"This Place Has Changed" August 12, 2022

[DBMiller]

I had the right answer, but didn't find all African cities. I did find...

pepsiLOGOS => lAgos, Portugal
PEZdispenser => Fez, Morocco
sultanoFOMAn => Roma, Italia
bluefinTUNAS => tunIs, Tunisia
ACURAintegra => acCra, Ghana
dickdURBIN => Arbin, France

I did see Oran as well as Roma, And Aspen as well as Fez. Had I made the African connection I would have been much happier with my submission.

[escapeartist]

Welp

I was on the right path but was not familiar with most of those places to reach the answer

The one rabbit hole I was down all weekend was to move and change one letter to create a place:

e.g. - DURBIN - the R moved and became an L to make DUBLIN

worked for a few but not all

congrats to all who got this one

[escapeartist]

other places with a letter switch:
TOGO
ASPEN
TUNIS
CUBA

oh well

[vandono]

Some of my rabbit holes:
I noticed that the letters for PEPSI appeared in 23A PEZDISPENSER and the letters for SULTAN appeared in 40A BLUEFINTUNAS, but there was nothing similar for the last pair of long entries. And there was nothing I could think of to do with that information to lead to a letter per entry.

1D ERIEPA and 65 EERIE had me looking for anything similar. (Or other city, state words... like could 46 STERNAL be Stern, AL? Ok, there's no such city... is it a letter off from an actual city in Alabama? Apparently not. But I kept looking just the same.

I noticed that a single-letter change on 2D MAPLES could give NAPLES. With a bit more effort, 7D TEPEE could become TEMPE. And 33D ANT and 54D ARBOR with a single-letter change could be ANN ARBOR all nice in a column there. I looked for cities that could be found with similar changes to one letter in a grid entry. I really wanted 49D AGEONE to morph into something - probably in Greece. (Edited to add: noticed that 70A LEON could be LYON... but of course it could also just be LÉON.)

I found 4 5-letter words that contained all the letters of 4 4-letter words (such as 60A OREOS containing the letters of 12D ORSO), thinking that if I could find 6 such instances I might have a word. I did find some similar relations between 3 and 4-letter words, but those were more problematic as 41D ERA was contained by both 58D ACRE and 13A RARE, while both 32D TAN and 33D ANT are contained in 67A ANTI.

I found 1 pair of antonyms (9D PRO and 67A ANTI) and wasted a bit of time looking for others. Similarly there was a pair of synonyms (69A GRAB and 63D NAB).

Also noted a couple of pairs of entries that were only a letter or two off from each other. 20D DIEU and 57D DIET; 15D ELSEIF and 51D EASEIN. It seemed really curious that they were so close. With the U->T from the first pair and the L->A and F->N from the second pair, all I could do was FLAUNT.

These are the rabbit holes that took up most of my time, but so many words caught my eye as being close to geographical names.

[woozy]

Well, I got LOGOS to LAGOS and PEZ the FEZ and A, F to Africa almost imemdiately but dismissed that as far too weak and figured that was just grasping at random letter. After all there no more reason to change those letters of just one word in the entry then there was to figure SULTAn anagrams to TULSA. Hours later I figured if I could reverse engineer I could get the rest of the cities.

It was not a particularly satisfying solve especially as it makes no use of 2/3 of the words in the entry, but I figured it was probably correct as experience says I can almost never accidentally back engineer five out of five entries.

[steveb]

I was in Washington (state) all week for a family gathering (great time for the 2 NY grandkids to get to know their 2 CA cousins better, not to mention bonding with their wonderful grandparents). On the 2-day drive home, I managed to print the puzzle this morning in Oregon and work on it in transit. I had the general idea of the metanism and got 5 of the cities (or so I thought): Lagos, Oran, Tunis, Agra(!) and Durban. I had no clue about the Pez Dispenser substitution. I almost gave up and took the L, but about 3 minutes before the deadline, while driving across the Bay Bridge (don't worry, my wife was at the wheel), I decided it was better to submit something than nothing. Seeing that 4 of the 5 cities were all in the same 6-letter continent, I decided that was the best I could do, so I sent off my desperation guess of AFRICA.

[checking the rules ... showing work not required ... it counts!]

Now gimme that mug! (hey, that's worked before)

[DrTom]

Well there were a lot of places to be found weren't there? I spent a lot of time with ASPEN but also AGRA. Thankfully I did not see ROMA. I'd have ended up the same though because I had AARIAA for the longest time. I figured that was closer to the answer than OIMAEI but had to check that I was on the right track. Once assured I was I saw that sometimes you used the first word, sometimes the last word. As soon as I convinced myself to go back to the older spelling of FEZ as opposed to FES it was immediately clear.

[rjy]

I found this to be one of those puzzles that can simultaneously be both a very clever construction and an somewhat unsatisfying solve. We got the gist of what this might be, but with no guidance to the specific mechanism or geography, we found pieces that were literally all over the map and equally legitimate. From the outset we had PAZ, Croatia rather than FEZ. Also CUBA from aCURA. Both completely legitimate. Or DICKDURBAN gave us DUCK, North Carolina. Also, equally valid. Or other places were an additional letter or two away: BHUTAN, BHARAIN, or why not DUBLIN from DURBAN? With ACURA INTEGRA, changing one letter of each and anagramming - not a usual Matt thing, but not out of bounds - gave us ARUBA and NIGERIA. It almost seemed as though you could take any random set of letters and - with the help of google - find some way to massage them into some geographic name. Clever construction to be sure, but the possibilities in solving seemed to fan out too far and wide. Kudos to those of you who got this nudgelessly…

[Omnibus]

