"Never Forget" March 22, 2024

[femullen]

I never even got out of the stateroom and up to Isaac's bar. With grid answers "Azul," "Anil," and "Aqua," I figured the theme was "Blue," and the answer therefore "DEJECTED," which is me on another utterly clueless Monday morning.

8^(

[femullen]

DFC6DA03-F433-4B72-8E9D-95D0A0E647B3.png

Did anyone know about this book? Saw it on Amazon.

I ordered my copy. Perhaps we can put our friend @femullen on the NY Times Best Seller List!

And, send him on a book signing tour!

How did @hcbirker even find that? It's ranked number ten zillion on the Amazon best-seller list. But yes, certainly, order your copy today. I just got my quarterly royalty check: 78 cents. Push me over a dollar!

[Physics3phd]

I’m a newbie, I am clueless as to how one is supposed to know which letters to pick to look at. The pattern was ABC…. But large words were left out. Trying to swim ashore, but lost at sea.

[Kas]

The good news is that I'm on the shore.
The bad news is that...it's the wrong shore--I'm not on the beach, because I COMPLETELY missed the ship.
I was going to throw myself off the pier in a fit of pique...but this is firmly a Kas 5 on the scale, so I'll just go home and sulk quietly.

For the newer Muggles:

The KAS Scale

1. The Metas that yield the A-Ha Moment too early...and I'm irritable about it, because I'm a dork;

2. The Metas that I torture myself over, then the a-ha moment is basically a head-slapping "Oh DUH!! You Eeeediott!!" Those make me laugh, self-deprecation is no problem;

3. The Metas I gut through, *eventually* figure out...and then walk around the rest of the weekend like I just solved The Middle East or learned Sanskrit;

4. The Metas I DON'T get...but *should* have. (It happens. I don't want to talk about it.)

5. The Metas I don't get, and after the answer is revealed I think, "Yeah...that wasn't going to happen." (Regarding which I happily just salute you genius Muggles out there, week after week...)

[Joe Ross]

I’m a newbie, I am clueless as to how one is supposed to know which letters to pick to look at. The pattern was ABC…. But large words were left out. Trying to swim ashore, but lost at sea.

oof

Practice.
Practice.
Practice.

As one muggle stated, "This is not a good puzzle to start solving metas."

Linked above are the general area of this site including various tools for solving followed by two specific areas within, Hints for Solving Meta Contests, and Past WSJ Crossword Contests & Solutions, respectively.

Finding a solving partner can help immensely, is fun, and can keep you sane.

There are two weekly ZOOM sessions for the WSJ Crossword Contests, at 4:30 PM ET Fridays & 8 PM ET Sundays. The ZOOM link is at the top of every page on this site, beneath the banner.

You can request help of those who have solved and found their way to the beach. Many of the helpful note their availability in the signatures below their posts.

There is the rich trove of metas created by others, including muggles, which give hints to solving the metas after a time & before deadlines. All of these past metas and solutions can be found in their various topics & forums.

Also, there are Tuesday night ZOOM sessions starting at 7:30 PM ET and lasting 45 minutes to an hour, during which most of the past week's puzzles are discussed, including solving strategies for each.

WELCOME to XWord Muggles, @Physics3phd ! We're glad you are one of us and BEST LUCK! If your screenname suggests that you have 3 PHDs related to physics & the sciences, another muggle, @FKelly, and you should talk. There are many muggles with advanced science degrees.

[EmilyW]

Definite KAS 5 for me. I just heard this word a few days ago and it made me remember a Full House episode. Stephanie is in the Spelling Bee and Danny teaches her about mnemonic devices to help her study. When she gets to the Spelling Bee, the word they ask her to spell is mnemonic. She is unaware of the silent M and loses but learns a valuable lesson about sportsmanship.

[Darth]

Hey everyone! Don't forget to check out the "Other Meta Crossword Puzzles" section of the Xword Muggles Forum.

MMM...The fun never ends! :D

[CromsFury]

I do not know if anyone else experienced this but . . .

I briefly found myself in a rabbit hole on Thursday.

After seeing Anil, Azul, and Aqua, it occurred to me that the puzzle's title may reference FORGET ME NOTS which might be described with the eight letter word:

CERULEAN

[Nlobb]

I thought the answer might have to do with funeral, the middle grid entry. The four 10-letter entries could be considered to go with this idea. Dwelling on (heaven), days to come (afterlife), churchyard (burial), and clogged up (sad). Also several mentions of blue, elegy and so on.
A request for a nudge enlightened me that this was a rabbit hole!!
Oh well… did I mention that my very cute granddog has one blue eye and one brown eye and is named Azul??

