"Shifty Schemers" November 11, 2022

[Cbaudhuin]

Ashore with a tiny bit of help from my 83 year old mother!
Sam Adam’s Octoberfest tonight!

[Bob cruise director]

Good evening muggles

Our finally tally is 21 on the ship and 129 on the shore.

Good luck to all, have a good week and don't forget the Tuesday 7:30 pm ET Zoom call to discuss the metas

[KscX]

Ashore after four week break. Good puzzle.

[rjy]

Nice visit with the Last Chance crew to snag juuuuust the right amount of nudging to peel off for a solve. Got the AHA, but Isaac brought out an after-dinner cocktail menu so I’ll hang at the bar in lieu of submitting

[Jade]

Finally ashore after some much-needed help from a few kind Muggles - thanks all!

[ReB]

Ashore after multiple nudges from the Last Call Zoom group.

[Magistra]

Bye-bye, Isaac! We had made a stupid mistake. Realized it by double checking some assumptions. On shore!

[mkmf]

Wow. The scales fell off at the last minute. What fun!! Hazy Little IPA already in hand.

[JeanneC]

Well, I’ve submitted an answer after throwing out the analysis I have used since Thursday afternoon.
Part of me just loves playing with one kind of construction that looks promising for a period of time and then saying “Nope, gotta try something else!”.
Good luck to all on winning the mug!
On to the MMM!

[Jeremy Smith]

LAS

[DrTom]

Ashore with a tiny bit of help from my 83 year old mother!
Sam Adam’s Octoberfest tonight!

We'll need a report on what she helped you with!

[escapeartist]

At sea with Isaac.

I think I was able to identify step one but didn't know what to do with it.

Not shifty enough this week apparently.

[Joe Ross]

[Joe Ross]

[Richard]

Congrats lo the solvers

Too tough for me.

[mheberlingx100]

Holy cow, I submitted the right answer. Total luck.

I thought the *shifty* referred to the clues that were two word clues starting with the same first letter, like Pen pal or Balky beast. The first letters of those clue answers were nonsense. But if I squinted my eyes and tilted my head and looked at the letters at a corner, I could get it to almost spell Plan. So that was my Hail Mary.

As Lefty Gomez reputedly said, “I’d rather be lucky than good.”

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

Maybe it was having AUTOS, ROAD, and BIKE in the gird, but I began the solve thinking about gearshifts. As we were looking for a four-letter word, I thought that could correspond to Park, Reverse, Neutral, and Drive. Scanning the grid, I see ATPAR: Hey, that's 'Park' with the K taking off! We've got NEWT in the lower right. Well, that's the first syllable of 'Neutral'. There must be a ROLE or something like it in the grid! No? Hmm. Well, I see ERR and VEE in a column, and those anagram to 'Reverse' with the S missing. And then you have ARRIVE, which is pretty close to 'Drive'! OK, those are all stretches, and they are stretching in different directions. But what about 'Low' for a gear? There's BELOW sitting smack dab in the middle! One of these must be leading to a gearshift themed mechanism...

And that's how I spent Saturday afternoon! I finally concluded I wasn't going to get anywhere, and went back to look at everything in a fresh light. That's when I noticed the four 'for example' s in the clues, as opposed to the one 'e.g.', and it was smooth sailing from there.

[Cindy N]

Thanks to a late nudge to look for a commonality among the clues, I made it ashore. Seeing ROAD CREW and PLAYER, I picked up on ROD CAREW right away. I should have figured it much sooner with the "pamphleteer" clue as it was just used in the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions last week.

[lacangah]

Hmmm... 'keying' off of the capital letters of the named people, and shifting one cell 'below' (per 30D), I came up with

Andrea - R
Tony Awards - O
Agnes - G
Bert - A
LeVar - I, E
Anne - N

which lightly anagrams to ROGAINE, and thus, HAIR!

This approach doesn't pass the elegance factor (I had to ignore PIUS, and it wasn't quite in a defendable order), but it seemed to be in the spirit of what was being sought.

Congrats to everyone who solved this! Have a great week, see you all at 4pm + epsilon on Thursday

[VanVeen]

This was definitely one of those that left you wondering how the heck the constructor figured it out.

I’m curious which name was first for other solvers. For me, it was Lance Ito. Pretty much by accident. I was running out of ideas and wondered “do you need to think up a famous writer? Artist? There are too many. And on the other extreme, how many famous judges are there?” I joked to myself, “the only one I can think of is Lance Ito” because it’s a pretty obscure name. And amazingly, that was it.

Amazing puzzle. And the title having the same number of letters as the name/job pairs was just icing on the proverbial cake.