MGWCC #825 — “Take a Little Off the Sides”

[ChrisKochmanski]

Beamed!

With a bit of help from the Discorders.

Very cool!

[TMart]

Solo beam at #26. Still missing a piece, but had enough to solve it.

[Meg]

Congrats to all the supersolvers! I'm on at #17, just in time for Mikey's and some spring training baseball.

I didn't know you were a baseball fan! What's your team??

I’m from St. Pete. The Rays, of course!

[boharr]

Beamed.

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

Waiting for the beam. This one came quickly for me after having issues with last week's.

[ship4u]

Finally awaiting beamage. I pray that my struggle will meet with success.

Edit: Beamed at #85. Yippee! Now, off to the WSJ Weekend Crossword......

[BarbaraK]

Wow!

Beam up requested. A couple bits I’m not sure of, but got enough to be confident of the answer.

[hcbirker]

What @BarbaraK said!

[Jeremy Smith]

I beamed last evening. One of Matt's best IMHO.

[Katiedid]

Thanks to the tiny hint I got at the zoom Sunday night - I beamed up! Had to sort of backsolve to find one piece. Cool meta!

[woozy]

I only got around to starting it about an hour ago. I ... don't think I'm going to make it.

Edit: I didn't even try. I just threw myself on discords mercy. Unfortunately I had a slight discussion where there was just enough share inspiration that I figured out exactly what I had to do and it was enough that I could feel it was a legitimate solve with help, but.... I couldn't finish it even though I knew exactly what had to be done. There were pieces I just couldn't do.

Oh, well. Next week.

[BarbaraK]

I only got around to starting it about an hour ago. I ... don't think I'm going to make it.

You have a day and a half yet. Deadline is not until noon Wednesday this week.

[mattythewsjpuzzler]

Beamed! Fun one. Well constructed.

[HunterX]

Beamed up. But not without a nudge, a push, and a hefty shove.

[rjy]

Okay Matt now you're just showing off.

You said it… inspired!

[HoldThatThought]

Beamed up. But not without a nudge, a push, and a hefty shove.

It looked something like this

[Laura M]

Another eleventh hour solve, I mean I'm glad I finally got there but there's no excuse for my taking so long!

[Dr.Buttbeard]

Spent the weekend skiing and not looking at this, finally put the wheels in motion last night and pieced it all together today in the nick of time. Beamed!

[burak]

A last minute observation led to a last minute inspiration, I figured out only 85% of what I needed to solve it but I'm pretty sure that was enough. Amazing meta, I don't know if this mechanism was done before but this is one of the best I've solved lately. Everything comes together nicely.

Post-deadline edit: I only realized the grid wasn't a perfect 15x15 around 11:30 am, which, d'oh, is one of the first things you should check. Then I counted 16 across squares so I thought we'd take letters from one side and was trying to figure out meaningful answers with one letter missing. Around 11:45 am I realized it was actually 17 letters, the last row was IQ and that obviously related to SMARTS and I was off to the races.

Figured out as much as IGO_____REMES around 11:51 am, but Google can't help with that. Finally I got IGOTO_X_REMES around 11:55 am and that worked out fine. That was the most rush I got from a meta since the prime number one for WSJCC a few years back.

[Bob cruise director]

I am not a music aficionado especially of anything after 1970 so I expected to do a lot of Googling. And I had a ton of help from @KayW which I appreciated as I would have and should have thrown in the towel early on. Skipping through all the many intermediate emails between Kay and myself, here are my issues that result in two thumbs down on this one.

Because of my lack of knowledge I googled “top songs of the 1990’s” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_B ... _the_1990s and had that page open. After I was put on the right track by Kay, I went through and got all the related clues and grid answers I could and that led nowhere. However I had the X and figured that there could not be very many songs with X in the title in the early 90’s. And there weren’t – zero songs on the top songs of the 90's web page (back to this later).

Also what I found was that many of the two letters from the outsides could lead to multiple clues that were as good or better answers. Or clues that I felt were not correct. For example

NO – instead of 75A, I had 6D as NO (number since CAM was an abbreviation also) as a phone feature and that gave me a C rather than a G.
CA – instead of 81A I had Circa which could be an alternate to 15A and that gave me an N instead of an E
CA – and when I got Kay’s thoughts on 81A, my reaction is that I have never seen a college URL with the state abbreviation in it, so I would never have thought of this as an answer. My UMass Lowell email and their web site are UML.EDU. Same thing for every other college that I or my family have attended.
And there were others were questionable paths to the right letter or several that had to be backsolved or both.

So when I got the answer and looked at my list of top songs of the 1990’s “I Go To Extremes” was not on the list. So I looked at “Top Hit Singles of 1990” and found that this song was #82 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard ... es_of_1990. So I looked at Billy Joel’s songs and found that this one was released at the end of 1989. https://www.vulture.com/article/best-bi ... anked.html So my googling efforts were doomed.

Not a great meta. To the extent that I did not submit the answer.