A place to discuss the weekly Wall Street Journal Crossword Puzzle Contest, starting every Thursday around 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. Please do not post any answers or hints before the contest deadline which is midnight Sunday Eastern time.
Mister Squawk wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 10:13 am
The "Day" thing was rattling around in my head as I spent hours trying to find a set of the letters OCCASION in the grid such that the letters above them formed an eight letter phrase. (ON OCCASION, get it?)
Also looked into phonetic phrases of eight letters (I C U for"I see you").
It wasn't until I looked up the dates of the four holidays that it fell into place.
Also first looked for letters in OCCASION above long answers as first foray.
Based on my notes, the first four spelled out RARE, so it looked like a promising mechanism for a short time, at least.
I saw FLAG Day, EARTH Day, CHRISTMAS Day, and CANADA Day immediately, and of course 66A, but then spent the rest of my time trying to backsolve an 8-letter phrase containing DAY. After the first few pages of comments, I knew it had to have punctuation, probably an apostrophe, because people were having difficulty submitting via the form. (Nerdy bits: WSJ probably doesn't sanitize their inputs and instead attempts to prohibit Little Bobby Tables from submitting something malicious.)
I was out of town away from my computer for the weekend, so I never got farther than that.
Some of my lame rabbit holes:
AGO appears twice in the long answers and relates to time/occasion. If you include either AND or DAY, you will find that there are 8 letters literally “on” those occasions…
Also, there are 3 grid answers with ON in them, with 8 additional letters…
Neither are elegant, but these puzzles never feel elegant to me until I’m finished.
Well constructed puzzle!
The only rabbit hole I encountered was on the definition for "bar on a train" which included "on" and had an interesting by-product with Goose and caboose (and it was interesting that the specific down answer was "cub"). I dismissed that mechanism after some thinking and I latched on to the date logic. It would have been really cool if Shenk would have also used "beyond" on 66 across as one of the clues, so the clue would have read "day beyond" which would have resulted in adding an extra day to the date.
This was, for me, a lovely example of logically thinking things out and reasoning.
I got the four theme entries FLAG OFFICER, EARTH SHATTERING, CHRISTMAS ISLAND, and CANADA GOOSE and they, being so prominent and looking so.... theme-entry-esque... were probably the key. But the most notable thing about them was that appear to have nothing in common. And FLAG OFFICER is less in common than all the others.
When you have *nothing* that can be done, that can be a blessing as you must then rely on the title. "On occasion".... How can I make an occasion out of FLAG OFFICER, EARTH SHATTERING, CHRISTMAS ISLAND, and CANADA GOOSE.
Well, CHRISTMAS obviously is already an occasion but to make the others an occasion I must look at the oddest sorest thumb of FLAG OFFICER and I can remember that silly day that serves no purpose other than to make jokes about Mr. Burns finding true love by-- FLAG DAY.
And so FLAG DAY, EARTH DAY, CHRISTMAS DAY, and CANADA DAY. Four occasions.
But they are specific days, who can we have letters/words associated with them. Well, To have ENTRY X => META-SEGMENT Y we need to have a some unambiguous property of ENTRY X to lead to META-SEGMENT Y. And to be a good meta rather than an alf-hass praccy meta the property needs to be unambiguous.
The only unambiguous properties of observed days that I could think of were .... dates. The month and day must lead to the eight letter phrase. Had to google the absurd FLAG DAY and remind myself whether EARTH DAY was always on the second to last Sunday in April or if it had a set date but that was easy enough
So first go replace numbers with their alpha numeric equiv to get FNDVLYGA. No go and listing the months/days first won't reveal anything useful so take first letter of months to get JNAVDYJA and again nothing. So the next thing to try is the numbered squares-- a very common technique I frequently have a habit of overlooking.
That yields IT'S A DATE.
So beautifully straight-forward and logical. From start to finish including doing the grid 28 minutes. One of my better times if not my very best.
Funny story. I was all set to enter Par for the course for the CrossHare midi contest for April but I mistakenly thought midi meant 7x 7 and not 11 x 11. Oops. Well.... Here's a complex but **small** meta on the subject of golf.
hoover wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 12:01 pm
to prohibit Little Bobby Tables from submitting something malicious.)
