"Power Play" August 5, 2022

[mheberlingx100]

526 entries at 37% correct implies less than 200 correct answers. That’s the lowest I can remember.

[Susan Goldberg]

I pursued pretty much all of the rabbit holes mentioned. Then there was the two hour digression into the Lion in Winter. It was, after all a great film. But, was it a play within a play?

[The XWord Rabbit]

I like a decisive rabbit

The XWord Rabbit has just discovered that Houman Tamaddon is, indeed, a member of this website, and he will contact him.

[CPJohnson]

I do squares in my head when I'm getting an MRI (don't ask; soccer injuries) or getting my teeth cleaned. It makes the time go by really quickly so I don't even notice the MRI knocking or whatever the hygienist is doing.

I always ask the technician how long the MRI will take, then I count seconds. At the end, sometimes I remember to compare my second count with the prediction. It's a test to see if I know how long a second lasts.

[flyingMoose]

526 entries at 37% correct implies less than 200 correct answers. That’s the lowest I can remember.

@BarbaraK has records that go back farther than mine, but The Three W's on 11/12/21 had 361 entries at 33% correct for 119 correct answers.

[MMe]

I wonder how many people solved this one.

[BarbaraK]

526 entries at 37% correct implies less than 200 correct answers. That’s the lowest I can remember.

@BarbaraK has records that go back farther than mine, but The Three W's on 11/12/21 had 361 entries at 33% correct for 119 correct answers.

It's the 8th lowest of all time, but most of the lower ones are from the early years when there were a lot fewer people playing.

[ImOnToo]

I felt like 59A was important. But, I couldn’t do anything with it. I convinced myself that “power play” was a word trick. So, I noticed (power) trip, solar (power), (power) cel?, (power) gate? Nah!
Okay, so I see “on” in 14A, 15A, 4D and 46D. Still nothing.
So, HERE’S my “stroke of brilliance“. (Follow if you can.)
I see “ac and dc” in four spots - squares 6, 7 and the square below 6, for example. Then, squares 22, 24. Squares “ac” in 55D and “d” in 66 A.
The letters that touch all 3 letters (“a”, “d” and “c”) in each case anagram out to either “then” or “hent”.
“Hent” means to seize. Sounded like a power play. So, with no better idea, that’s what I submitted.

[ImOnToo]

I’ve won the mug! I got an email from Mike Miller at 12:44 pm.

Congratulations!

[mlvilv]

that was a hard no. I only ever look for word play. I never think to count up numbers. I was pretty fixated on 'solar' power, right smack in the middle of the puzzle but that had nothing to do with it apparently. On to next week!

[JAQT]

I didn't solve. I had a strong hunch that it involved square roots, but could not find anything of which to take the square root. Like others here, I saw OUNCES (16^2), and that the letter-sum of WHY SHOULD I (but no others of the long answers) was a perfect square. I was also momentarily distracted by TEN and ALOG (who doesn't like a good logarithm!) In the end, a visit from my son's family took priority.

The rabbit hole by Houman Tamaddon on the WSJ site is awesome. If they're a member here (possibly), I hope they copy it here for archival purposes.

[MaineMarge]

I’ve won the mug! I got an email from Mike Miller at 12:44 pm. (526 entries, he said)
…….
And, if I don’t solve, I submit my best guess. I want Mike Miller et al to know I’m out there trying.

Like @CPJohnson, I think it’s important for the WSJ crew to know that we’re all here giving it our best shot. If we don’t submit anything, they won’t know we are out there wracking our brains for the cause. If I get a nudge I don’t submit the correct answer; I send in a sensible (or crazy) alternative to help out the odds for the solo solvers.
Time for a rerun of a great power play-

[Deb F]

I’ve won the mug! I got an email from Mike Miller at 12:44 pm.

Congratulations!

Yea, Cynthia!!! Congratulations.

[ship4u]

If you thought this puzzle was clever, I highly recommend this meta from our own @MarkWoychick

viewtopic.php?p=102165#p102165

Better odds to win a prize too!

Thanks for the heads up regarding Mark's puzzle this week. We looked at it this morning and Cynthia solved it very quickly! Excellent job and 3 cheers for @MarkWoychick !

[HunterX]

526 entries at 37% correct implies less than 200 correct answers. That’s the lowest I can remember.

@BarbaraK has records that go back farther than mine, but The Three W's on 11/12/21 had 361 entries at 33% correct for 119 correct answers.

