"Flight of Fancy" March 15, 2024

[Luxmea]

In need of a nudge. Feel like I was on the right path, but now I'm stuck.

Update: on shore! Courtesy of a couple helpful nudges that put me back on the correct path. Many thanks! After two weeks of easy solves I was feeling a little bereft.

[Bob cruise director]

Our final count is 28 on the ship and 1126 on the shore

And welcome to our newest muggle @AustinBunny

have a good week

[ELSavage]

Did you mean 126 on the shore? 1126 sounds like a lot.

[Ann]

On the shore!

[M and M]

Fun but took a nudge or two so we won't submit. A very clever twist there -

[Bulrich]

Ashore with some help (thanks!). Impressive construction for sure.
Bourbon nightcap...

[LadyBird]

Ashore--no mug submission since I was not figuring it out (even though I had all the ingredients). Left the Zoom early to do bedtime with the grands, but dragged ashore later. I'll have a Baileys.

[Colin]

No inspiration,
No “Wow!” No “Aha!” No clue.
No room at the bar.

[LuscombeDriver]

Made it with help from my sister

[meowmiao71]

Welp, my solve counter has reset to zero.

[hcbirker]

[lacangah]

I thought ‘flights of fancy’ referred to airlines of yore. Given that -

* “amenhoTEP” is one letter off of “TED” airline
* “asserTINg” is one letter off of “TAN” airline
* “hoTTAmale” is one letter off of “TWA” airline
* “caBOTCove” is one letter off of “BOAC” airline

The replaced letters spell out “PITT,” a movie artist.

Congratulations to all who solved it correctly - see you all later this week!

[KRM]

What would be most helpful is if those who solved this puzzle would explain how exactly did they figure out that the hints were in the two answers "Two Step" and "Get Down".

[mheberlingx100]

What would be most helpful is if those who solved this puzzle would explain how exactly did they figure out that the hints were in the two answers "Two Step" and "Get Down".

I think I understand the two step. The number 2 in the grid was so unusual that it pointed me to the spelled out “two” in the grid. Get down has me puzzled, unless it’s because it’s dance related like the two step clue was.

[steveb]

What would be most helpful is if those who solved this puzzle would explain how exactly did they figure out that the hints were in the two answers "Two Step" and "Get Down".

I never noticed those hints. But I thought "Flight" in the title might refer to a flight of stairs. So when I came back for my second attempt at solving, I looked for patterns that might resemble stairs. I managed to spot DESCEND (using the wrong D at the end), and it was - ahem - all downhill from there.

[MDM]

What would be most helpful is if those who solved this puzzle would explain how exactly did they figure out that the hints were in the two answers "Two Step" and "Get Down".

Never noticed those hints. Saw "flight", thought "flight of stairs", saw DESCEN going down the two black squares in the upper left, and then saw the rest. Realized "No. 2" was part of the painting's title only after looking up "Nude descending a staircase" to find the author.

[Cindy N]

What would be most helpful is if those who solved this puzzle would explain how exactly did they figure out that the hints were in the two answers "Two Step" and "Get Down".

Don't forget your title Flight of Fancy - FLIGHT as in stairs and then put those clues together - TWO STEP DOWN and

Start at the top and STEP DOWN your FLIGHT of STAIRS - 1/2/down, 1/2/down. All the way across.

And to those who completed the puzzle online and couldn't enter the "2", the answer was fully Google-able without that numeral.

[mikeB]

Once the grid is completed, this meta is giving us several nudges, and they all work together to help us solve the puzzle. One odd feature we noticed – and couldn’t stop thinking about – is the cell at the intersection of 68A and 56D. To complete the entries, this cell would contain the numeral 2, a departure from what we might think of as “convention”. However, this cell’s very roguishness contains information useful to the solve. To give extra weight to the cell’s contents, it is situated at an intersection, confirming not only the deliberateness of its avant-garde format but also its importance. Convention? This cell is thumbing its nose at convention. While we’re pondering that oddity, there are other nudges acting in concert to get us on track and keep us there. The entries at 8D and 43D are symmetrically situated and could be related semantically. TWOSTEP and GETDOWN could suggest downward stairs, if you focus on STEP and DOWN. But what about that pesky TWO? Does that relate somehow to the “2” that is haunting us from the intersection? We might be tempted to misuse the TWO, for example, by looking at the incidence of double letters in the grid. However, the Title offers rabbit repellant with the word “Flight”. That’s it: This meta is about stairs, not twos, and probably downward stairs at that. At this juncture we might peruse the grid, looking for an artist’s name in some sort of a descending pattern. (I wonder if anyone else was thinking about Escher, with all this interest in stairs.) But we haven’t resolved the issue of the numeral 2: Why is it there and imbued with such importance? We then realize that it’s not the fact of being TWO, but the fact of being a NUMERAL that is crucial. What we’re looking for has the NUMERAL 2 in it, and that means we’re not looking for a person’s name at all. Most likely, what we seek is the title of a well-known work of art, apparently a title that ends with the numeral 2. Find that, and you have the name of the artist. So we return to the grid and look for stepdown sequences of letters that might comprise such a title, and Whoosh!

What a meta this is! It concerns an avant-garde artist whose work is titled in reference to a descending staircase, and that title appears in a descending staircase in the grid and ends up at a cell unconventionally containing a numeral, which makes this meta itself an avant-garde work of art. Is it any wonder that we hold Mr. Shenk and his collaborators in such high regard for masterpieces such as this?

[benchen71]

What would be most helpful is if those who solved this puzzle would explain how exactly did they figure out that the hints were in the two answers "Two Step" and "Get Down".

I didn't notice the hints until after solving. The word "flight" in the title suggested stairs. And when I went looking for things on the diagonal, I found STAIR starting in 39D. I kept looking for more of these initially, finding SHIRTS starting in 22 down. But when I found DESCENDING I saw that it was just one long answer finishing on that extremely unusual (for the WSJ) "2".

[mheberlingx100]

My Hail Mary if I couldn’t solve was Rene Magritte. Flight of Fancy = pipe dream. And Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, declaring that this is not a pipe, seemed to fit with pipe dream.