XWord Muggles Forum

That was a neat puzzle that I didn’t crack. Twist has too many synonyms. Perhaps some indication to spiral would have been helpful. Five clues have all the letters of Do the Twist. Fcorona, poolc and skrog were on my radar but nope. Hopefully I’ll get it this week.

So I was convinced this had to do with cocktails with a "twist," after seeing CORONA and SONIC SCREW[driver] there. I spent a lot of time looking for drinks. *Finally* I saw CORKSCREW, so I looked up "corkscrew cocktail" or something, and there was a mixed drink with a lime. Then I saw HURRICANE...it was a drink with an orange. After that I got stuck looking at every single 3x3 square. But once I shook that off, I found CYCLONE...a drink with a lime! At that point I got frustrated and sent a picture of the puzzle to my son, asking if he could find any more mixed drinks. (He didn't look at it of course.) Quite some time later, it occurred to me that hey, these are not just potential drinks, but twisty things. Could I have the entire theme wrong? Yes, yes I could. And the next thing I saw that absolutely delighted me was ORGANOFCORTI. I taught Hearing Science in the speech pathology/audiology department once in 2007, and I surely never thought I would see that term again! And it is definitely not a cocktail. (But I just looked up NAUTILUS, and it is...though apparently twist-less.)

Wow. Great puzzle. Gaffney broke my brain over the weekend so I never got to dig into this one, but I love the mechanism. I wish I had spent the time - this was right in my wheelhouse!

I liked Peter's write-up in that he predicted nobody (except Karen) would recognize the fifth theme spiral but we'd be able to backsolve by starting from the letter O in the northeast corner.

I'm a bit miffed because I didn't notice that the five letters in the meta answer are in the same spiral shape. D'oh!