#720 - “Get It Together!” by Andrew Linzer

[Barney]

This weekend was the first time we were together with out kids since Dec 2019 (before COVID). They had never seen metas before, since I didn't discover them till later. So this MGWCC turned into a family project, with my kids filling in the leftmost part and identifying the key grid entry that opened everything up. Remarkably ingenious puzzle.

First visit since 2019, wow. Probably as good a time as any to seize the moment.

[Cow]

Wow! What an incredible puzzle! I'm very impressed with the construction!

[ColinM]

This one was great! More than made up for my struggles with the WSJ meta.

[BobDylan]

Struggling on this one. Any tips greatly appreciated. Just cannot see how to get started here. This kid is much smarter than me.


new note: thanks for the hint - managed to unscramble this one. great job Andrew Linzer

[Jeremy Smith]

I would say I’ve been beamed up, but it would be more correct to say I required a boost from a friendly Muggle with a Saturn V rocket.

[Joe Ross]

Ground Control to Major Nudge.
Soon, I'll be floating in the ether; far, far away.
Planet earth is blue, and I owe it all to you.

[Al Sisti]

Whelp, end of streak, but another streak continues. I vowed this year not to ask for or accept any nudges. Seeing that there was no satisfaction -- even guilt -- when I did in the past, it made me try harder to solve on my own. If others can do it, so can I, if I'm good enough. Sometimes, like this week, I'm not. Streak is gone, but pride is still there. Congrats to the ones who did solve it. For me, there's always next week.

[Joe Ross]

[DrTom]

That was one heck of a puzzle, elegant in its simplicity in that it showed you what you had to do and as soon as you cut it and got 2 x 15 column grids the lights started going on. The long entry RISINGS and ALEVELS were just sitting there waiting and he even clued it as such that the entry made perfect sense. This young man with his very first has outdone anything I have made so far, I am both in awe and jealous...

By the way, it should be lost on none of us that the mechanism was "Cut and paste". I wonder if he toyed with that as a title but realized it would immediately tip the solve and make this a week 1.

[EmilyW]

Wow what a cool puzzle! I cut on the dotted lines and stacked the grid, but couldn't find the glue to stick it together.

[Al Sisti]

Wow what a cool puzzle! I cut on the dotted lines and stacked the grid, but couldn't find the glue to stick it together.

I found it but didn't use it.

[Bird Lives]

I did it in .puz and copied that to Paint. When I saw where to cut, thanks to the scissors in the bottom row central square, I moved it to the only place I could think of. A very quick solve for me.
.

[woozy]

Oh! A logo for scissors in the bottom of the row of I's!

Somehow I got the row of I's but thought the lack of scissors in 65A and the addition I was to lead us to scissors by its omission and the extra I was poetic license.

Any way I *loved* how a regular grid is 15x15 and this being 7 tall tells us immediately that there will be one addition row to account for (as well as it being 31 wide)

[HunterX]

I was trying every which way to FOLD the puzzle to bring together the letters that make up the word SCISSOR, all available on the same bottom row, or above. When I got the hint to "be more literal" about the scissors, and realized I needed to (literally) draw scissors in that bottom center square, I was in disbelief that the four long down answers could combine into two. I basically asked, "What do I do with that? Find some magical word that would connect all those other grid answers?"

Apparently the answer was "Yes!!!"

Great construction!