WSJ Contest — Friday, November 8, 2024

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

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.

 

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14 Responses to WSJ Contest — Friday, November 8, 2024

  1. Frank DeMayo says:

    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

  2. Mac Lane says:

    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!

  3. Simon says:

    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.

  4. David says:

    All those “nuts” are actually fruits. 🤣

  5. David L says:

    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.

    • JohnH says:

      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.

      • David L says:

        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.

        • JohnH says:

          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.”

  6. Iggy says:

    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.

  7. Bert says:

    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.

  8. EP says:

    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.

  9. Mike says:

    Harland Pepper from “Best In Show” was the first person to turn in a correct entry for this puzzle.

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