MGWCC #780 — “Spare Parts”

[JonJonBovi]

Sigh… also requesting a nudge. Also feel I know the first step but… nothing.

[Joe Ross]

Beamed.

Peor que ser golpeado con una bolsa de naranjas. oof

NOT solo, but did a majority of the work after a couple hours of co-solving effort.

HUGE respect for solo solvers!

[Orsys]

Hi, I would greatly appreciate a nudge. I am stumped by a week 2!

Edit: Got it with a little help from my friends. Week 2?

[minimuggle]

Far from a solo but thanks to Wendy's nudge I am beamed. Thank you so much for the help and the offers of help. Never ever ever would have gotten this one.

[KayW]

Whew. On the board, thanks to a course correction from Wendy.

[Joe Ross]

This was a very tough puzzle. I'd be glad to review detailed PMs of solvers' progress, mainly hoping that their putting together what they have, so far, will allow them to see the path.

I won't reveal the answer but ask questions about what solvers see to allow them to progress.

[JonJonBovi]

I think I got it, without a nudge. One of those random "maybe I should try this" kind of insights. Definitely harder then the usual Week 2.

[DrTom]

Whew, made it to the end with considerable help. I had a lot of it, but not all, and I faltered in the home stretch. I have some SERIOUS, "Grrrs" about this one after finding way too many gleaming, glowing, bright crimson herrings. I'd bet I'm not the only one. More after the reveal of course. Despite those the mechanism was inspired if a little laborious. You can kind of see why this one was delayed a bit, but I certainly do not rate it a week 2.

EDIT: In at 178, but that should of course carry an asterisk since I got help along the way.

[MarkWoychick]

That was tough, and I got there with help from the intrepid @hcbirker. Hats off to all who got this solo and to all who persisted and got this by any means. If this is a week 2, I am not looking forward to weeks 3 and 4!

[Katiedid]

OK, I think I got it with a nudge from Meg. Whew! I'll enter it in the morning.

[burak]

I forgot that Mike's difficulty radar has been really off lately and started doing this tonight. ROFL LMAO indeed.

[Jeremy Smith]

I'm on the board with some help from a fellow muggle. Definitely not a week 2 puzzle. Kudos to those getting a solo solve on this!

[Bird Lives]

I think there's a stats/math joke that two plus two can actually equal five. . . for very large values of two. Needless to say, this Week 2 was in that category.

[BrennerTJ]

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I enjoyed this one, but that's only because I solved it with minimal frustration. I think that OHIO was the alternate I saw first, because it is all 2nd and 1st letters and because "West Virginia" was one of the longer grid entries, so I had spent some time looking at it.

I got LOON and OREO quickly enough, and then had to use Google to remember RAYA. But I had a hard time with the fifth alternate. TALK TO YOU LATER can also make TOUT, LOUT, TOUR, and TOOT. I was resistant to LOOT and TOOT because they used two letters that had already been used in KOOL, but I was mostly stymied by the clues. The other four themers had clues that were crying out for alternate entries, and I really disliked "Section of town" being AREA and wanted that to be an alternate, too. I could have been persuaded that "Look over quickly" fit TOUR, so I didn't immediately snap to "Go a-plundering" and LOOT. At this point I was hoping to back-solve.

But I didn't know what to do with the letters I was getting from these answers. I was sure that I would need to use the first letters that came from the other formed words, because these were the tricky ones to find, not the ones in the grid. So I had O O L R written at the top of my sheet, and that looked really close to LOL, LMAO, ROFL, ROFLCOPTER, or something else. I had also written G W C C at the top of my sheet, (directly below "Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest"), but I didn't make any connection there: 'What could GWCC be turned into? What Could George Carlin Do?'"

But eventually I decided that LOOT and MARAUD were the best match, and I added an L and an M to my letters at the top of the page, and then I immediately saw MGWCC! So then my thinking went: "Oh, wow, that's really clever of Matt to make the secondary matching answers spell out MGWCC! That's a great signpost to let us know that MARAUD is the correct fifth answer to pair with LOOT in a puzzle with so much ambiguity. So, now I know that LOOLR are the 'important' letters, what can I do with them?"

And I stared at LOOLR for a while, and wrote the alternate answers into a 5x4 grid, and looked at that for a while. And nothing. So I eventually considered that MGWCC might be the five letters we were looking for, but decided that would be way too simple. He has MGWCC on his post titles! It would be akin to breaking the rule where you aren't supposed to have a form of the answer in a crossword clue! So I resisted this for a long time until I took a step back and said, "Well it must be the answer, because anybody who sent in an answer of MGWCC would have a perfectly defensible mechanism, and Matt would have to do a whole lot of explaining if there was another level!". So I submitted MGWCC and prayed for the transporter beam!

[DrTom]

This one gave me fits, and only the assistance of others put me right. When ALL of the acronym entries were also actual words, and after trying to see if those words had alternate answers, I finally got to thinking, what if we are supposed to make new words. My first revelation was in DONNAKARENNEW YORK. If I had a dime for every time OREO was in a crossword grid I would have a sizeable sum. I also remembered thinking "what" when I was filling in CHIPS AHOY. My next was LOOT and then LOON, but there I stopped and REALLY struggled. Turns out YOUR MILEAGEMAY VARY yields REMY and I thought "Got You!" but of course "Ratatouille" was not 2021. Having found one Disney character and lost I never thought to look for another, particularly when I could get YEAR out of that and 1D was certainly a year, in another way. FWIW also yields OTTO, a bus driver on the Simpsons and of course a Springfield resident.

At any rate, good puzzle, though not one of my favorites. For me, way too much going on for a week 2 and way too many possibilities and red herrings, but a mechanism that we have not seem before.

[KayW]

I noticed KOOL/LAKE could be changed to TOOL/LATE. And stubbornly kept trying to find one-letter changes to the other theme entries even when they didn’t exist. I finally asked Wendy if that was on track and she knocked me out of that rabbit hole and onto the right path.

MGWCC was the answer to MGWCC. How meta is THAT?!

[rjy]

I knew I was on the right track with LOON (better answer than GOOSE for "Bird often associated with Canada") and OREO (vs CHIPSAHOY for "Beloved cookie brand"). LOOT sealed the deal ("Go a-plundering")

But I simply could not dislodge FAST (rather than OHIO) from FWIW. "It starts at sunup" seemed an odd clue for MORN, and a seemingly better clue for fasting, which is generally a sunup to sundown ritual.

Seems I was led astray by words intended to deceive!

[ricky]

I really didn't like this one for various reasons. I hit on the correct mechanism but there were so many alternate potential answers that I wasn't able to see the signal for the noise. And I've never heard of RAYA so the only word I was able to extract from DKNY that didn't use the 4 already used letters was DANK.

My list of potential answers

Rolling on floor laughing NORA 6152 alt roll goon Lori loon lofi Lola Nola
Your mileage may vary OMAR 2123 alt year rama olay
For what it's worth RASH 3335 alt fair oath fast
Talk to you later KOOL 3221 alt tool toot loot lout
Donna Karan new york NANO 3/4 2/4 12 alt dank

I also lost a lot of time messing around with the fact that the puzzle was called "Spare Parts" and many of the clues were extremely long. The clue for DUMAURIER is like 21 words long. I couldn't figure out why the clue for GENERALMILLS would mention "Kix and Wheat Chex" instead of just Kix and Chex. I guess there wasn't a reason.