNITS was in today's grid -- could that relate somehow. (Also, the previous day's solution included ON ICE, which is very close to NO ICE, which was an important element in the Trick or Treat meta two weeks ago). But I realized that if you solve online, you don't see the previous day's solution, so that can't be it.
2. One entry, UNDER, forms a compound word with a homophone of WHERE, but again, nothing corresponding to the other four.
3. Looked for entries with two Us (double-U), but didn't find any, just two diagonally adjacent.
4. Three entries relating to journalism - EDITORIALS, TYPESET and PRESS AGENT, but nothing more came of that
5. Looked for entries where a W can replace a letter to form a new word: Plenty of those (FLAP>FLAW, SPED>SPEW, OATER>WATER, etc.), but none that do so in two directions.
6. There are 4 Ws in the shaded box ("The answer to this week's contest . . ."), plus one in the title, but . . . what could that mean?

That's mostly *really* messed up - yet precisely in line with what I'm regularly seeing out of all the brilliant minds in this group. Just can't decide how to deal with all this.

[mntlblok]

plus most recently engine oil viscosity - 5W20, 5W30

And *this* is the kind of messed up that such a mechanism can bring to the fore.

[mntlblok]

Kudos to Mike on this one. The title was a total red herring, rewarding those who think outside the box better than I apparently do. As others said, this was quite simple - if you saw it. I give it thumbs up even though I crashed and burned.

I'm thinking that "plenty" of us made it to the "double U's". But. . .

[mntlblok]

I've been enjoying reading about everyone's rabbit mines so much that I wanted to reproduce the message I sent to DrTom and Darth to request some nudges:

1. We initially went for the 5Ws of journalism (who-what-where-why-when), but with so many "who"s and not really any "when"s, along with the relative wobblyness of assigning stuff to each W, we decided to abandon it.
2. There are a fair number of journalism-y sorts of answers EDITORIALS, TYPESET, PRESS(AGENT), SLIT OPEN (maybe), but nothing obvious jumps out from these.
3. We realized that not only are there no Ws in the grid, but there are no Ws in the clues.. which had to have been on purpose, but that purpose and whether crucial to the meta or not eluded us.
4. We also noticed that there are only 5 U's and 5 M's in the puzzle, but doubling the U words or flipping the M words over also didn't really give us anything to work with (although it turns out that "dooms" flipped 180 degrees can be "swoop")
5. There are a number of clues with two U's in them.. but there were about 9 of them, so mostly a no-go.
6. Tungsten's chemical symbol is W... this rabbit hole was pretty shallow.
7. Then we saw that there are a fair number of clues that could have alternative answers that start with W:
   1. 32A Horse opera > WESTERN
   2. 36A Attacks > WARS
   3. 46A Car-collecting celeb > WYCLEF JEAN
   4. 60A Unhealthily pale > WAN
   5. 5D Entice > WOO
   6. 25D Punts, eg > WAITS
   7. 30D Oreo layer > WAFER
   8. 31D Really minute > WEE
   9. 48D Dolphin's kin > WHALE
   But there are altogether probably too many of these. We were able to anagram COMBO, EPOCH, and BLOOP from the answers and CHORD, CHORE, and CODER from the clue beginnings, but these also seemed pretty wobbly.
8. As a last ditch effort, I thought about how maybee you could make a W out of a crossword grid by going from a square NE, SE, NE, SE, NE again, but couldn't come up with any words from these (because crosswords generally have to alternate vowels and consonants, so you end up getting longish strings of either)

The beach eventually slapped us in the face with the help of nudges so obviously didn't submit. Big thanks to Darth and DrTom for our nudges!

I apologize for over-posting, but the degree of "messed-up-ness" here is just *killing* me. Just wish I hadn't been too lazy to explore more of these warrens. You folks are incredible - in a "great" way.

[MajordomoTom]

Congrats to this week's winner, Henry Burt of Princeton, NJ!

Kudos, sir, well earned.

[TeaJenny]

An interesting mechanism. This one reminded me of the Thousand Island Dressing puzzle from a few months ago. Every once in a while, I guess the numbers do matter.

yes but the clue (Restaurant order) on the 1000 island dressing was much more tell-telling that this one where Mike did a mwahahah job in concealing; I solved that meta and the one with oregano in Al Sisti's speed.

Also, if I'm remembering rightly, the Thousand Island Dressing puzzle had as the first clue something about adding, which was a major hint. I got that one, but missed oregano.

[TeaJenny]

The contest answer is SCOOP. There are five U’s in the answer grid, all in numbered spaces. Doubling those numbers (as suggested by “double-U”) and taking the letters in the corresponding numbered spaces yields the contest answer.

Well, last week I wrote that the contest was one of the toughest ever, but this week really was one of the toughest ever. It's been three very challenging ones in a row if you're keeping score. We are pretty sure that's not part of a nefarious plan--Mike and Matt don't coordinate that way and in fact from time to time they're both surprised by how easy or hard a contest is. But this one was hard! We had just 361 entries and slightly less than 1/3 correct, way below our usual success rate of around 75%.

Other answers included WHERE (45), STORY (29), MEDIA (9), PRESS (6), EMOJI, WALDO, MOPED, FACES, many many other stabs in the dark. Hang in there muggles, the pendulum is bound to swing back to easier contests...

Congrats to this week's winner, Henry Burt of Princeton, NJ!

Whoever submitted WALDO really should get an Honorable Mention. That's just brilliant!

[katnahat]

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 makes me feel so much better. I was nudged with excellent guidance and still didn't get the answer. I remember reading in the "How to Solve Metas" thread that the clue numbers sometimes have something to do with the solution but that fact failed to surface in my brain.

[Bonnibel]

This one totally eluded me and I am starting to think I am not cut out for this puzzle solving gig.

I was fixated on the 5 Ws who what where when and why so effectively drilled into me in elementary school. I could not find any other W options and just nothing seemed to click.

In looking for words in the grid where the W or WH (the H being silent) might be missing, I noticed that OATER & EENSY contained all the other letters - (well, except for that S):

whO
whAT
whERE
whEN
whY

Of course there was the pesky S, never mind the fact that I didn't have a clue where to go from there.

2 weeks in a row failing at this proved to be just too much for me and I threw in the towel. I did see all my grandkids this weekend so that was where I decided to focus my energy!

Hope we are headed in a more fun direction this week.

Kudos to all who solved!

[Streroto]

I just want to say thanks to everyone on the Saturday zoom. In addition to the return of the rest of my weekend, it was really interesting and educational to hear how others approach a meta. We get that in print here of course, but it was just more fun in real time. The collective Aha! was one for the ages. Would be interesting to know if this was an all time low for correct submissions. Mike?

Stay well, all