"Long Road Ahead" May 19, 2023

[Ergcat]

Lovely day in Dublin…lovely time for a Guinness ! Highlight was the Guinness Storehouse tour! ! Sláinte, muggles!
(Regfish7 and Ergcat)

[mlvilv]

aagh! I had the right idea. I thought it had to do with filling in the blanks of the abbreviated streets but i never thought to look for the letters being mixed up. I was looking for them as letters in order and did not expand my mind enough to consider them mixed. Another trick in the bag to remember for later. On a bit of a dry streak, hoping this week will be better!

[DBMiller]

The random thoughts of DB:

Saw all the types of roads. Came up with several possible answers.

Sesame Street (Very likely due to 6 letters)
21 Jump Street
Route 66
Hill Street Blues
Streets of San Francisco
Night Court

The number ones might be interesting. I look at 21a, and figure skaters would do jumps, but doesn't seem likely. I count the number of dropped letters in HighWaY, BouLeVarD, LaNe, DRive, AVEnue, and CIRcle. Rats, only 20, not 21. Wouldn't that have made an interesting meta!

66d - USC. Isn't Los Angeles one end of Route 66? I see no Chicago connection and move on.

I connect BLVD to BLED, CIR to CIO, and AVE to AES but can't see much else. I see Menu, and connect to AVEnue, but don't see more... Wait NaL has two of LANE, and I have now confused dropped letters with kept letters, missing the AES connection! I see no 3-letter word with DR, and move on.

7d - Ice. Ice Road Truckers?

21d - Day. Night Court?

Penny is a character from The Big Bang Theory. Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple... 46a - Lemons? Jack Lemmon?

43d - DST. Della STreet? - Perry Mason?

In Friday's Zoom meeting, as I mention my travels down the Carefree Highway, my drop of the aveNUE/mENU connection is given a thumbs up.

Takes a while, trying to find to missing letters plus a letter in any order was surprisingly difficult. I finally spot HAGIA, and know this is the method. AROUSE, AES (duh!), and EVIE finally catch my eye. For some reason, ELEC was the hardest to see.

[RDaleHall]

Got the right meta answer… But the Eddy Grant fan in me was hoping that somehow ELEC AVE was going to be part of the solution. “And then we’ll take it higher…”

[MajordomoTom]

... that would have been "The Electric Company", if I recall.

[Tom Shea]

Immediately thought Sesame Street when I saw the puzzle. 6 letters, but not a long Street. Long running maybe.

Then thought long road? Must be Route 66, and it has 6s making the six clues sorta make sense.

Never even got around to throwing a hail Mary with either, and too busy to keep hunting for a mechanism, other than the obvious missing letters.

[The XWord Rabbit]

Why did the Muggle cross the road? To get to the meta, of course.

Mr. Gaffney’s “Long Road Ahead” puzzle had a few cul-de-sacs for solvers – much to the delight of your Rabbit.

Taking note of the abbreviations used in the six anchor entries was Step 1. Writing out the missing letters in each of those shortened roads was Step 2, but what to do with them? Look for other grid entries that contained those letters – plus one other -- of course! The IGHA missing in HIGHWAY was found in 49A. HAGIA. The OUEAR missing in BOULEVARD was found in 14A. AROUSE. And so forth. When all was said and done It became clear that the letters S-E-S-A-M-E were added, leading successful Muggles to a famous TV street that needed no further explanation.

Nominees? You betcha. An embarrassment of riches.

We have Dickie_Dunn (#284) who took a number of detours, removing some letters in the roads to find other grid entries and then made a desperate search for song titles instead of TV shows.

Then there’s Relic (#295) who took this marvelous path, earning a high five and the utmost respect from your Rabbit.

1. After being unable to do anything with the 6 theme entries -never thought of expanding the roadway abbreviations - I began looking for a hint in the clues.
2. 63A, Distances are measured from it, seemed promising. Off I went.
3. I abandoned the 6 theme answers and opted to go with 6 clues that listed city names: Phoenix, York, L.A., Beverly Hills, Istanbul,Baltimore.
4. I googled Distance from NYC to each of these cities.
5. I summed up the digits in the resulting miles, thinking 11D to be another crumb on the path.
6. I mapped the sum of these digits to that numbered box in the grid, and came up with the letters N S C O I N
7. NSCOIN, anagrams to NCIS NO, which is what I submitted despite knowing it would be wrong because I failed to find a logical path to rearrange the letters into the correct order.

And finally, we have Colin (#297) who methodically (and also numerically) laid out so many detours that not even the Highway Patrol had any hope of finding him.

The X-Word Rabbit is grateful beyond words for your responses this week as it's only the second time since he began reviewing your sorry tales that there have been three nominees. His hope has been renewed in the power of roads not taken. Amen, Muggles!

[Cindy N]

EDIT: no, they're not anagrams, they're just a bag of letters which is missing one letter to be an entry in the grid.

Umm...they need to be rearranged. That's an anagram.

I never said it wasn't a standard technique or hard to do. (I found it very easy). I said I found it ugly, clunky, and pointless.

I had really mixed feelings about this one. I loved the themes and the entries and the answer but I hated the mechanism.

No, they did not need to be rearranged, as pointed out in Joe's entry #291 just above yours. They are in grid order, top to bottom. There is no mechanism involved. Matt doesn't do puzzles like that.

[woozy]

EDIT: no, they're not anagrams, they're just a bag of letters which is missing one letter to be an entry in the grid.

Umm...they need to be rearranged. That's an anagram.

I never said it wasn't a standard technique or hard to do. (I found it very easy). I said I found it ugly, clunky, and pointless.

I had really mixed feelings about this one. I loved the themes and the entries and the answer but I hated the mechanism.

No, they did not need to be rearranged, as pointed out in Joe's entry #291 just above yours. They are in grid order, top to bottom. There is no mechanism involved. Matt doesn't do puzzles like that.

No. They have to be rearranged. (H)IGH(W)A(Y)=IGHA+A must be rearranged to HAGIA. And (B)OU{L)E(V)AR(D)=OUEAR+S must be rearranged to AROUSE, etc. There are six "bags of letters" which need a letter added. "Bags of letters" with no order must have a letter added and rearranged. I would consider putting a bag of letters in order to be anagramming.

[flossy]

my longtime meta puzzle solving partner really enjoyed this puzzle.
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