MGWCC #743 — “Butterfly Effect” by Paolo Pasco

[HunterX]

While I did gripe about the cluing, I did enjoy the meta-part of this puzzle. Yes, it was complex, not self-contained (the metanism being mostly in the other puzzles), and took some work. But I actually enjoyed going back to the previous puzzles, substituting the alternate clues/answers, seeing how that affected their meta answers, and bringing those back to the current puzzle. Very fun! (And unique.)

Of course, as I think someone already said, Joon was the hero of this puzzle as crosswordfiend.com was indispensable for solving it. Never would I have wanted to complete and solve 7 meta-puzzles to get the point where I could solve this one!

I also thought the title cutely apropos, given how it describes both the metanism--the changed clues rippling through the previous puzzles to affect the current one--and the answer--given the 'butterfly effect' starts with the flab of a butterfly's wings. (Though the origin of the term "flapper" as used to describe a specific sub-cultural of women in America has a few potential origins, one theory apparently includes the use as applied to a dancer who flaps her arms like a bird (as opposed to a butterfly) while doing the Charleston.)

Now I will hope for only easy puzzles for a little while...

[KayW]

My 2 cents. Giving the date (month and year) in the clues made it too open-ended. Simply including the MGWCC number would have been kinder.

That certainly would have been helpful. When I got clued in about the dates, I searched the phrase and added MGWCC - took me right to puzzles, but I never would have got that far without help. Maybe that would have made it too easy?

I wonder if long-time MGWCC solvers remembered any of these clues? That certainly would have helped, but I tend not to remember clues from one puzzle to the next, so maybe there's no advantage. A stunning puzzle in the end...at least I still feel stunned anyway.

While I didn't recognize any specific clues from those metas, EIFFEL TOWER is what first tripped it for me. I remembered there was a meta where famous buildings spelled out MATH, and that EIFFEL TOWER was the A and SPACESHIP EARTH would make a perfect O.

I submitted solo with an 86% solution. I came up with FLAAPER because I thought HANDLES mapped to ATS (TAGS ON TWITTER). I'd never heard of HANDLE as a liquor bottle size and didn't think to look it up. And ATS seemed more apt to me than POSTAL, the only "valid" P-word I could find in the grid. But FLAPPER fit the title so perfectly I knew it couldn't be anything else. I thought maybe you had to apply the metanism one final time and change one letter in the step-1 answer to get the solution. (After I submitted, I checked with a more smarter muggle who pointed me in the correct direction on that last entry.)

And at first I grumbled about having to hunt through so many metas based solely on the month and year. But as a more recent subscriber to MGWCC, I kind of appreciated the forced opportunity to peruse some of his older puzzles. Well anyway, I did AFTER I recovered from all that searching. An amazing construction.

[Guffman]

My 2 cents. Giving the date (month and year) in the clues made it too open-ended. Simply including the MGWCC number would have been kinder.

I agree 100%. Trying to decipher the meaning of the dates + the research necessary to identify the puzzle #s became tedious. After that, the sprint to the meta was fascinating and (dare I say it) fun.

[JennyByrd]

I have a hard time when the puzzles are late to be posted, as my employer would prefer I actually do work during the week rather than stare at crosswords for hours on end. That said, Matt could have made the deadline to be the next spring equinox and I would have never, ever gotten this one. Agree that it is an amazing construction.

[Katiedid]

Amazing puzzle. It would have been fun to go from I GET LONELY through JELLO to the letter F, but then to have to repeat that process 6 more times! Yikes! No wonder people were saying it was a lot of work. Maybe it's a good thing I never got started on it this week.

[MountainManZach]

I mostly disagree that is was too hard without specifically referencing that it was MGWCC (or giving the numbers). The clues were clearly referencing other crossword clues, some of which are functionally impossible to solve without crosses. This heavily suggests that there's a way to narrow the search... and MGWCC is the only set of puzzles that Paolo could assume solvers had some familiarity with.

