"Terrible Twos" -- Aug. 4, 2023

[woozy]

I might dislike red herrings but they are certainly fair and I don't see anything bad form about them. It's misdirection, inconsistent application or misdirecting that I object to (tossing in an anagram on the fifth entry when the first four were straight spellings.... grumble, grumble... and Maine is an eastern state... grumble...).

I don't think this inclusion of PIMA with PI DAY or the STIES with both STBASIL or ELM ST were unitentional (although CO-ST maybe was) but my jumping for to the conclusion that there must be something to portmanteauing elmSTbasil was actually only just there being two STs in the answer. I actually was surprised he didn't try a misdirection with HE or UP... so maybe STies and PIma were coincidences.

Did anyone for the PAIRED WITH and DYNAMIC DUO to be weirdly overly meta-meta. I've never had a meta spell things out to that degree. They distracted me but I quickly figured they couldn't contain anything useful. Just Shenk messing with us I guess.

[iggystan]

Failed miserably at both this and the MMMM puzzles. The solutions look easy when revealed, but the mounting frustration over the weekend is not fun when they don’t come. I’m sticking with regular crosswords and the variety puzzles from now on. Slightly better odds for someone here to win a mug.

[mheberlingx100]

The two longest across answers could be a red herring … or you could consider it a clue to focus on two letter portions of entries on the grid. It all depends on your point of view.

I originally included those entries while looking for the meta. It took a step back and a cup of coffee to see them as a guidepost and not part of the answer.

[DBMiller]

My free associations ran amok this week. Always happens when I don't see it right away. I didn't even write them all down. Many already mentioned, but this was how I worked through it...

So we have the title of "Terrible Twos", along with two long across entries: PAIRedwith and dynamicDUO. Lots of dualities to look for.

Let's start with 2-letter pairs. There are four across answers that have them: saPP, aDDsup, EEl, and aSSn. PEDS? Podiatrist?

Doesn't seem right. Let's add the down ones: ncAA, epEEs, miLLipedes, niSSan, and abySSinian. SPADELESS? Gardener? Poker Player?

"Terrible"... Let's look at near pairs: sapp/sap, lemans/leans, nyet/yet, celt/cel. PMNE... Nothing to see here.

"Terrible" as mispelled? CAR/ARC? Or Grid/Clue pairs (seat/eats). Zip, nada, zilch.

"Terrible Twos". Babies? Baby llama was a clue. Has LL in it. Nothing else "pairs" with it.

Terrible Twos and Dynamic Duo are both alliterative. Are the alliterative clues going to lead anywhere?

• nyet (Valdivostok Veto)
• arc (Pendulum Path)
• awe (Flabbergasted Feeling)
• dyes (Salon Supplies)
• lemur (Malagasy mammal)

NADAL -> Tennis Pro?


How about letter pairs spanning two answers:

• lemanS Stbasil
• apinG Gyros
• sinatrA Amenra
• awE Elmst

SGAE -> SAGE?

[ Down also has lemuR Runs ]


Sheesh. Okay, try repeat letters in the 4 longest (Across AND Down) answers:

• paIredwIth
• DynamicDuo
• mILLIpEdEs
• AbySSiNiAN (Shhhh... I missed the pair of I's)

IDILEASN

• DIE NAILS (Dye Nails? -> Manicurist?)
• Alien IDs -> Immigration/Custom Officer?
• Snail Die -> Malacologist?

Terrible "Twos". How about another spelling of Twos? Tos? There are only 3 clues with "to" in them. They lead to:

• Pairedwith
• Exit
• Peru

PEP -> Cheerleader?

Two word clues? Waaaaay to many to go through.

Two word answers?

• ANDCO (AC? 49A is ArC) [Air Conditioner?]
• PAIREDWITH (PW) [Password?]
• ADDSUP (AU) [Atomic symbol for GOLD]
• LEMANS (LM)
• STBASIL (SB)
• HEHIM (HH) [Hubert H Humphrey pops into my mind)
• AMENRA (AR? Again 49A is ARc, or 4D is cAR)
• PIDAY (PD) [Police Department, P.D. Eastman?]
• DYNAMICDUO (DD) [Dwight D Eisenhower?]
• ELMST (ES)

I run through combinations and can't find anything. Not like they are all initials of presidents or anything.

When Zoom does validate these are important, I realize the two-word answers (Other than the long ones) all have two-letter words/abbreviations in them.

