XWord Muggles Forum

Periodically you may hear one of us mention that we were pageanted on a puzzle.

December 29, 2017, the crossword was constructed by the nefarious Marie Kelly (alias for Mike Shenk and an anagram for Really Mike) and entitled PLAY GROUNDS. The answer to the contest was "a kind of competition". It looked very simple with seven long answers containing the names of college bowl games. So most of us entered something like College Bowls.

However there was a second level to the contest. If you took the first letters of the cities that all the bowls were played in they spelled out Pageant (see below).

Rose Bowl – Pasadena
Cotton Bowl – Arlington Texas
Fiesta Bowl – Glendale AZ
Sun Bowl – El Paso Texas
Peach Bowl – Atlanta Georgia
Sugar Bowl – New Orleans
Outback Bowl – Tampa

So Pageant’ed has come to mean a puzzle where you get hoodwinked by the simplicity and there is a second level.

The link to the original puzzle's page on the WSJ site is no longer active.

If you want to see the morphed puzzle and solution, go here and scroll down 4 or 5 contest solutions.

To solve this via PDF, click here.

The standalone PDF solution published by WSJ is here.

... and its solution (also with explanation): https://blogs.wsj.com/puzzle/crossword/ ... -37759.pdf

To me, it's amusing when people keep thinking they are being pageant-ed on later puzzles. To me, the submissions of "College Bowls", or the like were just a guess, because it wasn't a 100% solution - If the answer really was "bowl", or similar, there should have been that extra click that tied it to the puzzle title.

In the "Play Grounds" puzzle, you needed to know where the bowl games were being held, the "grounds" part of the title. Had you noticed that, you would have all the letters for pageant, which is a contest. "bowl" or "college bowl" didn't tie back into the title, and wasn't spelled out from other things found in the grid and/or clues.

So now when an "easy" meta comes along, people are afraid there's another step, when they have already taken the step and they SHOULD be 100% certain. If the "easy" answer is either spelled out, or ties in neatly with the puzzle's title, stop worrying!

Not February "29" 2017, but December 29, 2017, right?

boharr wrote: ↑Sun Jan 26, 2020 12:12 pm Not February "29" 2017, but December 29, 2017, right?

Correct! I'll fix it. Thank you.

If only I could spot metas as easily!!