Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Look Inside”—Laura’s review
This week, we are informed that “the answer to this week’s contest crossword is an 11-letter answer.” Okayyy, that’s a little recursive? Is there something to that?
WSJ Contest – 4.3.20 – Solution
I made short work of the grid, and noted that the center entry …
- [35a: Reserved]: SELF-CONTAINED
… was likely important. What does self-contained mean in the context of this puzzle? I thought, maybe there are letters “contained” by the letter I? or other letters “contain” the letter I (i.e. the “self’). Meh. I then set the puzzle aside for two days. Not feeling inspired, I asked Austin for the tiniest nudge, and he mentioned that the clues had a role to play. Was that where I was to “look inside”?
Ah! I knew some of those clues were weird. The first one I noticed was:
- [47d: Weapons of our medieval ancestors]: LANCES
(Not all of “our” ancestors likely hailed from medieval Europe, but that’s neither here nor there.) Then, because I just happened to be messaging with my friend Ken Stern, I noticed:
- [23a: Area of a two-master near the rudder]: STERN
Essentially, we need to “look inside” the clues to find their clued entries SELF-CONTAINED within them, like so:
[4a: Another word for a scalawag]: RASCAL
[17a: Stadium personage]: UMP
[23a: Area of a two-master near the rudder]: STERN
[26a: Any of the multitudes of the addlepated]: SOFTHEAD
[46a: Fire in the blood]: IRE
[51a: Made amends for what one did]: ATONED
[52a: Pitcher’s position in the lineup, typically]: NINTH
[10d: Idea that terrifies thanatophobes]: DEATH
[34d: “Season of Glass” singer]: ONO
[47d: Weapons of our medieval ancestors]: LANCES
[58d: You shouldn’t believe it]: LIE
Those all spell out RUSSIAN DOLL, which is our 11-letter answer. Also known as a matryoshka (Russian for “little matron”) doll, a RUSSIAN DOLL is also SELF-CONTAINED, in that it contains increasingly smaller versions of itself.
This was fun! But as Nadia Volvokov says, “Fun is for suckers.”
Russian Dolls are — aside from two words — Matrushkas, so the meta should have spelled out Matrushkas and not the american equivalent. sheesh
Construction of the contest sentence implied that it was more than one word.
Brilliant. Solved and enjoyed the puzzle but didn’t solve the meta.
Oh that’s pretty clever. Had no chance at it.
Great one. I was stuck for a long time until I was sitting down without the puzzle in front of me, but thinking about it. I remembered the weird end of the clue for ATONED: “…for what one did”
…hmmm and then aha!!
For me it was the weird phrase “our medieval ancestors” that turned on the light bulb.
Agreed that this is one of Mike’s best metas.
Took awhile for the aha but when it did it was sweet. Really loved the 26a set. Wow. This was a really inspired meta!
This was a good one. The wording of the prompt doesn’t bother me. I suspect it’s phrased this way so as to avoid indicating whether the answer is a word, phrase, or hyphenated construct.
I agree. And it signals the recursive nature of something that contains itself.
I was totally off on this one. I got stuck on “self contained” meaning body parts – SOFT HEAD, O LIVER (liver), DA NEC OO K (neck) H EARS T (ears), A TO N E D ( toe). Forehead slap this morning (pardon the pun).
I fell down that rabbit hole, too.
*sigh*
Not bad, but I was nowhere close. I did notice the wordiness of the clue for RASCAL and the redundancy of the answer being an answer, but after that I didn’t look back at the clues.
The only reason I got this was because I knew Mike Shenk often uses the clues in his metas.
Good to know. Thanks
“Look Inside”
Went down a Rabbit Hole over NINTH, it didn’t work, never went back to it
Due to the current situation, I got hung up in a rabbit hole with the disease-related words in the puzzle: Lister, enol,aerobe, sore, cure, strain (of a virus), and death. After narrowly escaping, I noticed the word “auto,” synonym for self. So then I looked for a 7 letter word for quarantine and came up with isolate. In fact, the letters that spell isolate are nicely quarantined in 4 corners of the grid and a bit socially distanced in the corner. So I submitted auto-isolate. After all, if you are isolated you have to look inside to find things to do… Whew! I can’t imagine finding those words hidden in the clues to find the right answer! Congratulations to all who did! Stay safe everyone!
Who the hell is Dane Cook? Not that it matters, since there was no way I was going to solve the meta.
Exactly. Who is he and why is he in this puzzle? Isn’t it interesting the ONO (Yoko) appears in about 1 out of 3 puzzles of all kinds. And her only fame is once being married to John Lennon.
That’s a mischaracterization.
Standup comic and actor. His stardom as a standup was brief, but he sold out Madison Square Garden.
Yes maybe it’s time for constructors to give us different clues for ono ie wahoo sushi… Would be a nice change of pace!!
Was hopelessly stuck in the rabbit hole of the three IN/IN crossings in the grid. Letters to either SIDE of two of those crossings spelled encouraging 4-somes like NAME and DENT. Kept thinking the crossings weren’t accidental and kept churning.
I can see that this great meta would have produced a fabulous CLICK upon finding that first hidden answer in its clue. BRAVO!