[MatthewL]

I thought the answer might have to do with funeral, the middle grid entry. The four 10-letter entries could be considered to go with this idea. Dwelling on (heaven), days to come (afterlife), churchyard (burial), and clogged up (sad). Also several mentions of blue, elegy and so on.
A request for a nudge enlightened me that this was a rabbit hole!!
Oh well… did I mention that my very cute granddog has one blue eye and one brown eye and is named Azul??

Right there with you. My WAG was going to be OBITUARY.

[Justmarebear]

Still cruising with Isaac, calm seas, good company and awesome buffet.

[mheberlingx100]

I chased a lot of rabbits on this one:
- 1D as a hint. Tried adding OT to words or looking for IE in them.
- Blue in clues.
- Long answers. First half, second half, first letters, second half unnecessary, hidden words, directions on or up, alternate answers in grid, etc.
- Funeral. Buried words.
- Abbreviated word. Letters omitted from abbreviations.
- Monuments. Dwelling on reminded me of Wellington. Kept looking for items related to Waterloo or British monuments.
- Next. Looked for words formed by next letter of alphabet on abbreviations.
- by name. Looked at names in the grid and in the clues.
- 111. Add across clues to sum to 111 to see if anything works.

Finally sister-in-law hints got me there.

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I also spent a while thinking the theme was related to memorials based on the puzzle title and the central position of FUNERAL, as well as 'elegy' in the clues. I had even circled the word 'require' in 1D and written "requiem?" next to it.

I was trying to tie the long grid entries to a memorial theme when I came up with CHURCHYARD -> (Winston) Churchill and DWELLINGON -> D(uke of) Wellington. So I went through the grid to see if I could find any other tenuous connections to figures from British history in the longer answers and Google to find information on their monuments.

It was only shifting my focus to the short answers that led me down the path of:
Hmmm, there are more than the usual number of odd entries like JQA, BTU, CXI and GTE
There's a J, Q, X, and Z in the grid, is this grid a pangram? Let's find... A, B, C
Hey, the first three across answers start with A, B, and C! And I can continue through the alphabet by continuing with the first letter of across answers.
But it stops at L... so where do I find?... Aha!

[Eric Porter]

As I alluded to in my first post, the first thing I noticed was that the puzzle contains all 26 letters of the alphabet. I then saw where the Z, Y, and X were. Next I saw that the first 3 across entries started with A, B, and C. If the first 3 theme entries weren't at in the top row, I would have had a harder time.

I managed not to kill myself skiing at Snowbird. It was icy in the mornings and slush covered ice in the afternoon. I wish I was there this week as the snow's better. I mostly did blues and the easier blacks.

[Homer Buckle]

At first, I considered arteries as a possible answer: Clogging up of ARTERIES will lead to a funeral in a churchyard as a dwelling place for days to come. Glad I kept working on it.

[Lyman]

Fortunately, the dictionary I consulted had only one word that began "MN" (and it happened to have eight letters). It just took a while for me to realize that I needed to find a word that began "MN".

[woozy]

woozy being woozy.

Here's my retaliation for this. Never forget... and never mind.

FWIW the concept and infrastructure was done before I solved. (It took me two days to solve. I had a statement from Discord to look at the entries carefully, which shouldn't have helped me [I do that anyway, right?], but somehow did.)

[otlaolap]

I said this was right up my alley. When my son was small, I used to try to sing him to sleep, with a very small stock of suitable songs. One of these was the alphabet song, which worked pretty well but became for me, quickly, boring. Then, inspiration! I'd learn to sing it backwards! And so I did, struggling over several weeks until I became fluent and the rote repetition became second-nature. Since then I have used the sequence for various things I want to be semi-private or at least inconvenient for others, such as wi-fi access point names. When first logging in to this forum, I even considered it, or a subset of it, as a user name.

Anyway, Z Y X is an immediately recognizable attention-getter for me, and there it was, right in the top line.

Suspect though that this quirky ability will have no influence on MikeMillerwsj this morning.

[sharkicicles]

I just did not have the mental bandwidth for this one- been in some job interviews recently- but what an elegant construction.

[jrdad]

It's my lucky week. I won the Mug! woot woot