A place to discuss the weekly Wall Street Journal Crossword Puzzle Contest, starting every Thursday around 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. Please do not post any answers or hints before the contest deadline which is midnight Sunday Eastern time.
mydogsam wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 1:51 am
I found the answer ACTOR but never solved the letters using the META in the solution. Every rabbit hole I went down led to nowhere. So I finally looked at the the theme and the last across answer SEX (which is often the location in the puzzle where a hint is given that your answer is on the right track). I then concentrated on the title FILM EDITING and WORD RELATED TO MOVIES. I also assumed like many puzzles (Lunar New Year, Betty White, etc. that the theme may be timely. So I was trying to figure out what was timely about the movies and I realized (from watching Turner Classic Movies of 31 days of Oscar this month that the Oscars are occurring this coming weekend. So I thought the answer must be OSCARS. But when I saw OSCARS as the answer to 54 DOWN, I knew that answer would be too obvious to be the answer. So then by putting SEX and OSCARS together I realized that there are only four catagories in the Oscars related to sex. Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. So after looking at the four long across answers and the middle answer that the answer was probably five letters. But I really fought myself over this assumption as the letter count was a big leap. But after I looked up an article on who won the most Oscars it mentioned Katherine Hepburn and referred to her as an ACTOR and not an ACTRESS. So that's what sold me on ACTOR.
Hey, whatever works! Though I have to say, reading your path the following comes to mind :
NUDGES!I am always willing to give nudges where needed; metas should be about fun, not frustration. Send me what you have done so far because often you are closer than you think!
I was also in the 'why not use 'LONGTIMEAGO for ARGO' crowd to get the R. Well, whatever. Streak stands at 7.
So many rabbit holes for me. The double letters in 3 of the 4 long across answers kept me busy for a while. IRE and ICE being near each other in the NW had me playing with LAND. GOOSELIVER having both GOO and LIV (other grid answers) and editing those out giving SEER seemed too promising to be true - but the only other grid answer with a hint of that was BLONDEVENUS and NUS. And, of course, playing with all the answers in the movie-related clues, including 1) using a subset of those with Best Picture associations, or 2) using those in the 'actor-name of movie-name' format.
Ironically, my AHA involved ARGO! There are four boxes in the NE that look like:
AG
RO
Seeing that and noticing the Best Picture clue, I began looking for other 4-lettter Best Picture winners, which caused me to specifically look for CODA, which led me to ATLANTICCOD and the rest is history.
In my first post declaring myself on the ship (before the eventual solve), I said that I thought being a movie fanatic would be a disadvantage here; that turned out not to be true. Knowing Best Picture winners off the top of my head is probably how I noticed CODA in my eventual solve.
Phew! On to next week - which, if successful, ties my personal best streak - but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Looking forward to official opening night of Boswords tonight! I'll see any other participants there!
OMG! I found that answer in about 5 minutes and rejected it because CRASH twice. I spent hours on this #&#&#-# puzzle. Finally I submitted ACTOR as my best guess. I was so sure that the near anagramming of ATLANTICCOD for TITANIC and DIAPERRASH for PARASITE was they key.
Yep - confirms my choice not to spend any more time on this. I also got fixated on BIG, and though (O)liver crossed my mind, I was completely unaware of CODA and MARTY as names of films, so I never would have seen this. Doubling CRASH would have cause me to abandon that mech. anyway. Everybody has an “off” day and less-than-expected performance… we still love ya, Shenk!!
benchen71 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 12:11 am
Why repeat CRASH? Surely something could have been done with ARGO. For example, LONGTIMEAGO would fit in 60 across (clue: "A ___ in a galaxy far, far, away...."). It would mean moving the meta hint from 54 down to 69 across (changing it to OSCARS). But that would have worked fine!
(4letterword)CHICAGO would have given you the same effect, plus keep the C intact for the needed OSCAR down entry/metanism hint.
