"Consider the Alternative" October 6, 2022

[BarbaraK]

I won the mug!!!!!

Yay! Another mugged muggle!

Congratulations!!

[Joe Ross]

I won the mug!!!!!

[M and M]

As Joe said the play is The Tempest, not Tempest, so it doesn't work. Secondly, as a tip for solving Matt's puzzles, Matt is too polished to give solvers a random group of letters to anagram for a solution. Almost always the letters composing the answer will be found in grid order. If you have to anagram to get your answer be very skeptical of what you have.

Agreed that Matt would not normally require that kind of anagram. However, the full name of Macbeth is "The Tragedie of Macbeth" and the full name of Othello is "Othello, the Moor of Venice" so using Tempest makes as much sense as using Othello. I think both answers should be accepted.

LOL, Othello is referred to as Othello; no one refer to The Tempest as Tempest.

No one except - oh, wait for it, I guess some people do:

https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/v ... /plays.php

Shakespeare's plays,
listed by genre
List plays by title + word count + speech count + date
COMEDIES
All's Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure
Merchant of Venice
Merry Wives of Windsor
Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado about Nothing
Taming of the Shrew
Tempest
Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Winter's Tale

[boharr]

Agreed that Matt would not normally require that kind of anagram. However, the full name of Macbeth is "The Tragedie of Macbeth" and the full name of Othello is "Othello, the Moor of Venice" so using Tempest makes as much sense as using Othello. I think both answers should be accepted.

LOL, Othello is referred to as Othello; no one refer to The Tempest as Tempest.

No one except - oh, wait for it, I guess some people do:

https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/v ... /plays.php

Shakespeare's plays,
listed by genre
List plays by title + word count + speech count + date
COMEDIES
All's Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure
Merchant of Venice
Merry Wives of Windsor
Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado about Nothing
Taming of the Shrew
Tempest
Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Winter's Tale

As Matt notes on Crossword Fiend, once you click on a link for a play the proper article is restored.

https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/v ... ID=tempest

[boharr]

And when they're not in grid order, they're in clue order.

Lesson: Beware anagramming unless clued or directed to do so.

Except when you're required to anagram because the only rule of Club Team is that there are no rules of Meta Club.

Or to quote Conrad from Crossword Fiend:

In my experience: anagramming for an answer is a pretty sure indicator that you’re in the wrong rabbit hole, unless anagramming is implied by the title or notes. If an anagram does work: I go back to the grid to find the intended order. I’ve done that successfully on a few recent MMMMs. If I don’t find any logical grid order (across then down, left to right, etc): I know I don’t have the answer.

[hoover]

And when they're not in grid order, they're in clue order.

Lesson: Beware anagramming unless clued or directed to do so.

Except when you're required to anagram because the only rule of Club Team is that there are no rules of Meta Club.

I see what you did there.

[hoover]

Waiting to see/hear, or did I miss it, how many entries and % correct. Sounds like a lot of people entered OTHERS. (Disclaimer: I didn't submit an answer because I never arrived at one.)

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is OPTION. In the six clues
that begin “One of...” there is exactly one alternate
answer that would fit: EISENHOWER, SATURDAY,
RHODE ISLAND, OCTOBER, OTHELLO, HARVARD.
Take the first letter of the answer plus the first
letter of the alternate to get the first two letters of
a three-letter grid answer, like WASHINGTON +
EISENHOWER = W-E-T. The others are: T-S-O,
C-R-O, J-O-N, M-O-P and C-H-I. The six final letters,
taken in grid order, spell the contest answer.

This was a super-hard one, right? Stumped us here at Contest HQ. We had 881 entries, with only 35% correct. A lot of discussion this week (here, the Crossword Fiend blog) on whether OTHERS was acceptable (initial letters of the alternatives with "Tempest" as the Shakespeare play). We had 344 entries with OTHERS, more than for the correct answer! (Also 75 for CHOOSE.) We tend to agree that OTHERS is a bit inelegant, that common usage is to refer to "Othello" (even if it has a longer name historically in some editions) and "The Tempest" but it's a nice guess on a tough week. In any event we did not have to adjudicate the matter because our randomly chosen entry had OPTION.

Congrats to this week's winner (see celebration above): Matthew Smyth of Far Hills, NJ!

[flyingMoose]

We had 881 entries, with only 35% correct.

A 4 in the olden days based on the rated metas of yore.

[BarbaraK]

Or to quote Conrad from Crossword Fiend:

In my experience: anagramming for an answer is a pretty sure indicator that you’re in the wrong rabbit hole, unless anagramming is implied by the title or notes. If an anagram does work: I go back to the grid to find the intended order. I’ve done that successfully on a few recent MMMMs. If I don’t find any logical grid order (across then down, left to right, etc): I know I don’t have the answer.

So true!!

@Conrad should put this on the Hints for Solving viewtopic.php?t=49 page

[Joe Ross]

Or to quote Conrad from Crossword Fiend:

In my experience: anagramming for an answer is a pretty sure indicator that you’re in the wrong rabbit hole, unless anagramming is implied by the title or notes. If an anagram does work: I go back to the grid to find the intended order. I’ve done that successfully on a few recent MMMMs. If I don’t find any logical grid order (across then down, left to right, etc): I know I don’t have the answer.

So true!!

@Conrad should put this on the Hints for Solving viewtopic.php?t=49 page

@howardl makes this point & @DBMiller suggests antiundisanagramming, then finding proper order, in the following post. Both make excellent points & great suggestions, along with @Conrad.