I guess it's no coincidence, then, that The Five W's (my records show it as Five and the answer was SCOOP), was also a Mike Shenk puzzle, and also used math. It required the solver to double the box number of the 5 containing U's and then look at the letters in the boxes of the "doubled U's."

[whimsy]

526 entries at 37% correct implies less than 200 correct answers. That’s the lowest I can remember.

@BarbaraK has records that go back farther than mine, but The Three W's on 11/12/21 had 361 entries at 33% correct for 119 correct answers.

I guess it's no coincidence, then, that The Five W's (my records show it as Five and the answer was SCOOP), was also a Mike Shenk puzzle, and also used math. It required the solver to double the box number of the 5 containing U's and then look at the letters in the boxes of the "doubled U's."

And yet for that one, I got it pretty readily and had a hard time understanding what all the teeth gnashing was about. This one was a never in a million years for me -- so go figure.
Probably because that one relied more on word play ( and the math was much easier! )

[flaringnostrils]

Rabbit hole? I gotcher rabbit hole right here! Looks like I was on the right track, but then ran off the track, out of the stadium, clean through the parking lot and now I'm standing here panting on the shoulder of the interstate. Where am I, really? Oh, at sea.
Started by trying to find four words that paired with "power". Hmm, "tool", "mad", "bar" and "shake". Only four, four letter meta, oh that's gotta be it! So, "bar". I added up the square ##s for the three letters in "bar" (all were numbered) and they added up to 156 (51+52+53)! The correct entry right below "bar"? "Square root"! 156 is a perfect square of 14! Take the letter on the #14 square in the grid ("E"). Oh, I got this!
Uh, no I don't. None of the other "pairing" words work with that formula. But, OK, "tool", oh looky, the words "tool" go both down and across and meet at the "L". They form a corner, half the perimeter of a square! Gotta be a clue! The intersecting long answer: "Why should I". Huh? That don't make no sense. "Why should I" keep doing this? "Mad" intersected with "Had a Bad Effect"; hmm, three three letter words that rhyme! But 3x3's a cube, not a square! And, finally, "shake" is embedded in the fourth long answer. I got nuthin' for that one. Nope, alone on the lifeboat with SPF zero. Mr. Schenk is a diabolical dude.

[The XWord Rabbit]

The XWord Rabbit is pleased to announce the first nominees for the Golden Rabbit Hole Award.
A number of Muggles pondered over the word "solar", a cruel trick by Mr. Shenk, putting it in the center of the puzzle.
Others took a maddening Shakespearean route (25A). Most correctly assumed the title "Power Play" and the
59A entry "Square Root" were the keys, but couldn't find the door. No one appreciates math more than The XWord Rabbit,
as he loves to multiply, but alas, to those Muggles who fell into these holes, the Rabbit can only extend his sympathies.

Now onto our two nominees: The first is DBMiller whose tenacity (not to mention verbosity) is to be commended.
Here is the complete text of his method, although some of you may prefer waiting until the movie comes out.

"My long winded story of rabbit holes and how one of them is how I tunneled between rabbit holes and backed solved into this one just before Friday's zoom meeting…

Grid was quickly done, and I saw two possible hints that might lead to the meta. With the title of Power Play, I saw the play within a play clue and the second power clue. As there were four theme answers, and the power clue was one, I wasn't sure if the latter was a clue and a themer or not. Could they both be clues? What about SOLAR? Time to dig in.

Play within a play. Shakespeare was fond of that. Google leads me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Hamlet. Darn. I could maybe relate NO GREAT SHAKES with MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, but not much else.

Square roots… interesting. I will keep an eye out for various powers of numbers. MATH does come to mind as a possible answer. A power play is also a hockey term, so maybe GOAL or PUCK could be it as well.

Roots… Trees… One answer is ELM, but I see no other trees. I scan the grid for squares of 9-letter tree names and don't see any. I look for squares of 4-letter tree names and only find DATE.

I did see NINE as a square. But nothing else.

Wait .. The play within a play answer, which coincidentally is META, has ALOG above it, an anagram of GOAL. Could it be that simple? How do I get there? Well, the exponents in numbers are often written using superscripts, so maybe I need to find the letters in META elsewhere and map them to the letters in ALOG to make GOAL. Hmmm… ATME would be the order, how do I find them?

Okay. Nothing obvious so let's go to the hint about squares and/or square roots. As a math major and computer programmer, I run through a bunch of squared numbers in my head. 2, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100, 121, 144…How do I pick just four of them? And what do I do with them?