Two letter pairs
================
CO
UP <- Must be right track
LE <- I bet I know where this is going
ST <- Yep. I'm positive I know the answer now
HE
RA
PI
ST

Duh! More like troubled twosomes, but I get it. And after all the times I grumble doing these metas and my wife just shakes her head, I may need one.

Maybe we should rename our Zoom sessions to "Muggles Therapy".

[Andrew Bradburn]

Something about HEHIM gave me pause, leading me to look at other twosomes. But before that, I was fixated on DYNAMICDUO, which led me to ADAM, which sent me on a hunt for BURT....

With regard to the show Batman, which the phrase DYNAMIC DUO brings to mind, did anyone notice that a down entry crossing that phrase was T-MOBILE, which becomes BATMOBILE if you add BA to the front (for Burt and Adam?). Two letters/bigrams being key to solving this puzzle.

[DannyWalter]

Something about HEHIM gave me pause, leading me to look at other twosomes. But before that, I was fixated on DYNAMICDUO, which led me to ADAM, which sent me on a hunt for BURT....

With regard to the show Batman, which the phrase DYNAMIC DUO brings to mind, did anyone notice that a down entry crossing that phrase was T-MOBILE, which becomes BATMOBILE if you add BA to the front (for Burt and Adam?). Two letters/bigrams being key to solving this puzzle.

Yes, and of course Mobile Alabama. I guess that was the end for the dynamic duo! Tune in next week. . .

[clonefitz]

Did the puzzle with my kids and I found the 2-letter combos first. I was looking at them, trying to figure out what to do with them, when I saw that the last three pairs together spelled RAPIST. This seemed odd, but at least put me on the right path.

When my kids finally got it, and I told them about what lead me to it, they mentioned a line by Tobias in Arrested Development:

Tobias: You're forgetting, Lindsay, that as a psychiatrist, I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first "analrapist".
Lindsay: Yeah, and you were almost arrested for those business cards.

Michael: You buy yourself a tape recorder, you just record yourself for a whole day. I think you're going to be surprised at some of your phrasing.

[Joe Ross]

Failed miserably at both this and the MMMM puzzles. The solutions look easy when revealed, but the mounting frustration over the weekend is not fun when they don’t come. I’m sticking with regular crosswords and the variety puzzles from now on. Slightly better odds for someone here to win a mug.

BOO!

Keep hanging with us, Iggy!

[RDaleHall]

Found myself asking this question as I emailed WSJ… COUPLES THERAPIST is kind of a long meta answer (?) 16 letters in all. Anyone have the data on what the longest meta answer has been? Trying to remember over the past few years but not immediately coming up with it, especially constructed fully from grid letters. Maybe the one with moving like a knight on a chess board (?)

[steveb]

Found myself asking this question as I emailed WSJ… COUPLES THERAPIST is kind of a long meta answer (?) 16 letters in all. Anyone have the data on what the longest meta answer has been? Trying to remember over the past few years but not immediately coming up with it, especially constructed fully from grid letters. Maybe the one with moving like a knight on a chess board (?)

You've come to the right place! Not only am I obsessive enough to have saved and uploaded to Dropbox the entire history of the WSJ puzzle contest, but when I store the puzzles on my own computer, I include the solution in the filename. This makes it an easy (but, yes, a little time-consuming) task to paste all those names into Excel, strip out the unnecessary characters and sort them by answer length.

COUPLES THERAPIST is long, but at 16 characters, it is tied with 7 other answers for 15th place. Out of 410 metas, that puts it in about the 95th percentile.

Here are the longest ones, using the solution as written in the Monday puzzle's PDF, with the count of all characters except spaces. I've included the dates for reference in case someone wants to find other information, such as whether the letters were in the grid (SUE GRAFTON: no, KING ARTHUR: yes)

2017-12-15 SUE GRAFTON, PERIL and WASTED (25)
2019-10-18 KING ARTHUR AND SIR LANCELOT (24)
2021-12-03 A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT (23)
2019-08-09 50 WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER (22)
2021-03-26 THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING (22)
2015-10-23 THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD (21)
2021-02-12 WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... (20)
2017-09-15 ST. BASIL'S CATHEDRAL (19)
2020-04-10 GRILLED HAM AND CHEESE (19)
2023-02-10 A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT (19)
2023-04-07 THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA (19)
2018-06-01 UNDIVIDED ATTENTION (18)
2020-12-11 LIVE ON BORROWED TIME (18)
2020-04-24 JEFFERSON AIRPLANE (17)

At the other end of the scale: the shortest meta answer was one character: "W" on 11/9/2018. The most common answer length is 5, which has occurred 82 times, exactly 20% of the metas to date.

