"Interior Design" January 13, 2023

[Joe Ross]

*A* Fifth Beatle?

("Fifth" isn't relevent, but "Beatle" is, per clue 56A First name in the Beatles.)

[woozy]

STU SUTCLIFFE certainly is a recognizable name to those who care about such things.

My main complaint would be that a mechanism finding a string of letters between initial letters isn't really accurately described as "interior". At least it doesn't really sit well with me. To try such an arbitrary thing should require another type of hint-- I'm just not sure what it would be.

I didn't submit.

[woozy]

I cannot believe that 39A's inner letters being an anagram of "A NARWHAL WHALE" or "NARWHAL WHALER" if you change just one letter to W was completely irrelevant! What are the chances?!

I am dead.

But... that would have been true even it weren't an entry in a crossword.

I'm afraid unintentional coincidences like that a fairly common.

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

This one had a lot of diversions, between "Get A Room" sounding like an instruction to go with Interior Design, baths and sliding doors, and then ELS right in the grid center where ELL is often used in crosswords as the wing of a building, and even INOIL, INIGO, and RINGO giving us various "INs".

I'm just thankful that Matt Gaffney ordered the five theme answers and their ten words in (nearly) alphabetical order. Otherwise I would never have noticed the relationship between the leading letters. As it was, I only noticed when my eyes were off the grid and all its distractions and I just had the theme answers running through my head.

[Mister Squawk]

Didn't get it. Spent a lot of time in this rabbit hole:

• Three people won an Academy Award for "It Happened One Night." Clark Gable, Frank Capra, and Claudette Colbert. FRANK CAPRA same number of letters as CLARK GABLE.
  Three prime ministers died in office in 1964: Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Jigme Palden Dorji (Bhutan), Milton Margai( Sierra Leone). If you squint, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU and JIGME PALDEN DORJI have the same number of letters.
  Among the other fitting answers to Game of Pool? is EIGHT BALL (same number of letters as MARCO POLO)
  Pickles are frequently held by TOOTH PICKS

And so on...

[CallMeShane]

Look up the definition of "Kas 5".

Behold "Interior Design".

[pjc]

Big NOPE over here. The closest I came to the solution was noticing that there were two words in each numbered answer

I did try looking for the initials of those words as entries into other clues/answers, but got nowhere (obviously).

I did stare at ETYM because of its grid position, thinking that might be trying to tell me something about the numbered clues, but that didn't provide any fruit either.

Oh, well; my personal best winning streak is broken and I'm starting the OTHER kind of streak!

[Joey Avocado]

Our rabbit hole

5 words close to the grid answers, just one letter off from other entries

Marco - a room
Gable - angel
Jars - rasp
Rift - Rita
Nehru - Heron

Put the changed letters in order and you get “onpao”, a meaningless word. We were hoping there was a Onpao School of Design out there…

The coincidence of all 5 having another word one letter off made for a very deep rabbit hole.

There goes our perfect year. Congrats to the solvers.

[mbryant]

STU SUTCLIFFE certainly is a recognizable name to those who care about such things.

My main complaint would be that a mechanism finding a string of letters between initial letters isn't really accurately described as "interior". At least it doesn't really sit well with me. To try such an arbitrary thing should require another type of hint-- I'm just not sure what it would be.

I didn't submit.

It might have helped to see “ABC” for 1D but I doubt even that would have gotten me there. Looking forward to Thursday.

[Ergcat]

I chose the answer EARTH instead of HEART... I even assumed it wasn't HATER ... Sheesh....

Matt gave us those numbers in parentheses to indicate the order of the 5 letters in the meta answer.

Early on, I tried the alphabet thing but I tried it in the “interior” of the long themers, i.e. BETWEEN the words. So for “RIFT VALLEY” I got “t U v”! Aha, got my first letter…. This must be the path!!
“MARCO POLO” gave me “o- p” ….. oops, doesn’t work. So I abandoned that idea.

[clonefitz]

Very clever Mr Gaffney! I am kicking myself for not getting this. Even after reviewing last year's misses and coming across "Inner Turmoil", the mechanism still did not jump out at me. Some of my rabbit holes:

The most desperate (and promising) was a back-solve of all four letter words in the grid where three of the letters were contained in the theme answers, in order of the parenthetical number in the clue:
1. MARCOPOLO - RASP - S
2. CLARKGABLE - KTEL - T
3. GLASSJARS - ELSA - E,
4. RIFTVALLEY - ETYM - M
5. JAWAHARLALNEHRU - USER - S
Yielding STEMS (The "interior" of a flower?). Just could not come up with the needed step one.