I also didn't find the search to be all that tedious, even though I did have to look up every single one. Matt's site is actually pretty easy to search if you have the month and year. (xwordcontest.com/YYYY/M, then go back a few as needed) If you tried that for all the dates, one would even directly land you in the right spot: https://xwordcontest.com/2011/6 I did also use crosswordfiend, which is again easily searchable w/ 'MGWCC #XXX'

That said, I understand some of the dissatisfaction, but my sense is the bigger factors were 1) guest constructor - and hence guest cluer, 2) bigger than usual grid with a multitude of 3-letter nearly nonsense answers, and 3) the release time limiting weekend mode brain work.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

[HeadinHome]

I submitted solo with an 86% solution. I came up with FLAAPER because I thought HANDLES mapped to ATS (TAGS ON TWITTER). I'd never heard of HANDLE as a liquor bottle size and didn't think to look it up. And ATS seemed more apt to me than POSTAL, the only "valid" P-word I could find in the grid. But FLAPPER fit the title so perfectly I knew it couldn't be anything else. I thought maybe you had to apply the metanism one final time and change one letter in the step-1 answer to get the solution. (After I submitted, I checked with a more smarter muggle who pointed me in the correct direction on that last entry.)

Exactly my problem (ATS for TAGS); I had never heard of a handle referring to a liquor bottle (grew up in a teetotaler culture) and ATS fit that clue so perfectly. I knew the answer had to be FLAPPER not FLAAPER, but only a discussion with another solver led me to abandon ATS and find the correct P-word.

r.e. the mechanism — the use of the old puzzles — did seem to me to favor people who tend to remember old clues/answers (not I) and have been doing these MG’s for a while. I have been doing MG’s for maybe 2 years (?) but I only figured out what to do with the dates by thought process, not memory of the clues: “he’s referring to cluing and giving dates… is it possible he’s referring to old Gaffney puzzles??”. For a while I feared I would have to go back and download all the puzzles in the given month to find the clues (which I made a start at, doing the first two, and that did seem ridiculously tedious). I also seriously worried as I was downloading them that I was going to have to SOLVE each of the relative puzzles (so, do 7 metas this week instead of 1??), but early on I noticed one of the clues appeared in the weekly write-up and realized he was using only clues that would appear in those, so they could be googled or at least found by flipping from week to week on the main page, and no downloading or puzzle solving involved.

I must say, I enjoyed seeing that Eiffel Tower one again… it was one of my earliest Gaffneys and the aha moment on that one was just splendid. I got to the aha on that one because I sketch a lot, and I had sketched each of the buildings in the margins (initially thinking the one that looks like an elephant was leading to animals related to all of them… nope). The sketches soon brought letters to mind… like that brilliant moment in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World when they see those palm trees at the end that form a W.

[boharr]

^ The Fiend is your Friend.

[DrTom]

Any of my gripes about the puzzle really echo other posters. HANDLES was really out of my knowledge base, though I have purchased a few of them, and @ as a Twitter handle was a VERY good fit. TWINE got me to LACES not PEANUTS and I completely messed up the R, ending up with SRMILE and then looked for a Jim Ryun type clue. Even when someone explained to me the R became the LAST letter I went for TEEHEES or SVEN (if you've seen Frozen you know why). It took so many back and forths to get me there I could not submit. It was also, for me, difficult because the letters were not in order so I could not back-solve. Yes I know people will say "but they were", however the entire puzzle had been based on the effect a previous change had on the current puzzle, so it seemed uncharacteristic that I should go with the previous puzzle(s) placement(s), thus I thought I might have a letter wrong but I needed to anagram to get it and I though that inelegant when everything else had worked the way it "should" be.

As for recognizing what the Mx was, I actually caught onto that by virtue of the fact that the Eiffel Tower one had made me comment and send in a picture since I was in Paris at the time and when I looked from our vantage point I saw the top (a capital I) and did not think of the whole thing (a capital A). Therefore that was actually the "easy" part for me. at first with J and O I thought it was going to be one replacement letter from each, and of course it was but only as a starting point.

I will say though that everyone looking back at MGWCC and Fiend is certainly an approach, but actually if you type the second clue, for instance "Chocolate company known for ovoid products crossword clue" into Google the first thing that pops up on my computer is: MGWCC #743 | Diary of a Crossword Fiend which gives me a link directly to the puzzle in Fiend, no dates needed.

So, superb bit of construction, intriguing mechanism but enough HUGE red herrings and odd clues (yeah I know, who am I to talk) that it will not go down as one of my favorites. Still, props to Paolo for having the idea and the talent to produce this, and I do wish I had gotten that last little tie-in.

EDIT: I just found out that one of my critiques of the puzzle was a problem of my own making. Although the letters were not in GRID order (you get FRLPEAP) that way, they ARE in clue order. Perhaps if I tried that I would have been more successful. So I apologize to Paolo, nothing worng with your puzzle just in my solving constraints.

TB