Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Measure Twice, Solve Once — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for a five-letter adjective. There were five long theme entries, each fifteen letters long:
- BEHINDTHESCENES: [Away from public view]
- ROYLICHTENSTEIN: [Noted pop artist]
- CATCHMEIFYOUCAN: [DiCaprio/Hanks movie]
- THANKSGIVINGDAY: [Time to talk turkey]
- PERSONIFICATION: [Very essence]
Matt was riffing on a “measure twice, cut once” theme. Keeping measure in mind: I bounced around the grid looking for a signal, and I found none. I measured the lengths of the themers: each was 15 letters long, with varying word lengths. For example: BEHIND THE SCENES (6,3,6).
WSJ Contest – 12.15.2024
I found zero signal in the grid, so I check the clues. LSD’s stood out: Big hallucinogen. Why big? Same as AROAR’s clue: Making cat noises. Two very odd clues.
My meta solving experience has taught me to note oddly worded clues. Meaning: stop when you see one and write it in your notes. It’s easy to rush right past them. I now had two and noticed that both were 15 letters long. And Making cat noises (6,3,6) followed the same word pattern as BEHIND THE SCENES (6,3,6). Measure twice.
I had the rabbit: there were five 15-letter clues, with words matching the lengths of the theme entry words. Here they are in theme entry order:
- AROAR: Making cat noises (6,3,6) -> BEHIND THE SCENES
- LSD: Big Hallucinogen (3,12) -> ROY LICHTENSTEIN
- IVAN: Lendl up at the net (5,2,2,3,3) -> CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
- KNAVE: Unscrupulous man (12,3) -> THANKSGIVING DAY
- ERGO: Consequentially (15) -> PERSONIFICATION
The first letters of the mapped grid entries spell our contest solution ALIKE. Solvers: please share your thoughts. I’ll end with a non-thematic Christmas song I heard in London last week.
Very clever. Didn’t solve it. I felt like Clue 14A was mocking me.🙄
I’m still new at this,so I thought 14a:How did it take me so long to see that & 2d:Italy’s longest river in full made me think long = lanky. Seeing AHHH was odd and led me astray. Out of 6 puzzles I’ve gotten only 1 correct. Still fun trying.
General tip for solving these: the answer is never going to come down to just one random clue. As the write up shows, it often involves the theme answers. If it doesn’t, or if there are no obvious theme answers, it’ll involve many other answers in the grid, or many of the clues.
What a great meta. If I could have spent the rest of my life, I might have gotten it, i.e., if I live to be 100. I at least considered that the clues might be relevant. Congratulations to those who solved it, and to the constructor as well.
For us, not a chance. Looking forward to next eeek 😬
Never in a million years.
Had to squint to count letters. Headache inducing. “Big hallucinogen” jumped out at me too but only because it reminded me of the campy Lana Turner movie about LSD called The Big Cube.
I thought maybe we were looking for types of measurements or words that mean size, think coffee lingo: SHORT, HALF, BIG, SINGLE, LONGest, GRANDe. Etc. (I was doing this at Starbucks. lol.) That got me nowhere. Got sidetracked by FRANKENSTEIN and LICHTENSTEIN and FRANKINCENSE (was SCENE an anagram?)
Glad you got it Conrad.
P.S. Does anyone ever check that other WSJ contest forum? Yikes. so many yacht-owning, golf-playing, martini-drinking, braggadocious hotshots!
Simon, to answer your post script question – Yes :)
Indeed!
You should probably get some glasses if you get a headache from counting letters! :-)
I did it on my phone. Maybe I need a bigger phone. :)
They’re obsessed with how fast they can solve it. Solving it and posting that you did on page 1 is the new badge of honor. A lot depends on what time zone you live in!
A time-consuming diversion on this one:
67d: Jensen Huang, notably. Not notably to me, so I looked him up, and he is the CEO of Nvidia. THANKSG IVINGDA Y has Nvidia anagrammed into it, along with an extra G. I spent too long looking for other such instances. I then tried looking up 5-letter adjectives with G as the fourth letter to back-solve, but it looked like those adjectives were ending in Y, and there was no Y in PERSONIFICATION.
I never would have thought to match grid word counts with clue word counts. The title only seems obvious in hindsight.