Others were alternate answers to the theme clues with missing letters: CLARKGABLE - CAPRA - P, RIFTVALLEY - FLAT - L, MARCOPOLO - CAROM (oops, no missing letters). Like Mister Squawk, I also found DORJI and MARGAI, but to no avail. Also found ARP in MARCOPOLO, which needed an S to get RASP. Is ARP an interior designer, and are there others in the theme clues? Could not make that work either.

Also, noticed the "AHA" in the long theme answer. Thought that was funny.

[Dplass]

I got the interior letters but couldn't see what to do with them. Never having heard of that Stu guy (I'm 54 ftr) I'm glad I gave up when I did. Wouldn't have gotten DEF / ETYM either.

[KscX]

It was a no, nay, never for me! Even after getting my sea legs at last call I STILL had to backsolve a little. 🫤 Much as I love these metas, I’m not even sure I want to put this mechanism in the bag of tricks!!! Many thanks to those on the zoom call who keep us all going through these rabbit hole weeks.

[Colin]

Kudos to the Solvers! Metanisms are many, varied, hybrid, pure, direct, indirect, easy and hard… often all at the same time! Keeps us coming back. I just need to get better at remembering more of the micro-meta components.Didn’t even think to look for alphabetic sequences this time, even though we’ve seen that a few times before. Onwards!

[phykos]

I saw that the theme entries were each two words, whose first letters were in alphabetic order, with not too many letters between, wrote down the ‘interior’ letters, and never noticed their significance. Instead, I took one letter from each group and got ODIUM, which was probably not the answer, but it matched my mood…

[KayW]

As a 63 year-old rabid Beatle fan then and now I was lucky to immediately grok STU/RINGO but wondered how easy that would be to figure out for young whippersnappers. I imagined there might be quite a bit of back-solving on that one.

It took me longer than I’d like to pay attention to the initials of the theme entries but as soon as I did I noticed how close they were alphabetically.

And I do remember a similar metanism somewhere before, tho I can’t remember where or when.

[CPJohnson]

As a 63 year-old rabid Beatle fan then and now I was lucky to immediately grok STU/RINGO but wondered how easy that would be to figure out for young whippersnappers. I imagined there might be quite a bit of back-solving on that one.

It took me longer than I’d like to pay attention to the initials of the theme entries but as soon as I did I noticed how close they were alphabetically.

And I do remember a similar metanism somewhere before, tho I can’t remember where or when.

It was the 4-8-22 puzzle, Inner Turmoil, as noted by @clonefitz in post #251. (There may be others.) Wish I had remembered it. Matt need not worry about using previous metanisms helping ME to solve; if they weren't used in the last month, I'm not likely to remember them.

[femullen]

As usual, I went googly-eyed for the first shiny object I saw, which was that Jawaharlal Nehru contains the "interior" sequence HARLAL, which becomes 24D HALAL on removal of the R. Voila, the 5th letter. That was the only letter I got, and it was wrong. On seeing the mechanism this morning, it was clear that this was a never-gonna-happen anyway. (Stu who?)

So far in 2023, perfect record.

[chriscross]

This one was very hard until you see it.y first rabbit hole was HARLAL/HALAL. No way that could be a coincidence right? I’ve learned anything can be a coincidence from a puzzle that used google street view across an entire city. But that doesn’t make it any easier to let go of rabbit holes.

I was stuck on interior letters for a while. Eg for ClarkGable i looked at KG, expecting to have to fill something in the middle. When I finally wrote down initials, I think it was JN and MP that made me realize what I was looking at. Alphabetical order didn’t help me, because I wrote the theme answers in order of their parenthetical numbers and was using that to solve, not the grid.

Oh, and I expressed a little uncertainty. That came from KLM and Stu. Never heard of either of them before. They certainly fit and produced an answer. But the grid was full of proper names this week, and everything about the meta was pretty generic (ie no hints about what kind of word the answer was, very vague name for the title). So I wasn’t willing to say I was 100% on the answer despite thinking the metanism had to be correct.

[mattythewsjpuzzler]

I am happy I was away all week and didn't have to face this one!