Count me in the "glad I didn't spend more time on that" crowd. I've only heard of one of those five (scratch that, four!) films and never in a million years would have gotten there. Like many, I presume, I was deep in the "[actor's name] of [film]" rabbit hole. Seeing SEX at 71-across made me realize that "Film" starts with an F and ends with an M, so I tried finding the opposite-gender leads from each of those films (which was not easy to do!). I actually came close to getting on the right track when I connected DIGITAL CASH to REESE Witherspoon in "Walk the Line" about Johnny Cash, but I had a much harder time connecting other theme answers to anything useful— who wants to watch a film about DIAPER RASH?
Well the shore I came to was not the right one even though I used the same idea. But what a rabbit hole it was!
My first thought was ATLANTICCOD was a near anagram of TITANIC if you swap one letter. I started with the list of Oscar winners and found PARASITE, CRASH, MARTY, GIGI, and whole host of others totaling 8 which is number of clues formatted as ““name” of Movie” so 8 seemed promising. I had decided to check all entries since the anagram and swap on letter worked out a lot (maybe this should have been a hint it was wrong but everyone was posting the puzzle was a bit off so I went with it). It especially worked out a lot for CODA, ARGO, and CRASH. I checked the clues again and noticed Across clue film (a title word) that Warren Beatty won AA for best director. And viola, it took out those three answers and my long themes could only be anagramed + letter changed to 1 answer. I had a few other duplicates but when I used the across ones only the letters I changed could be made to spell ENLARGED.
Did I think it was suspect? Sure but you enlarge stuff in film editing and movie are on a large screen and I had spend a whole day getting there so I went with it. I might have caught on without the double crash. I found it first in DIGITALCASH and didn’t go looking for it again and therefore couldn’t see there was always a movie at the end.
Any limitation of "theme entry should have two words only" should not be the reason to duplicate a theme entry. One of the other entries could have had more than two words if there was a need to balance AGO.
He could have had “long ago” that’s two words!
My first thought was to “edit” i.e. “cut” the long themers to find Best Picture Winners.
Atlanticcod had TITANTIC in it except for an I
Diaperrash had CRASH except for C
BIGMARY had ARGO except for O
Gooseliver had OLIVER except for *nothing*?
Digitalcash had GLADIATOR except for OR
Clearly this was a rabbit hole but I thought I was close! Then I got on the very end of the Zoom call and heard something about “adding a letter” and that “CRASH” was used twice. So I WAS close but needed to “add” not “subtract” letters. But I agree, it would have been better to use ARGO !
I’ve been on team Mike all the way. It’s his party and he can make us cry if he wants to.
CRASH got 2 academy awards that make it ok to get 2 spots in this meta
Mister Squawk wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 4:20 am
OMG! I found that answer in about 5 minutes and rejected it because CRASH twice. I spent hours on this #&#&#-# puzzle. Finally I submitted ACTOR as my best guess. I was so sure that the near anagramming of ATLANTICCOD for TITANIC and DIAPERRASH for PARASITE was they key.
Yup. Crash twice was a killer. Never even submitted. Not in a million years did I think he’d do that.
My totally baseless guess is that Mike started off with something else in that last theme entry, like AGO->Argo, and then late in the editing process decided he needed to include Oscar to narrow down the possibilities, so he reworked just that section of the grid and forgot he'd already used Crash above.
If you want help with a meta, feel free to PM me. The more specific you are about what you have and what you want, the more likely I can help without spoiling.
(And if I help you win a mug, I’ll be especially delighted.)
I almost rejected CRASH being repeated. But, with lack of a better solution, I told myself that the plethora of double letters in the grid answers was meant as a hint to repeat(?) Also, the repeating letters in the down answers, in order, spell CLONE. I may have been reaching. But, it worked for me.
Jace54 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:18 am
From reading the comments, it appears that many have never seen Marty. I highly recommend it, great movie!
@Jace54 Not only have I never seen Marty but I have never seen any of the five movies and had never heard of any of them except for Coda from crosswords and Oliver from the distant past. I knew I was doomed from the start.
I relearned, the hard way, to make a list of all BEST PICTURES (or fill-in-the-winner/nomination category) for film, stage, television, music, Nobel, etc.
My eidetic memory has been on the fritz for the last 6+ decades. I find no shame in interwebbing these things. Pity it takes me hours to realize this, sometimes.
:
