I've Got a Feeling - August 2022

[Wendy Walker]

Was pretty sure of my answer even before finding the mechanism!
We are vacationing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, getting to which involves crossing the 17-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I was reading up on the bridge's history on Google while Mark was still deeply engrossed in the MMMM.
WLW: Wow, seven people were killed during its construction!
Mark: What, the puzzle?!

[HunterX]

We are vacationing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, getting to which involves crossing the 17-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I was reading up on the bridge's history on Google while Mark was still deeply engrossed in the MMMM.
WLW: Wow, seven people were killed during its construction!
Mark: What, the puzzle?!

WLW: No, Mark. Not the MMMM. The MGWCC "My Cup Runneth Over."

[jhseeman]

Was pretty sure of my answer even before finding the mechanism!
We are vacationing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, getting to which involves crossing the 17-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I was reading up on the bridge's history on Google while Mark was still deeply engrossed in the MMMM.
WLW: Wow, seven people were killed during its construction!
Mark: What, the puzzle?!

Next time you need to come to the "REAL" Carolina....South Carolina.

[Wendy Walker]

WLW: Wow, seven people were killed during its construction!
Mark: What, the puzzle?!

WLW: No, Mark. Not the MMMM. The MGWCC "My Cup Runneth Over."

Hunter, Mark's response was "And even more during the solving!"

[Joe]

Got it! One of those that is completely gibberish until it's completely obvious. I liked it.

[woozy]

My worry is a song or album from 2021 could be any possible combinations of words and none would seem more or less recognizable to me than any other. And I know I will not have heard of this song because I have not heard of *any* music written in 2021. So I'm wondering ... is this worth attempting.

[BarbaraK]

My worry is a song or album from 2021 could be any possible combinations of words and none would seem more or less recognizable to me than any other. And I know I will not have heard of this song because I have not heard of *any* music written in 2021. So I'm wondering ... is this worth attempting.

Yes.

[HoldThatThought]

This meta mechanism exposed (at least for me) a bad habit that I've obviously developed in the solving wars. Clean and elegant solution, once I put that aside.

For those who are wondering if you need to know 2021 hits to solve - the answer is only if you're trying to back solve.

[HunterX]

My worry is a song or album from 2021 could be any possible combinations of words and none would seem more or less recognizable to me than any other. And I know I will not have heard of this song because I have not heard of *any* music written in 2021. So I'm wondering ... is this worth attempting.

The song is from 2021. The year of the well known album is not specified in the prompt.

FWIW, I had never heard of the song from 2021. The album, on the other hand... Different story altogether for me.

[HunterX]

We are vacationing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, getting to which involves crossing the 17-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I was reading up on the bridge's history on Google while Mark was still deeply engrossed in the MMMM.

Tesla on autopilot through the tunnel? Or was the chauffeur with you? Oh, the chauffeur was working on the MGWCC?

[rjy]

On the board, took a few walk-away-and-come-backs, but a solid click in the end

[ChrisKochmanski]

Yikes, I almost overlooked this MMMM amidst the summer fun. And for some reason, I’m now not getting Pete’s emails. Anyway …

Got it! Good one! Thanks, Pete and Andrew!

[kurtalert]

On the board, finally. Like usual, I first chased a dozen hare-brained rabbit holes… my board had been highlightered and erased so many times, embarrassing. Fortunately, I solved this on my iPad for the first time- so I didn’t kill any trees with all of my stupid starts and restarts!

[MikeM000]

I liked this puzzle, but I think the prompt gave away too much, especially if difficulty is supposed to be ratcheting up. I was on some rush projects for work; did the grid, and consulted a list of top hits of 2021. There were only 2 that struck me as having shared titles with famous albums (I'm forgetting the other), and seeing the end of MINAJ and the beginning of UVLAMPS I submitted the right answer without really knowing why. Without the "famous album" clue and my Neil Young fandom it wouldn't have happened so quickly.

I went back to the website a little later, saw my grid didn't save, re-filled it in, and was all "ah! I get it now..."

[kurtalert]

Now that the solution is out, I'll detail some of my silly rabbit holes.

"Mirror Images" was obvious right away, of course, but for some reason it got me hooked on finding entries in the grid that were still valid if you looked at the puzzle in a mirror. So, OTTO, AIM, AMMO, MAMA... and these really got me nowhere.

Then I thought I'd try and identify all clues and/or grid entries with an ABBC pattern like FEELing... got nowhere... and I had no idea how to tie them to Mirror Images.

I also noticed what felt like an inordinate number of grid entries with an ABA pattern- including some that were kind of weird- eATAt, iDED, SASs, ODOr, and that had multiple ABA patterns- MAMA has MAM and AMA, ISIS has ISI and SIS, etc. These, of course, got me nowhere.

And then I tried to hone in on alliterative clues- perhaps thinking that the Stephen Sondheim entry, combined with what seemed like a clue that was repetitively worded (repeating musical motif - motif already kind of implies repeating, so this seemed like an obvious "hey, pay attention to this!" hint...) and there are MANY clues like this- snares say, cousins of cassowaries, dispatched a dragon, spot seller, tide type, able amusingly, Fear of Fifty, sauce-sopper, raspberry relative, sweat spot, decibel or degree, Samuel and Sonia, etc. But, still nowhere. Sigh.

I think I only got on the right path once I noticed a few weird lines- Jocks/minaJ and improVe/uVlamps. I was getting really close to admitting defeat! I spent all day Sunday in airports traveling back from Croatia and thought I was going to be staring at the same PDF on my iPad all day long until the deadline hit... fortunately, the answer came to me before the first flight even took off, which gave me plenty of time to start working through the big stack of old WSJ & benchen metas that I printed to help me learn how to do these better. Phew!

[BarbaraK]

My first pass at this, on my phone and not focusing much, I had the right metanism but missed the A.
DEJVU just looked like alphabet soup.

But I was confident enough in the approach that once I got a printed copy, I looked again for matching mirror letters, more carefully this time, and found them all.

Never heard of the 2021 song but remember well the CSNY album.

[woozy]

Well, that was the weirdest danged thing. I saw the puzzle. Figured it was latterally symmetric and the clues mirror image pointed directly to look at the symmetry. So I looked for the letters that appeared in the same position on each side and got D,E,J,A,V,U and....

.... couldn't make any sense of them. Kept looking off and on for a week and knew it had to have something about symmetry but felt I was missing something.

Saw the answer and thought... "But that didn't spell out DEJA VU when I did it; It only spelled out D,E,J,A, V,U"....

weirdest dang thing.....

[hoover]

This meta mechanism exposed (at least for me) a bad habit that I've obviously developed in the solving wars. Clean and elegant solution, once I put that aside.

For those who are wondering if you need to know 2021 hits to solve - the answer is only if you're trying to back solve.

Now that the solution has been revealed, what's your bad habit?

[HunterX]

Sent in my usual style of comment in hopes that PM will include it in his "Groaners" section. But I'm guessing others may offer the same one.

As hoped, Pete included my Groaner.

As predicted, he said "At least 10 other solvers made the same joke..."

So I guess, @Petemuller, that means each time you saw it, you had a feeling....?

[Wendy Walker]

There were only 2 that struck me as having shared titles with famous albums (I'm forgetting the other),

Yes, me too! I scanned the Billboard 2021 hits list and DEJA VU and RUMORS jumped out at me. But the Fleetwood Mac album was spelled RUMOURS so I knew that wasn't right.