[The XWord Rabbit]

Your XWord Rabbit was certainly prophetic when he warned those who breezed through last week’s meta: “The difficulty of these puzzles has a way of evening out, so you know what that means come (next) Thursday afternoon.”

Six clues beginning with “One of the …” had alternative answers of the same length. Taken together, the start letters of each entry and its alternative could be found elsewhere in the grid, as the beginning of a 3-letter word. The final letters of those words, in order, spelled out the meta: OPTION.

But now it’s time to “Consider the Alternatives” and there were others… so many OTHERS…

Bill Bovard and Bonnibel were just two of a great many Muggles who used “Tempest” as an alternative for “Macbeth”, yielding ESOTRH as the start letters. This anagrammed to OTHERS, a solution that seemed logical enough. It also caused a ruckus, as the play is entitled “The Tempest”, not “Tempest.” Your Rabbit doesn’t intend to get into THAT argument and leaves it to other Muggles and their attorneys.

Further down the hole we find Hidden in 3D, BethA, Dplass and Colin who took the “ordinal positioning” route: Eisenhower being 34th of 46 Presidents, October the 10th of 12 months, and so on. It didn’t get them very far, of course, but it resulted in another fun romp through Wikipedia.

And now we come to our nominees, notable for their uniqueness, if nothing else. Hats off to LadyBird for finding alternatives within the grid itself, like so:

President = HOOVER, an alternative to 13D Floor cleaner: MOP
Day of the Week = SUNDAY, an alternative to 57D List closing: ETC
Month of the Year = MARCH, an alternative to 19A Walk with a hitch: LIMP
Play = TEMPEST, an alternative to 54A Rage: IRE
Ivy School = BROWN, an alternative to 22A Back to the Future Surname: McFLY
Stage = VERMONT, an alternative to 46A Cheese go-with: MAC
(Yes, that last one is certainly stretching it, but isn’t that what rabbit holes are all about?)

Put them all together and get MELIMM. Lovely!

Next, we have mheberlingx100, our second nominee:

I tried to find the logical next items in a series.

Washington—> Adams
Thursday—> Friday
January—> February
Macbeth—> Othello (next most recent tragedy)
Connecticut—> Rhode Island (next smallest state)
Cornell—> Dartmouth (next youngest Ivy)

Result was AFFORD. Admittedly, no relationship to the title, but at least it was a real word.


You Muggles may also take some comfort in knowing that The XWord Rabbit’s close personal friend, Guffman, struggled with the same rabbit hole as Bird Lives and MaineMarge, notably the appearance of the word “OR” in six across answers. Last time he checked “OR” was the definitive word for alternatives. Is no one safe from Mr. Gaffney’s tyranny? Until next week, then ...

[MikeM000]

Do any of the stat keepers know if this is the first time that a specific incorrect/alternate answer was more popular than the proper answer?

[TeaJenny]

And when they're not in grid order, they're in clue order.

Lesson: Beware anagramming unless clued or directed to do so.

Except when you're required to anagram because the only rule of Club Team is that there are no rules of Meta Club.

They're more like guidelines, anyway.

[BarbaraK]

Do any of the stat keepers know if this is the first time that a specific incorrect/alternate answer was more popular than the proper answer?

Certainly the infamous PAGEANT puzzle; only 13% got it right and the vast majority of the others submitted "bowl games".

Some recent ones with low percentages correct were:

04/22/22 Dude, Where's My Car - 30%
11/12/21 The Five W's - 33%
08/05/22 Power Play - 37%

But I don't recall if those had a single popular wrong answer or they were more scattered.

[HunterX]

We had 881 entries, with only 35% correct.

And yet I still couldn't win the mug. (grumblegrumblegrumble) At least a Muggle got it!

A lot of discussion this week (here, the Crossword Fiend blog) on whether OTHERS was acceptable (initial letters of the alternatives with "Tempest" as the Shakespeare play). We had 344 entries with OTHERS, more than for the correct answer! (Also 75 for CHOOSE.) We tend to agree that OTHERS is a bit inelegant, that common usage is to refer to "Othello" (even if it has a longer name historically in some editions) and "The Tempest" but it's a nice guess on a tough week. In any event we did not have to adjudicate the matter because our randomly chosen entry had OPTION.

I bet they are relieved that they didn't have to adjudicate that one! At least they considered it.

[Flying_Burrito]

I won the mug!!!!!

Yay! Another mugged muggle!

Congratulations!!

Double congrats since you were also on page 1

[Joe Ross]

I bet they are relieved that they didn't have to adjudicate that one! At least they considered it.

Not a chance.

What we got was lip service to calm the waters.

Read @MattGaffney's replies to THE OTHERS on crosswordfiend. He correctly and firmly defended OTHELLO & debunked THE TEMPEST. Matt may not be a part of the selection process, but there's no way @MikeMillerwsj & Mike Shenk are going to go against his emphatic & repeated objection to a bad answer.

[mattythewsjpuzzler]

I won the mug!!!!!

Yay! Another mugged muggle!

Congratulations!!

Double congrats since you were also on page 1

Thanks! Glad I didn't see all the rabbit holes others mentioned!

[MMe]

I bet they are relieved that they didn't have to adjudicate that one! At least they considered it.

Not a chance.

What we got was lip service to calm the waters.

Hee hee, they always seem to luck out and not have to adjudicate these controversies.