And the most common answers have been ARGO and MAINE, with 2 each.

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is COUPLES THERAPIST. Eight Across answers include a two-letter word or abbreviation (AND CO., ADDS UP, LE MANS, ST. BASIL, HE/HIM, AMEN-RA, PI DAY, ELM ST.). Those two-letter pieces, in order, spell the contest answer.

This was a challenging one! We had 711 entries, about 2/3 correct. As always we're in awe at the ingenuity both of our constructors and the many solvers who figured it out (this one stumped us at Contest Headquarters). Incorrect guesses included AU PAIR (cute, 22), CHEF (9), NANNY (8), DENTIST (6), and lots of others in small numbers.

Congrats to this week's winner: Jill Smith of Leawood, Kan.!

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I also took the two long answers to indicate that we were looking for thematic pairs rather than just letter pairs and went down many of the same rabbit holes mentioned, but haven't seen this one:

What if "terrible twos" indicated use of a plural to refer to a single thing? Such as a pair of pants. And we have PANT in the grid at 24D. I was also bothered by the clue "Jeans part" at 57A, which fit the idea. But unfortunately I couldn't find anything else to support it.

[The XWord Rabbit]

If ever there was a puzzle that was more easily said than done, this was it. Eight of the across entries in Mr. Shenk’s “Terrible Twos” puzzle contained two-letter words or abbreviations: CO in 1A, UP in 22A, LE in 26A, ST in 29A, HE in 39A, RA in 43A, PI in 44A and ST in 61A. In order they spelled out the answer: COUPLES THERAPIST. Simple, no? No.

There was considerable grumbling amongst you Muggles and much talk of red herrings on this one. Your Rabbit greatly appreciated the organized and well-edited accounting of two-letter words from Colin (#226) as well as the …uh…mmm… manifesto from DB Miller (#245).

The problem here is the title “Terrible Twos”. It sent everyone off in the same direction, stumbling around in a forest full of trees with two letters. So much of the uniqueness of method (as far as rabbit holes are concerned) went out the window.

But your Rabbit is delighted to report he did find a nominee, and one that may surprise you a little bit. It’s from lacangah (post #219). While there is recognition of the two-letter variety it starts in a different place and ends with a genuine – and wrong – conclusion.

“I ran with the following rabbit….

* Another ‘Warren in the Pro Football Hall of Fame’ is Warren MOON
* Another ‘Candidate of 1992 and 1996’ is CLINTON
* Another ‘Garden Exile’ is EVE
* Another ‘Site of an annual endurance race’ is RALLY

Letters which appear twice are O, N, E, and L; “One L” was a novel written by Scott Turow about law students -> LAWYER”

And now on to more critical matters – Friday is fast approaching and your Rabbit has been hard at work, studying all of your long and winding stories of the past year to determine the remaining finalists and winner of the GOLDEN RABBIT HOLE AWARD. This Friday, during the weekly Zoom call, he will share the results and award prizes.

Be there!

[RDaleHall]

Terrific info here!!! Thanks for pulling it up for reference.
The great thing here is that some of these in the list are fully constructed from letters in the grid; others were answers through a reference. If I'm remembering right, KING ARTHUR AND SIR LANCELOT was derived from actually hopping around on the letters found in the grid. But by comparison A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT was from constructing something like MONTANA and then doing an association. So double kudos to Mike Shenk for doing COUPLES THERAPIST as an answer that was not only high on the letter count distribution, but also fully constructed from grid.

Found myself asking this question as I emailed WSJ… COUPLES THERAPIST is kind of a long meta answer (?) 16 letters in all. Anyone have the data on what the longest meta answer has been? Trying to remember over the past few years but not immediately coming up with it, especially constructed fully from grid letters. Maybe the one with moving like a knight on a chess board (?)

You've come to the right place! Not only am I obsessive enough to have saved and uploaded to Dropbox the entire history of the WSJ puzzle contest, but when I store the puzzles on my own computer, I include the solution in the filename. This makes it an easy (but, yes, a little time-consuming) task to paste all those names into Excel, strip out the unnecessary characters and sort them by answer length.

COUPLES THERAPIST is long, but at 16 characters, it is tied with 7 other answers for 15th place. Out of 410 metas, that puts it in about the 95th percentile.

