Grid: 11 minutes; Meta: 8 more
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Nutcases” — Conrad’s writeup.
This we’re looking a four-letter word. I found the rabbit when I spotted CASHBAR/NEW, a.k.a CASH BARN EW. Cashew was the nut encasing barn. There were four nuts encasing words, and each contained a word that matched another grid entry:
WSJ Contest – 11.10.2024
- CASH BARN EW -> SILO (Farm structure)
- PE STORES CAN -> EATS (Puts away
- FIL LINE BERT -> EDGE (Boundary)
- AL GRAY MOND -> DRAB (Like an overcast day)
The mapped entries spell our contest solution SEED. Loved this methodical meta by Mike. Everything in its right place. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
Fun puzzle. One of the few I’ve gotten to solve the meta in a long time. Must be relatively easy if I got it lol
Fun one!! Mike’s Metas are always so precise! I love there was no ambiguity here. Either you got it or you didn’t. Fun one!
Thanks Conrad for the write-up. I agree. This was a clever STUNT. Took me a while to figure out FILBERT as I am not much of a nut eater. Clean, satisfying meta. Nicely done, Mike.
All those “nuts” are actually fruits. 🤣
“Fruitcase” just doesn’t ring, though.
My wife thinks “fruitcake” is more appropriate- as a description of meta solvers…
They’re all culinary nuts, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_nuts
I rarely try metas but I had a go at this one because Eric H said a couple of days ago it was fairly easy and would be a good introduction for those of us who don’t care for metas (see my comment yesterday).
I had the right general idea: either words for nut enclosed in other words, or nuts enclosing something else. But I didn’t get the solution because I was looking for nuts involving single words, not pairs of adjacent words.
Ah well. Not my cup of tea, these kinds of puzzles.
That was my experience as well, expecting hidden words but not seeing them. Of course, I also started by looking at longer entries as potential themers. Finally I scanned the whole puzzle looking for nuts but didn’t catch the starts and ends of them far apart. Instead I saw PESTO as possibly related to pine nuts (and DIETS to eating well generally, although I myself can’t eat nuts), but its symmetrical counterpart, EBERT, ruled that out.
So, as in week-in, week-out before, I was too dumb to get it.
I noticed PESTO and wondered if that was part of it.
I don’t think it’s a matter of being dumb. Metas appeal to a certain kind of puzzle-solving mentality. It’s like those IQ test questions I remember from years ago — they give you a series of numbers and ask you to figure out the next one. I hated those and was terrible at them.
Thanks. I don’t myself feel dumb, to be honest, and I was great at tests like that. Got me into some great schools. I prefer to read hard books that present a puzzle, too. Today I was trying to refresh my old-age memory of field theory, although I fear it’s not coming back, and I’m fond of philosophy and lit crit or theory, where basically you’re asking “what’s THAT about?”
But yes, metas are a very special kind of problem, very open ended. I think of it as my asking what sort of thing I’m looking for and hearing in reply, “you’ll know it when you get it.”
I had a suspicion that the answer was SEED, and I saw CASH, CAN, FIL, and MOND but it took a few minutes for the title to sink in (Mike is usually literal) and I finally saw EW, PE, BERT, and AL. And my suspicion was correct.
I thought they were related as “milk,” but then this is my first time ever doing the meta, and ddin’t realize the second step was usually puzzle related.
Agree with all that this was a very nice, clean meta. And, not previously mentioned, it even included Mike’s ‘signature’ use of 71A as a meta-related confirmation: ‘seed’ is alternative answer to the clue.
Harland Pepper from “Best In Show” was the first person to turn in a correct entry for this puzzle.