A place to discuss the WSJ Weekly Crossword Contest and other "meta"-style crosswords
https://xword-muggles.com/
Well they were clues that could be answered by EWE but apparently not anyone else. Judges "shearing" sheep, good sir that sounds ominous and makes me quite glad that our paths did not cross, or at least not where I might be up before you (oh, and don't try the "Why what time do you get up", I've seen all the old comedies too).
Yeah, that's the one that caught my attention first - like one of those A-OO-GA horns in my face -- so thankfully, I never had to see all the great rabbit holes and herring traps others did. Even when I knew what it was going to be, I couldn't send it in until I found that other "E"... and when I saw the "B.A." clue, first I laughed, then I submitted. Still wasn't fast enough to beat Laura though...TMart wrote: ↑Tue Apr 21, 2020 5:18 pm “Be home with honey” was what broke it open for me. I noticed that early, but inexplicably went down a bunch of other rabbit holes before I went back to it. I got hung up too much on “In your face” as some sort of meta clue. No obvious themers and a bunch of strangely worded clues should have pointed me in the right direction sooner.
I got caught with two ho's once, with the result that I got paperwork that told me I was no longer welcome to "be home with honey." (of course that's not true, but when you set it on a tee...)BarbaraK wrote: ↑Tue Apr 21, 2020 6:54 pm Reading about all the rabbit holes others found, I'm feeling more lucky than smart. I was keeping an eye out for repeated bigrams, so I marked the two ho's in "Be home with honey". After not finding anything useful to do with the ones from the grid, that clue caught my eye and I remembered hive and the rest was history.
The one I was least sure of was the goo. I looked through the grid for other options and only found SAP, and thought maybe since that's basically what maple syrup is, but YOLK seemed more direct. And when I put them it grid order, it was obvious.
And there's the reason for the multiple wedding songs....Al Sisti wrote: ↑Tue Apr 21, 2020 8:50 pmI got caught with two ho's once, with the result that I got paperwork that told me I was no longer welcome to "be home with honey." (of course that's not true, but when you set it on a tee...)BarbaraK wrote: ↑Tue Apr 21, 2020 6:54 pm Reading about all the rabbit holes others found, I'm feeling more lucky than smart. I was keeping an eye out for repeated bigrams, so I marked the two ho's in "Be home with honey". After not finding anything useful to do with the ones from the grid, that clue caught my eye and I remembered hive and the rest was history.
The one I was least sure of was the goo. I looked through the grid for other options and only found SAP, and thought maybe since that's basically what maple syrup is, but YOLK seemed more direct. And when I put them it grid order, it was obvious.
Same here. But when I'm stuck, one of the things I look for is signs of forced entries, and USYE is about as forced an entry as you can get. There were other ways to do that corner using real words, especially if you change BRUNCH to BRANCH. So I was sure that it was YOLK.