Oh! That's why it never submitted!
I just remembered I never got around to correcting that and submitting by e-mail.
Dang--- My absolute best solve and I never actually submitted.
Funny story. I was all set to enter Par for the course for the CrossHare midi contest for April but I mistakenly thought midi meant 7x 7 and not 11 x 11. Oops. Well.... Here's a complex but **small** meta on the subject of golf.
The ‘BEYOND’ at bottom center had me thinking that something had to be added off the grid, leading me to adjacent entries that required the same letter: 11/16/19 ADO-S, PIG-S, and ELL-S; 35/38 W-HAT and W-ISE; 40/43 FLA-K and FRAN-K; 59/63 T-URN and T-ASK. Not quite a clean approach, and couldn’t make anything from “S,W, K, T” (“SO WE KNIT”?), so climbed out of that hole.
Then started adding “ON” to entries - “DILL+ON,” “APR+ON,” … crickets…
The answer was ‘beyond’ our grasp until after a good night’s sleep
Always amazed and thankful for the creativity that goes into these - hope you all have a great week,
"On Occasion" can mean "Off and on", which struck me as a pretty nice 8 letter phrase. So, when seeing the prominent "flag OFFicer" straight away, down a rabbit hole I went. Fortunately, it was quickly abandoned for a more robust search.
Don & Cynthia
We are always happy to get to know other muggles and help in any way! PM's are always welcome. The next best thing to winning a mug is helping a fellow muggle win a mug!
“It’s a date” jumped into my head almost immediately. I finished the grid but was unable to backsolve the phrase. I then spent the rest of the weekend trying to find an eight letter phase OTHER THAN It’s a date.
Maybe it’s better to ignore the hint and the title. Just complete the grid and try figure out what’s going on before looking at the hint/title.
The contest answer is IT’S A DATE. The four long Across answers each begin with a word that precedes “Day” in the name of a holiday: FLAG Day (6/14), EARTH Day (4/22), CHRISTMAS Day (12/25) and CANADA Day (7/1). Taking the letters in the correspondingly numbered spaces in order spells the contest answer.
I sound like a broken record, but thinking about the ingenuity required to construct this one took my breath away! We had a robust turnout--1331 responses, with about 80% correct (slightly above our typical rate of 75%). The call for an 8-letter answer led to several repeat incorrect guesses, including DAY TO DAY (49), DAY BY DAY (17), WHAT A DAY (6), DAY AFTER (4), and several others.
Congrats to this week's winner, Anne Prousi of Willow Grove, Penn.!
ajk wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 12:14 am
On Thursday I looked up the dates and thought to check the 14/22/25/1 squares, so literally had T A A E written on my (electronic) scratch paper. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I though to include the months, despite the 8-letter prompt.
The exact same thing happened to me! I think because I wrote my dates down as June 14, etc so I was only looking for one number each. Also I didn't want to mention before the deadline that I had a Goose Island beer to celebrate in case it was a spoiler. It was the Fourteen version of this years Bourbon County Stout, so fits in with 3 of the theme answers.
ajk wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 12:14 am
On Thursday I looked up the dates and thought to check the 14/22/25/1 squares, so literally had T A A E written on my (electronic) scratch paper. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I though to include the months, despite the 8-letter prompt.
The exact same thing happened to me! I think because I wrote my dates down as June 14, etc so I was only looking for one number each. Also I didn't want to mention before the deadline that I had a Goose Island beer to celebrate in case it was a spoiler. It was the Fourteen version of this years Bourbon County Stout, so fits in with 3 of the theme answers.
Me too. Exactly. Just didn't occur to me to include month numbers. Kicking myself.
Andrew Bradburn wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 9:49 pm
I find this puzzle to be one of a long line of Mike Shenk puzzles that are tricky but not overly so, and extremely elegant. Quite a skill he has.
Which means that if a rabbit hole begins to feel squirrley so to speak, you can confidently exit quickly.
