XWord Muggles Forum

KayW wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 4:25 pm
Oh and earlier in the weekend, BABEL popped into mind as a WAG. It's a historic place, and sort of supported by GEELONG GREETING/HAINAN HI.

BABEL was my Hail Mary - I found consecutive letters (DEF, NOP and STU) in clues for grid words that started with B, E and L. Tried my best to get it to work, but it didn’t happen.

A rabbit hole I haven't seen mentioned: I was trying to make sense of the longer entries, and after a while I fixated on STENCILS (sort of like the pirate's treasure map meta with the three X's). I went so far as to print out a new copy of the puzzle and cut out all the A's, B's, and C's to make a stencil, and then tried placing it in various positions on the other copy to see if the holes picked out any phrase that would lead me to the answer. No luck, and it left me with a bunch of little white squares of cut-out paper littering my home office.

Meg wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 12:30 pm After Australia and China, I initially thought Burma for the B, but no way did Matt hide 5 things related to Burma anywhere in the puzzle. The letter change is a nice week 4 twist and the hardest to find for me was the animal. Am I sure CAPYBARA isn’t in there somewhere? The meta gods were smiling this time.

It would have been hard to choose among all those Burmese sports stars.

ky-mike wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 1:23 pm My nit on this is that Rio isn't the full city name, so I was stuck on changing loges to Lages (a real Brazil city name). Then it was a matter of whether to take first letters from changed names, or the letters taken out or the letters added in. Tough one. Am looking forward to a Week 1 again on Friday.

Nobody said that the answers were full city names. You could think of the unstated category as "what a city is called." Perth is known as Perth, Xian as Xian, and Rio de Janeiro as Rio. Like Vegas, St. Pete, LA, etc. People from Rio are known as Cariocas, not Cariodejaneirocas.

Babel was my first guess, but that was nothing but a guess.

I ended up submitting Burma with what felt like a reasonably solid click. I had all the Australia and China answers so knew I needed a B country. I did look at the other rabbit holes mentioned and didn't find anything. Some time this morning, I got to thinking about all the people who were looking for "dressing" in the WSJ grid and wondered if I was doing the same thing here. When I saw on the map that Myanmar nee Burma was between Australia and China geographically as well as alphabetically, it just seemed to fit and I thought I didn't need to keep looking when a perfectly appropriate answer was right in front of me.

Congratulations to those who got all the way to Zaire. I don't think I'd have got that one even with more time. I'm so used to seeing meaningless coincidence in the short answers that I can't say I'd have followed up even if I'd noticed one or two.

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:35 pm

Meg wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 12:30 pm After Australia and China, I initially thought Burma for the B, but no way did Matt hide 5 things related to Burma anywhere in the puzzle. The letter change is a nice week 4 twist and the hardest to find for me was the animal. Am I sure CAPYBARA isn’t in there somewhere? The meta gods were smiling this time.

It would have been hard to choose among all those Burmese sports stars.

What? You never saw U Thant play chinlone?

I've never been gladder that I didn't have time to work on a meta...

And as if missing the MGWCC were not a big enough disappointment for one day, they finally announced who won the seat on the civilian space mission, and it's not me.

I did not solve, though did get a chance for an AHA. A friend pointed out there were 5 things from two different countries. I didn’t see anything that popped out. Then I thought « ok there are two athletes let’s see if there is a third. » I kept looking for the athlete near the other two (since there was a one across near one down thing going on, but no luck. Then for some reason I saw PILE and thought “hmmm if I replace the I with an E I get PÈLE, could that be”. Let’s see he was from Brazil....WAIT A MINUTE Australia, China, and the B is! Took a while to find the other words (AÇAÍ and BOA the hardest) but there they were and ZAIRE as well. I just wish I had seen the connection myself so I could have claimed a solve. Still it was VERY elegant and at least I am not alone on one of the 23 islands!

One of the things that bugs me about MGWCC puzzles is that Matt doesn't seem to believe in doing anything to warn solvers away from the plentiful red herrings that lead them to plausible-but-wrong answers. Case in point here.

How I got to BURMA after spotting the Australia and China entries:

You can always petition Matt to accept an alternate answer, though right now he might be just sitting down to some prime udder after taking his roars for a walk.

Surprised to see some negative comments here. Maybe I'm biased, but I thought the meta was really well done. It's a week 4, so it's supposed to tax your brain. Finding A and C was pretty straightforward, but finding the B elements was quite the challenge, and certainly not obvious. I felt like I got a workout there. Kudos to Matt for an imaginative meta.

markhr wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 1:23 am Surprised to see some negative comments here. Maybe I'm biased, but I thought the meta was really well done. It's a week 4, so it's supposed to tax your brain. Finding A and C was pretty straightforward, but finding the B elements was quite the challenge, and certainly not obvious. I felt like I got a workout there. Kudos to Matt for an imaginative meta.

I didn't even see that there WAS an A and C so you saying "Finding A and C was pretty straightforward" is a nonstarter for me.