Bird Lives wrote: ↑Fri Dec 17, 2021 2:19 pm
On the board -- 50 to the left of me, 50 to the right, there I am, stuck in the middle with who, I don't know.
I know Matt says that he doesn't put red herrings in his puzzles, but I see a couple of them swimming around in the grid, and one of them could have been de-herringed with a single change of letter.
I couldn't be more specific pre-reveal, but now . . .
My first stab was to search for words that contained the 4-crossroads letters. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but EOLA at 58D and TENT as the final across entry, a place that often has a special significance. Surely this could not be coincidence. EOLA is just too weird a word (is it even a word?), and if TENT weren't part of the solution, it could easily have been changed to TEND, crossing with WEND. But it turns out that these two were
not part of the solution and just somehow swam inadvertently into into the grid.