"Flight of Fancy" March 15, 2024

[JeanneC]

Wow. I came up with Erte. Started with H, N (for “and”) O. Counted 2 spaces past the O in each of the four HO combos in the puzzle and got E, E, T and R for Erte, the Art Deco artist. Never saw the significance of “flight” in the title.

[Relic]

Wow, what a brilliant puzzle! The only element I got right was 2 was key to the metanism. I was unable to put two and two together though.

Congratulations to the solvers!

This reminds me of another Shenk masdterpiece, "Following Directions", from 5/14/21.

I am libating and learning.

[Plymouthrock]

And I was struggling with making sense of a game of Senet.
Three down, ten across trying to find some kind of pattern. And that was just my most compelling flight of fancy.
He is some kind of brilliant and so are all of you who solved it. See you next week.

[clonefitz]

For the XWord Rabbit’s consideration:
Regarding “Flight of Fancy”: that center row can often be significant. In this case there are four three-letter words (COP ASS ASK TIP), a very unusual arrangement. But what to do with them? And what about that pesky numeral “2” in the southeast? Perhaps that “2” gives a hint for how to address the center row. “2” is a part of the across entry LINE 2. Interpreting this as row 2, I see the words HIDEY MOVE WACO. My first thought was, “is there an artist named Heidi Muvueco?” but a Google search came up empty. Instead, could the words in row 2 be instructions to apply to the middle row. Parsing HIDEY, I come up with HIDE Y, so I hid a Y in the first black square in the center row. Next step is to MOVE the W sound from that hidden Y (wye), where to move it? Just move it a-WA (away), changing the Y to I. So I’ve taken care of the HIDE Y and the MOVE WA, now I just have to MOVE C and O by placing the C before ASS and the O after ASS. So in summary, my alternate solution looks like this:
COP ASS
COPYASS
COPIASS
PICASSO

[schmidzy]

For those debating the renown of this artist / work, may I present:

To my knowledge, there is at least one other C&H strip riffing on this one, but this is the one I remember most.

[Renee]

sfgdfg

[otlaolap]

The answer to this week's contest puzzle was[n't] LI SHEN. As suggested by the entry "Line 2", begin at Line 2 and then "Get Down" doing the "Waco" [Texas] "Two-Step", repeatedly dropping down two and across two, yielding the letters LISHEN. Google reveals an aritist SHEN LI. Allow for uncertainty of customary differences in forename-surname ordering in the US and in Asia. This will get you to that slimy remote swamp I said I got to, and submitted in order to enjoy St Pat's day dinner with family.

I had thought Mike Shenk's hex puzzle NERDS was brilliant (I still do) but this tops them all.

[damefox]

For those debating the renown of this artist / work, may I present:

calvin.gif

To my knowledge, there is at least one other C&H strip riffing on this one, but this is the one I remember most.

Literally that is the FIRST THING I thought of when I finally saw the answer.

[Onaquest]

A thing of beauty. We had absolutely nothing.

[zacmoretz]

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?

“Rabbit repellant”! . Wonderfully well-written, thank you!

[mattythewsjpuzzler]

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".

Agree with most that the importance of those two answers wasn't apparent (to me) till after seeing the meta. The title led me to think stairs. BUT once you think stairs and see some of the answer's connecting letters (or solve the whole thing) Shenk has a habit of providing corroborating evidence in the grid. Often key answers (especially if there is little to be found elsewhere) are in 1A or the last vertical down answer in the lower right. (For Gaffney in the last horizontal answer). In this case it was two symmetrically placed answers in the middle of the grid. Shenk is a purist: virtually everything is tied together, is symmetrical, is in a 15x15 grid. If something is NOT like that, it is a hint. As well as things -- like the above -- that ARE symmetrically placed. Shenk is a genius.

ALSO (late add) whenever, and I mean whenever, I see an answer and say "that's weird" I should always make a note and look at it further and almost immediately. 1A NULL did that for me...Null = lacking force?? Maybe but a stretch for a master like Shenk. Another example of not following my own rules.

[BigPear]

My sister (laurab) and I dug ourselves ever deeper into our artistic rabbit hole.
The blueprint:
Irving AMEN, Jose-Maria SERT, Jerry OTT, Hugh CABOT, Stephen PACE, and Roger ING are all artists— perhaps obscure, but you can find them on Wikipedia. Go ahead, I’ll wait. They can also be found in the faux theme answers and symmetrically abutting two of them. SERT is there twice.