I found this to be one of those puzzles that can simultaneously be both a very clever construction and an somewhat unsatisfying solve. We got the gist of what this might be, but with no guidance to the specific mechanism or geography, we found pieces that were literally all over the map and equally legitimate. From the outset we had PAZ, Croatia rather than FEZ. Also CUBA from aCURA. Both completely legitimate. Or DICKDURBAN gave us DUCK, North Carolina. Also, equally valid. Or other places were an additional letter or two away: BHUTAN, BHARAIN, or why not DUBLIN from DURBAN? With ACURA INTEGRA, changing one letter of each and anagramming - not a usual Matt thing, but not out of bounds - gave us ARUBA and NIGERIA. It almost seemed as though you could take any random set of letters and - with the help of google - find some way to massage them into some geographic name. Clever construction to be sure, but the possibilities in solving seemed to fan out too far and wide. Kudos to those of you who got this nudgelessly…

I was one who briefly went down the ACURA/ARUBA rabbit hole, but initially saw a Caribbean theme with INTEGRA/ANTIGUA. Fortunately, while working the other entries, I spotted PEZ/FEZ and TUNAS/TUNiS, so I opened up my maps, zoomed in on North Africa, and found….nothing. Once I trolled around the rest of the continent, I finally spotted LAGOS, DURBIN, and ORAN. Once I had AFRI*CA, it was pretty clear that ACURA was ACCRA.

[Bird Lives]

On my "Ashore" post I was going to add "I don't think it's Kansas, Toto" or something along those lines. I thought the last word would mean nothing to those who hadn't solved and that even many of those who had solved would not get the reference. But I redacted it anyway. It was, after all, their biggest hit. Google "Toto," and it's the first video on the page.

[Bird Lives]

[HunterX]

Hmmm... Wish I hadn't spent so much time on it. Kids and I saw some of those cities, but we were primarily looking for the names of places that had changed.

-BLUE FIN TUNAS contains all the letters of ISTANBUL
-OSLO is in there a couple of times, but that's an easy one.
-ACURA INTEGRA includes GUERNICA
-SULTAN OF OMAN has TULSA with one letter swap.

So getting FEZ from PEZ seems too easy and, frankly, arbitrary.

Not Matt's best, IMHO. But he has so many incredibly fantastic ones that he's allowed one of these every so often.

[otlaolap]

Here is the mechanism I saw: find a string of letters in the answers which, with one switch, yields a geographic place name. Hence,
LOGOS -> LAGOS
ISPEN -> ASPEN
ULTA -> ALTA
TUNAS -> TUINIS
CURA -> CUBA
DURBIN -> DURBAN
Gather in order the switched letters, yielding "AAAIBA".
Now, apply the mechanism again to the result: this gives "ABAIBA", which is a geographic place name.

As I said yesterday, reekiness such as this is better far away from here.

[DianeA]

I had the right answer, but didn't find all African cities. I did find...

pepsiLOGOS => lAgos, Portugal
PEZdispenser => Fez, Morocco
sultanoFOMAn => Roma, Italia
bluefinTUNAS => tunIs, Tunisia
ACURAintegra => acCra, Ghana
dickdURBIN => Arbin, France

I did see Oran as well as Roma, And Aspen as well as Fez. Had I made the African connection I would have been much happier with my submission.

I didn't have the answer, but logic was similar. At first i thought of Lagos, Nigeria, but thinking the countries of the clues gave the answer, switched to Portugal.
I was so locked on Aspen, and Agra (after giving up on Cuba, a country, not city). Also, never found anything for Sen. Durbin. Frustrating when you know what to do, but can't execute it to completion.

[pjc]

Never did get it (so three misses in a row). I did consider LOGOS/LAGOS, but nothing else jumped out at me along those lines.

Other rabbit holes:

- EPSILOG hiding in PEPSILOGOS becomes EPISLON with a letter change. But that went no further.

- If you change the order of the words in the long answers, DICKDURBIN becomes DURBINDICK - which has the string INDIC in it; and changing the C to an A gives one INDIA. Bonus points because switching that to an A gives AARE as the crossword. That all felt promising, but, nope.

- Because of some of the very generic ways the cluing was done for the long answers (like "Ride recently reintroduced"), it seemed as if those clues could apply to other answers somehow - for example, could some other piece of transportation have made a comeback recently? I spent too long trying to apply that.

Ah, well. There's always this coming week!

[Joe Ross]

I know I'm in rough seas when I resort to this brand of desperate thinking within an hour of filling the grid:

[femullen]

They're always easy when you see them. It's seeing them...

I saw Lagos and Durban right away, saw that the six-letter answer started and ended with A, and thought, " AFRICA." If I'd been brave enough to go with that, I'd have made Page 1.

Contrast this blitz with a typical week: hours of stupid staring, pages of scribbled rabbit holes, mug upon mug of Isaac's cheapest plonk, culminating in that familiar palm-to-forehead Monday morning.

I got my Muggle secret decoder ring (which never works) two and a half years ago. Since then, I can count the number of times I've stepped ashore with @Wendy Walker and @Al Sisti on the fingers of a Boy Scout salute. This week, "I see!" Next week asea.

[flyingMoose]

For me, the title of the puzzle normally serves as a confirmation rather than being much help in finding the solution.

This time, however, I thought the title was basically the instructions for finding the solution. CHANGE one PLACE (letter/cell) in each of the six themers to form another PLACE (city). Those new letters are the six-letter solution.

I won't go into the ones far simpler than this that totally stumped me.

[Al Laubenstein]

I bless the rains.

[Wendy Walker]

I'd be interested to learn which city was the first that folks "saw." For me it was Durban.