XWord Muggles Forum

madhatter5 wrote: ↑Tue May 18, 2021 6:18 am Solution:
SLATE -> ROCK

I went the obscure route here...

STELA -> Rock

Bummer. I was perfectly content in my rabbit-hole in some other corner of the meta-verse on this one. Even looked at the nudges and thought, "Yep, did that, did that...what am I missing?"

I wasn't taking the SPINNING TALES prompt literally enough. I found 6 "tales" (films, novels, etc.) in the clues and was trying to anagram their grid entries assuming I'd find works by a particular author, or maybe an author's name itself. I even had some confirmation in that one of the two-letter entries (NW and SE corners) was used...just the wrong one.

Cool puzzle @madhatter5! Wish I had my cryptic hat on a little tighter.

Ugh. I got that SPINNING meant to anagram, but then I saw that the long answers were all two words, and I took TALES to mean "the second word of a two-word answer." That led me down the rabbit hole of trying to anagram GREENS, LENNON, CAR, and FUEGO into something meaningful (spoiler: you can't). And then I looked for other multiple-word answers and ended up with a pile of them.

The answer is BRONTA

B lue greens (Teals)
R ock (Slate)
O ld (Stale)
N ick (Steal)
T iniest (Least)
A rmored CAR (Tesla)

The Bronta sisters (Masha, Sasha, and Kasha). Their many books, such as the one about the ditzy Indian girl (Jain Airhead), soared to withering heights on the best-seller list. Their oeuvre was of such large and diverse word-choice that it became the basis for a source for synonyms, now known as the Brontasaurus.

I solved, but needed some extra nudges so didn't submit. But in refreshing my memory on "lepton", I stumbled across quite the appropriate page.

https://particleadventure.org/leptons.html