Of note, Amen’s most noted work is an etching of Sancho Panza. Sert did a painting of stubborn animals, and believe me, finding all these artists was a pain in the stubborn animal.

At any rate, when you anagram the first letters of said artists, using Sert twice because it is in the grid twice, you get PICASSO.

Shenk is not one to scramble an answer, but c’mon— Picasso. A cubist meta of sorts.

The only thing that snapped us out of our folie à deux was the enthusiasm from the muggle board. Nobody but nobody would have been happy with this solution.

So after a beautiful nudge by Don ship4u, we saw rhe real (astounding!) answer and made it ashore.

[Joe Ross]

I'm a dedicated Calvin and Hobbes fan from its outset, then studied every collective book and the ongoing series as an operating manual for one of my twin sons, who IS Calvin.

While aware of the name of the revealed work (& familiar with the name of the artist), I'm fully shamed that I didn't connect it to the comic strip until noted, here, by Lydia & Emma.

Time to self-reflect in my super-secret clubhouse.

[arecibo]

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 that ELLS was also a hint. Anyway, that's how I got in: Title, "Flight of Fancy" --> 59D, "Some wings" (related to flight? Will the answer be "VEES"?) --> ELLS (no, not V-shaped, L-shaped, and related to architecture) --> back to the title ("flight" = stairs). I consider flight/wings as purposeful but who can say.

[clonefitz]

I had a list of so many different things that I had tried and did not pan out. What i think finally did if for me was considering that I was making it too hard. To put is simply: what does Mike want us to do here? He has a numeral 2, the title is Flight of Fancy, and while I did see TWO STEP, I completely missed the matching symmetrical clue GET DOWN. Much earlier in the weekend I thought I had done all of the "stepping down" combinations throughout the grid (now realizing I must have done so carelessly). I decided to double check the step down that ended up at that numeral 2 and there it was.

[pjc]

Holy cow - this was 100% in my wheelhouse and I absolutely whiffed on it! Completely embarrassed by missing it!

[Secret Adversary]

Well my first problem was that I didn't look up the IRS form, so I wrote nitrous acid as HNOO, and thought "Line O? could be!" So I didn't have the 2 as a clue.

So then I looked and looked, then at one point my blurry vision turned the puzzle a sideways 'fancy' 45 degrees, and saw a clear butterfly pattern made by the black squares. Butterflies have 'some wings', and they're certainly fancy! Ok, now what ... "Chevron site"? Look in one of the chevrons formed by the butterfly's wings, and you see RENOIR.

I didn't think it was the solution, since it was not the kind of mechanism that would earn such praise from the group, and the RENOIR doesn't fit neatly in the chevron. But I was pleased with the flight of my butterfly!

Thanks to the friendly zoom group for the help last night! A very clever and fair puzzle indeed. No submit for me at all this week - bring on next week!

[MatthewL]

I saw the title and was convinced it was going to be M.C. Escher. Then I decided the grid entry HNO2, could be parsed as "H and O, two", and saw that there were 6 grid entries that had an HO in them, which seemed to confirm my guess (6 letters in Escher). Spent quite some time trying to make that 2 work to find the right letters, but to no avail. Thankfully @Joe Ross pulled me out of that rabbit hole and urged me to go back to the basics. I had tried looking at various diagonal words in the grid previously (playing on the staircase theme), and after hours of off and on staring, finally saw descending, and the rest was pretty straightforward. I don't know how Shenk managed to do that grid with no real stinkers in the grid. Quite a feat of construction.

[HunterX]

I had a slight advantage with this given I live in Philadelphia and have visited the venerable Philadelphia Museum of Art many times. Duchamp's Nude#2 hangs there. There is a large collection of his works there, including his last large-scale project, Étant donnés. That is one you really have to see in person, as a photo can't convey the experience of walking into the darkened entrance and then looking through the peep hole in a wooden door.

After seeing the two, symmetrical down answers related to dance, I originally thought perhaps the answer would be Edgar Degas. Eventually I connected the title to those clues, noting that twoSTEP + getDOWN would give you STEP DOWN. Immediately I thought of Nude#2, realized the '2' must be part of it, and found NUDE in the top-left.

In the WSJ app, since I couldn't type a '2', I had to use the Reveal Letter function to get it to appear.

[RDaleHall]

Did not see the TWOSTEP AND GETDOWN hints; will have to look back to see if the clues indicated more. Lots of staring before finally seeing the word “stair” and led to the meta.