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.
Got it! Just under the wire. Thanks to everyone saying how easy it was, we realized we were over-thinking it. Whoo hoo! H will have a Raspberry Lime Rickey, and J will have a glass of Iced Matcha.
Busy weekend, so when I didn't get it immediately I set it aside until late tonight. Took another look, made it to the mechanism after a few rabbit trails.
Sometimes there's a reason you keep going back to one thing over and over again, no matter what else you might look at. Duh. On shore - where I should have been when I finished the grid Friday night.
On the beach with a last minute solo solve. MANY rabbit holes in this one. Never heard of the one piece I was missing, but I knew, at that point, what the meta answer had to be.
I suspected that the down clues with "Irish" as the first word descriptor was a hint to a mechanism. Going back to the grid gave me KLM (E), KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and former CEO, Pieter Elbers. That led me 5D AER LINGUS and CEO, Lynne Embleton. But, alas, I couldn't get that to fly.
Don & Cynthia
We are always happy to get to know other muggles and help in any way! PM's are always welcome. The next best thing to winning a mug is helping a fellow muggle win a mug!
GREAT SCHISM was the Aha clue for me.
I knew of the Schism from the game Crusader Kings 2.
And I knew of Schist from Dwarf Fortress, a video game that was in the first bath of games honored by MOMA as art. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... Modern_Art)
A few years ago, I read this book featuring 60 poems by Yeats. The poems were paired with paintings by Irish artists. It was a beautiful book, both poetically and visually.
Remained on board (and unaccounted for). I was looking for sham rocks as the title suggested, and the closest I got was a sham pumice-labmice connection.
My short-lived rabbit hole was considering the Irish-related Down clues. I finally said to myself: "Oh, wait - what was the title of this puzzle again?" And that immediately led me to RUBS -> RUBY. And the next two quickly fell - so the answer HAD to be YEATS. I had to back-solve the last two letters (with a short "what the heck is a WHALS?" detour).