I see TEN in the grid. Is ADUE two? Is TRIP three again? I quickly give up there.

Ooh .. MINER forty-niner. 16 OUNCEs in a pound. 100 members in the SENAT. I scour the grid for a fourth square but cannot find one.i must be missing one. Maybe I can back solve it.

100 is too big to be a grid number, so now I'm back to square roots. I have 4, 7, and 10. Could be D, G, J. Nah. Look at grid squares. Hmmm… ICL doesn't seem to help. COIL? LAIC? LICK? LICE? Doesn't look good.

Oh yeah, I was trying to spell ATME. So I need a either a 6 or 16; a 5: either a 2, 13 or 14: plus what? A 19???? Squares are 36 or 256; 25; either 4, 169 or 196; plus… 361???

Back to the theme answers. SECOND power. What about the second word of each theme? SHOULD GREAT A ROOT. Ugh. Well backwards it spells RAGS. Did counterpart mean that? What would RAGS have to do with it?

Zoom meeting was going to start soon. C'mon, you can do this. Maybe I need both first and second words. So I write down…

WHY SHOULD
NO GREAT
HAD A
SQUARE ROOT

And then I noticed the letters in each word. I saw 36, 25, 41, and 64. Three out of four squares! This could be it. But 41??? Even if I reconcile 41, they aren't in order for META. Using the square roots I have T, A, and H. Well what about MATH after all? Hmmm… 19x19 is 361, oh… "36" + "1". Wait… 361 is 19, check. 256 is 16, check. 64 is 8, check. 3136… Well I'll be. That's 56, which is a T in the grid. Click!

Just as I'm hearing the zoom discussion how people who love to count would find this one interesting. Yes, indeed. Very odd route to the answer, but I got there!

And for the real math nerds, how I got 361 and 56 without a calculator….

19*19=20*19-19=400-20-19=361
Then verified in my head, 81+90+190, yep.

(a+b)^2 = a^2+2ab+b^2
3136=2500+300+300+36, so a=50, b=6"

The second is the following entry from Houman Tamaddon, posted among the Wall Street Journal comments.

"Power play in ice hockey is when one player is out. The grid contains every letter of the alphabet EXCEPT the letter J, which is the tenth letter in the alphabet (the grid's lower right hand corner contains the answer "ten", as a hint). There are EXACTLY 4 clues that contain the letter J (no more, no less): 10A, 36A, 65A (with a reference to ice skates, no less), 60D 10A = LODE 36A= ITEM 65A=AXEL 60D=UND If you jumble the four first letters of those grid answers, you get ALIU, as Akim Aliu, a 13 year veteran of the Chicago Blackhawks ice hockey team! As an added fun fact, he is part Ukrainian, which is a nod to power plays of sovereign nations as well as power plays in hockey."

The Xword Rabbit has spoken. To these two Muggles, congratulations. To the others who came close, remember: There will always be more metas in which you have an excellent chance of failing. And when you do, I'll be there. Best to all!

[BarbaraK]

Rabbit hole? I gotcher rabbit hole right here! Looks like I was on the right track, but then ran off the track, out of the stadium, clean through the parking lot and now I'm standing here panting on the shoulder of the interstate. Where am I, really? Oh, at sea.
Started by trying to find four words that paired with "power". Hmm, "tool", "mad", "bar" and "shake". Only four, four letter meta, oh that's gotta be it! So, "bar". I added up the square ##s for the three letters in "bar" (all were numbered) and they added up to 156 (51+52+53)! The correct entry right below "bar"? "Square root"! 156 is a perfect square of 14! Take the letter on the #14 square in the grid ("E"). Oh, I got this!
Uh, no I don't. None of the other "pairing" words work with that formula. But, OK, "tool", oh looky, the words "tool" go both down and across and meet at the "L". They form a corner, half the perimeter of a square! Gotta be a clue! The intersecting long answer: "Why should I". Huh? That don't make no sense. "Why should I" keep doing this? "Mad" intersected with "Had a Bad Effect"; hmm, three three letter words that rhyme! But 3x3's a cube, not a square! And, finally, "shake" is embedded in the fourth long answer. I got nuthin' for that one. Nope, alone on the lifeboat with SPF zero. Mr. Schenk is a diabolical dude.

This is terrific! Thanks for sharing it with us!

[MMe]

156 is a perfect square of 14!

Not...really