"Buy Low" August 25, 2023

[JAQT]

By the way, just wanted to use this opportunity to point out the genius of yesterday's WSJ puzzle, Elevated Tensions, by Mike Shenk. Thought it was really well constructed. Highly recommend.

Thanks for the tip! That was fun and I didn't get it until the clearly correct answer for 45A didn't fit.

It reminded me (in a way) of the LAT puzzle from many years ago where the gimmick was that all W's were replaced literally with double U's. I never forgot that one: https://laxcrossword.com/2015/05/la-tim ... ay-15.html

[iblinked]

On shore!!!!

[Cbaudhuin]

Ashore for the first time in several weeks.

[ReB]

That was close - I almost forgot to submit my answer. Realized it at 11:55pm

[hcbirker]

[MajordomoTom]

a nice week 0.5 puzzle, I hope someone tipped Isaac, he was lonely this week

[BarbaraK]

Those of us who've been doing these for a while had an advantage this week as we’ve seen variations on this mechanism before.

For a fun example that is especially appropriate for all the muggles who were on shore this week, check out

viewtopic.php?p=65283

It's from MMM two years ago, but if you didn't solve it back then (or if you did but forgot it) it will be new for you:)

And speaking of MMM's by Peter Abide, I can't wait to try this week's as I hear he's bringing a new generation into the fold!

viewtopic.php?t=2399

[Deb F]

I'm declaring a week off for our esteemed Rabbit!

Have a good week, Muggles.

[woozy]

Ooops. I just remembered after solving early on thursday, I never actually got around to submitting my answer.

[MMe]

Sufficiently easy that early on Thursday afternoon, muggles everywhere were indulging their dipsophilia

[Bill Bovard]

Sufficiently easy that early on Thursday afternoon, muggles everywhere were indulging their dipsophilia

Love your mug.

[LadyBird]

On Mondays, I volunteer at a wildlife hospital. They asked me if I wanted to release 2 hummingbirds. In my yard. Heck yeah!

[OGuyDave]

Done Friday, and done Friday shortly after. Finishing up our great lakes cruise, right now, asea in Lake Ontario. Good food on the cruise, maybe too good. Look at the size of the pepperonis on this freshly made pizza.

TFTXWD

[Flamel616]

I don't think I've been getting enough sleep. I didn't even see the DIPs.

[The XWord Rabbit]

What’s the X-Word Rabbit to do?

No point in talking about the methodology of Mr. Gaffney’s “Buy Low” puzzle as it was a romp to the shore in the truest sense.

After a record-breaking four nominations last week your Rabbit literally has nothing to work with this time around. No tales of Muggles lost. No frustrations, complaints, or even minor annoyances. Nothing. Nada. Zipp-o. Not even a title that evokes much in the way of videos. He hoped to find an old broadcast of “Wall Street Week” with Louis Rukeyser, recommending Apple at $5 a share (Anything that would evoke “Buying Low”), but alas, came up empty.

So his only choice is to resort to you-know-who …

Some of you Muggles may be wondering: What’s the deal with Carmen Miranda? For the answer to that we must return to a puzzle last November “Trending Ending”. The solution was based upon five “double bigrams” in the entries. Your Rabbit was unfamiliar with the term but soon learned that it meant a sequence of two adjacent elements – letters, symbols or words – repeated twice. Being the smart bunny that he is, he realized that Carmen Miranda built her entire career, singing in bigrams. The rest is history.

Given that the last couple of weeks has driven your Rabbit bananas, it’s only appropriate to leave you with a premier example of Ms. Miranda’s craft: From the 1943 classic “The Gang’s All Here” and directed by Busby Berkeley it’s “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat”. Rarely shown on TCM you can see it right here. Until next week, then --

[sharkicicles]

Man, after watching that video I may have been born 40 years too late…

[CptnCodon]

Please permit me to dream for a moment... Does anyone else wish that the WSJ could send out two emails to everyone that submits an answer:
1) A confirmation email immediately after submission saying "Yes, we've received your email"
2) An email on Monday informing whether the submitted answer was right or not Something along the lines of "Congratulations! Your submission, XXX, was right! You and XXX other people correctly solved this puzzle. Unfortunately, your entry wasn't randomly chosen as the mug winner. Try again next week!"

Something like this would for me be a nice consolation prize (and also assuage my fears that my email is silently being dropped into a spam filter somewhere deep in the interwebs *).

I'm not seriously requesting this. I do realize the amount of time/effort/complexity this would introduce, even if it were automated, and it's unfair for me to ask any more from an already free service **. Still... a guy can dream!

* This fear isn't entirely unfounded, as I actually once received an email three days after submitting, saying that my ISP hadn't actually sent my email, because it thought it was spam (maybe because the subject was ALL CAPS and the email had only my name as content?).

** I am grateful that Mike Miller takes the time to post here with the post-mortem stats. @MikeMillerwsj, thank you! And of course thank you to MikeS, MattG and the rest of the WSJ team for creating and hosting the puzzles in the first place!

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is UNDERCHARGED. As suggested by the clue at 69-Across, take the three letters beneath DIP in the four theme answers (UND/ERC/HAR/GED) to spell the contest answer.

After a run of unusually tough contests, this one was a very big crowdpleaser. We had 2851 entries, about 95% correct. The scattering of incorrect guesses included DEPRECIATION (16), CAPITULATION (4), MICROECONOMY, CREDIT RATING, and a handful of others.

Congrats to this week's winner: Wes Goldberg of Charlotte, NC!

[MikeMillerwsj]

And to @CaptnCodon above, thank you for the nice note and the thoughtful suggestions. The 2nd email you suggest would indeed be a programming challenge but I like it. Thanks right back to you and the other Muggles for the fabulous fanbase and community!

[BarbaraK]

Please permit me to dream for a moment... Does anyone else wish that the WSJ could send out two emails to everyone that submits an answer:
1) A confirmation email immediately after submission saying "Yes, we've received your email"
2) An email on Monday informing whether the submitted answer was right or not Something along the lines of "Congratulations! Your submission, XXX, was right! You and XXX other people correctly solved this puzzle. Unfortunately, your entry wasn't randomly chosen as the mug winner. Try again next week!"

The first one would be very easy as every email system I know of already has the capacity to automatically respond to every message. It's usually used for vacation notices, but instead of the automatic message being, "I'm out of town this week; I'll reply when I get back." it could just say, "Thanks for your submission. Good luck."

The second one though is not just a programming challenge, it requires that a person look at every single entry (or at least every entry that is not exactly what they were looking for) to decide if it is acceptable. A brilliant feature of the way WSJ set this up is that they only have to decide whether to accept any given alternate answer if it happens to be the randomly selected potential winner.

** As a WSJ subscriber, I don't see these puzzles as "free" but rather as a part of what I pay for with my subscription. I am delighted that WSJ shares them with the public, so to all the non-subscribers, on behalf of the subscribers, you're welcome!