"It's Not You, It's Me"

[ajk]

Got it the second time, after some google work. Thanks.

[Al Sisti]

A few more additions to the leaderboard:

25 HeadinHome
26 Jaclyn
27 heidi
28 ajk
29 Alvibu67

And now for the promised nudges:

There’s nothing more to find in the grid once you get the first name… Those “of a certain age” may put that name and the metanism together to come up with a song title, and its composer and singer is your answer

For those of you who are not in that age group, Google can help. Search for what you know and any notions you might have. You’ll know when you’ve got the right song, and hence the right singer/songwriter

There are some Easter eggs in the clues that are consistent with the title and the metanism. They’re more for corroboration than helping with the answer

Okay, so a few of you might not have been around when this song was a #1 hit… but you might well have been, when it became a #1 hit again, 13 years later… for the same artist

[edestlin]

Off the couch. Thanks, Al!

[Cinny]

Solved last night, pre-nudges. Great meta! Thanks, Al.

[minimuggle]

Finally got it. Thanks for the puzzle and the nudge

[MatthewL]

Finally off the couch for sure this time. Can't believe I missed it the first time.

[benchen71]

Nudges helped me off the couch! Thanks for the puzzle, Al.

[JeanneC]

Ooh. This took too long for me but I believe I have rolled off the couch. A really fun puzzle but now it’s too late to make dinner. What a great excuse for ordering Chinese food!

[Jade]

After a very confident wrong answer pre-nudges, got the right one after reading them. Great puzzle, thanks!

[rjy]

Must be the holidays… took me to Thursday to get off the freakin’ couch! Like @Jade, I had a very confident and yet very wrong answer, after rooting around in inescapable rabbit holes filled with quicksand.

Thanks Al! Happy Metaversary!

[Ergcat]

Off the couch!!
(Took me longer than it should have … misinterpreted something which led me deep into google-land. )

[TeamDoubleTow]

We needed the nudges and even so it was after the 3rd guess that we finally understood the answer.

[Al Sisti]

Friday morning leaderboard update -- please let me know if I missed you (at Christmas time I miss you most of all).

30 Cindy Heisler
31 edestlin
32 FrankieHeck
33 BarbaraK
34 minimuggle
35 BrennerTJ
36 DIS
37 DebbieC
38 wendy walker
39 Laura M
40 Teamdoubletow
41 Jim Dean
42 rjy
43 Richard
44 Ergcat
45 ReB
46 MatthewL
47 JeanneC 
48 LindaPRmaven
49 benchen71

[CPJohnson]

Got it, finally, with the nudges and some help from @Cinny. Thanks for the puzzle, Al, and Merry Christmas to you and yours!

[Al Sisti]

Got it, finally, with the nudges and some help from @Cinny. Thanks for the puzzle, Al, and Merry Christmas to you and yours!

And the same and more to you...

[Al Sisti]

Well hello, Muggles! It’s time for this week’s reveal. We’re told we’re looking for a singer/songwriter, but not much else. So where to go, where to go?

Guided by the clue at 54D (“Delivery company, and a hint to solving this meta”), most of you found the letters U and P in all four symmetrical long acrosses, separated by one letter, and you collected up the letters N, E, I and L in between them… and I was sure that once you did that, you’d see that the metanism was (literally) “breaking UP,” and hence, the Neil you were looking for was Neil Sedaka, whose signature song was "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do." And even if some of you weren’t around then (you know who you are), Googling “Neil Breaking up” would have given you the “aha” (and it was further corroborated by the title, which – yes -- I have actually been told at least a couple times).

That’s what I assumed would happen. But oh, how wrong I was. In retrospect, I maybe should have tried to use three more U-P entries, and spelled out SEDAKA, because there were two other valid candidate Neils that people found... and preferred (possibly still).

Neil Diamond was actually the most-submitted answer, after a few solvers (giving me far more credit than I have earned) noticed that the letters N-E-I-L, when connected, formed a diamond. That actually, would have been a great metanism, and though “Diamond” was corroborated by a clue referencing the Mohs scale, and had a coincidental connection to the title with the Monkees’ song he wrote, “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” it really had nothing to do with the U_P trick. Great answer… but not what I was looking for.

With less rationale, some people thought I was looking for Neil Young, primarily based on the fact that that’s the “Neil” I would have most closely identified with. They would be correct – Neil Sedaka was always a little nerdy to me, and it still creeps me out that Neil Diamond would have written “Sweet Caroline” about Caroline Kennedy, with the lines “Reaching out… touching you, touching me” (she was 11 years old when he wrote it)… plus there’s the Red Sox thing. “Bum bum bum.” Oy.

So yeah, the answer was Neil Sedaka, who actually had two stints at #1 with this song; once in 1962 (and one Muggle noted that it was interesting that the metanism keyed on “Ups,” since that version starts out with “Down doobie do Down Down”!), and again 1975, with a much slower, sweeter version (here).

Okay, enough talk. The winner of either a Utica Club keepsake, or a Blarney Rebel Band CD, or $15 donation to any charity – randomly picked from our 54 solvers – is Heidi Birker. Congrats, Heidi, and let me know what prize you want…

I’ll be back with a new meta on January 16th. In the meantime, please accept my most heartfelt wishes for a very happy, healthy and peaceful Christmas!!

[dsbened]

Do you post the completed grid solution? I want to verify my answers. Thx!

[KayW]

Do you post the completed grid solution? I want to verify my answers. Thx!

Grid entries are verified if you complete the puzzle on Crosshare:

It's Not You, It's Me crosshare

It will tell you if you've completed the grid correctly or not as soon as you complete the grid. And you can click to reveal any squares that might have you stumped - or even the entire puzzle. But what fun is THAT?

You can also submit meta guesses there - early and as often as you like, there's no penalty for wrong guesses. Plus once you submit the correct meta answer on Crosshare, you can see comments other users have entered there or make your own. It's ok to discuss the solution there because you have to enter the correct meta answer in order to see any of the comments.


But if you don't want to do that, here's my grid: