Joni Mitchell's song "Both Sides Now" is a beautiful song with amazing lyrics full of deep melancholy. On a personal level, I actually have a childhood memory of my father playing the guitar and singing this song. Only problem is I misheard the lyrics and thought he was singing about looking at both sides of clowns, which didn't make much sense to me at the time! And now the song (and not that memory!) has inspired this meta, the answer to which is a 7-letter word. Answer & explanation: https://www.xword-muggles.com/viewtopic.php?p=178941#p178941
Check out "The MOAT Mini Pack of Marching Bands" here: https://www.ephesusscroll.com/about/interest4.html. US$5 gets you 7 Marching Bands which, hard enough on their own, now contain metas too. And once again there's a mega-meta!
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Ooh... Tough one. Was stuck on COOL DAY FOR DIMBUS YC RUELIN' for a very long time. DIMBUS rhymes with nimbus and maybe I should switch to last do letters half way through and get MY ETTH NREW IN POER YD DAN PICK. Dan picks at something? Eventually the DIM/LIT ate at me and the Bus? Truck? Bus? and what the heck is YC to ... BUSY eventually knocked through.
Well done. My rabbit hole was that the two Queen tracks you mention were A- and B- sides of the same 45 (so I thought maybe we were looking for a song that took up both sides of a 45).
(Freddie Mercury was pissed that every fan dollar spent on his masterpiece was split with Roger Taylor, who wrote the B-side.)
Very nice! I was looking for a song/lyrics with called COOL DAY FORD IM BUSY CRUEL IN when it hit me, "Hey that is seven words!!!" I had a heck of a time with FORD and IM until I ran through the puzzle the 10th time and saw ANTI and realized it could be FOR and DIM when, contrarily, the light went on. Fun solve.
There it is! I got Step 1, but then went to Google to search for Joni Mitchell lyrics... Then I remembered NIGHT and IDLE in the grid, and I knew what I needed to do from there. ;D Thanks, Ben.
HeadinHome 🤓1:17 · 4 months ago
Phew… I was worried I was going to need to know a lot of songs and their B sides! I’m still not sure where the “E” is coming from… Exit? (All the others are opposites; EXIT doesn’t seem like the opposite of IN). But 6 out of 7 was enough to get to the finish line. Thanks!
Very nice. Took me a while to notice COOL DAY FOR DIM BUSY CRUEL IN, and then I got hung up for a while with the fact that many of these have synonyms or could be alternate answers for clues- like CRUEL/EVIL, DAY/FRI (both part of TGIF), etc. I thought it was going to be taking like- maybe the first letters of synonyms, the last letters of antonyms- or vice versa- continuing with the "both sides" theme. Took me a while to shake that path- EVIL and FRI really had me hooked!
Carolyn 3s · 4 months ago
Clever! Took a bit of thinking and looking, but nice AHA.
MatthewL 🤓8:24 · 4 months ago
Needed the nudges, but finally got there. Thanks for the puzzle, Ben!
Definitely needed nudge 3, but got it fairly speedily after that. Once I realized that the words didn't form a sentence I went looking for alternates. Initially paired CRUEL with EVIL but eventually figured out the opposites idea. Had to backsolve the U, but that wasn't too tough. Fun aha, once I had a clue how to start. Thanks. :)
omnilynx 🤓10:16 · 4 months ago
This one went pretty smoothly for me, didn't even need nudges! Maybe because I already liked that song.
Qmark 3s · 4 months ago
Thanks Ben...no nudges needed.
Sharkicicles 2s · 4 months ago
Needed the letters nudge but fell pretty quick after that. Thanks Ben!
whimsy 🤓10:20 · 4 months ago
Needed the last nudge and worked backwards from that. And speaking of working backwards, I concentrated on the "longs" at first -- I took the end of the second entry in those rows, and brought it around and finished it with the beginning of the first entry. So I got RA/DIO, ERR/OR, READ/OUT.... before that broke down. At least the Crossword Rabbit might have been proud of my efforts..
Thanks, Ben -- intricate construction, but tough for me!
lukadisgre 🤓6:44 · 4 months ago
Took me embarrassingly long, but thanks for introducing me to a nice song!