Here are the longest ones, using the solution as written in the Monday puzzle's PDF, with the count of all characters except spaces. I've included the dates for reference in case someone wants to find other information, such as whether the letters were in the grid (SUE GRAFTON: no, KING ARTHUR: yes)

2017-12-15 SUE GRAFTON, PERIL and WASTED (25)
2019-10-18 KING ARTHUR AND SIR LANCELOT (24)
2021-12-03 A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT (23)
2019-08-09 50 WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER (22)
2021-03-26 THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING (22)
2015-10-23 THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD (21)
2021-02-12 WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... (20)
2017-09-15 ST. BASIL'S CATHEDRAL (19)
2020-04-10 GRILLED HAM AND CHEESE (19)
2023-02-10 A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT (19)
2023-04-07 THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA (19)
2018-06-01 UNDIVIDED ATTENTION (18)
2020-12-11 LIVE ON BORROWED TIME (18)
2020-04-24 JEFFERSON AIRPLANE (17)

At the other end of the scale: the shortest meta answer was one character: "W" on 11/9/2018. The most common answer length is 5, which has occurred 82 times, exactly 20% of the metas to date.

And the most common answers have been ARGO and MAINE, with 2 each.

[benchen71]

The great thing here is that some of these in the list are fully constructed from letters in the grid; others were answers through a reference. If I'm remembering right, KING ARTHUR AND SIR LANCELOT was derived from actually hopping around on the letters found in the grid. But by comparison A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT was from constructing something like MONTANA and then doing an association. So double kudos to Mike Shenk for doing COUPLES THERAPIST as an answer that was not only high on the letter count distribution, but also fully constructed from grid.

If it's a competition, here's one of my MOAT puzzles that has a longer answer (34 letters!) than any of the WSJs. And, yes, the letters of the answer were all in the grid!

[woozy]

The great thing here is that some of these in the list are fully constructed from letters in the grid; others were answers through a reference. If I'm remembering right, KING ARTHUR AND SIR LANCELOT was derived from actually hopping around on the letters found in the grid. But by comparison A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT was from constructing something like MONTANA and then doing an association. So double kudos to Mike Shenk for doing COUPLES THERAPIST as an answer that was not only high on the letter count distribution, but also fully constructed from grid.

If it's a competition, here's one of my MOAT puzzles that has a longer answer (34 letters!) than any of the WSJs. And, yes, the letters of the answer were all in the grid!

Got you beat. THis one https://crosshare.org/crosswords/8R70W5 ... h-the-ages is 77 letters long....

[benchen71]

The great thing here is that some of these in the list are fully constructed from letters in the grid; others were answers through a reference. If I'm remembering right, KING ARTHUR AND SIR LANCELOT was derived from actually hopping around on the letters found in the grid. But by comparison A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT was from constructing something like MONTANA and then doing an association. So double kudos to Mike Shenk for doing COUPLES THERAPIST as an answer that was not only high on the letter count distribution, but also fully constructed from grid.

If it's a competition, here's one of my MOAT puzzles that has a longer answer (34 letters!) than any of the WSJs. And, yes, the letters of the answer were all in the grid!

Got you beat. THis one https://crosshare.org/crosswords/8R70W5 ... h-the-ages is 77 letters long....

Solution image or it doesn't count!

[woozy]

If it's a competition, here's one of my MOAT puzzles that has a longer answer (34 letters!) than any of the WSJs. And, yes, the letters of the answer were all in the grid!

Got you beat. THis one https://crosshare.org/crosswords/8R70W5 ... h-the-ages is 77 letters long....

Solution image or it doesn't count!

Did you really think I would back away from your challenge?

[Although I don't think it will surprise anyone to know that NO-BODY submitted a correct answer.

[benchen71]

Did you really think I would back away from your challenge?

Love it! That's one mammoth meta!!

On a tiny technicality, your grid is quite a bit larger than 15x15. So I'm still claiming the welterweight (15x15) title - until someone knocks me off!

[Cindy N]

Did the puzzle with my kids and I found the 2-letter combos first. I was looking at them, trying to figure out what to do with them, when I saw that the last three pairs together spelled RAPIST. This seemed odd, but at least put me on the right path.

When my kids finally got it, and I told them about what lead me to it, they mentioned a line by Tobias in Arrested Development:

Tobias: You're forgetting, Lindsay, that as a psychiatrist, I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first "analrapist".
Lindsay: Yeah, and you were almost arrested for those business cards.

Haphazardly writing the letters down as I found them, my spacing resulted in something similar. I immediately thought of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy spoof with Will Farrell as Alex Trebek and Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery. Connery loudly proclaims "It looks like this is my lucky day. I'll take The Rapists" for $200".