Prime Directive

Thank you! Maybe I was prescient enough to make my "Week 4" a bit easier to combat the MGWCC (though, that seems like it's trending Week 3) and WSJ (trending Week 7).

That's the bees knees!

And that is an absolute, complete coincidence! The original title was simply "Prime Time," but DrTom and I were brainstorming ways to make the title further click to the answer. And "getting out of here" is certainly a directive! (One my students would like me to follow sometimes.)

I was wondering if someone would catch that! That likely clues that something may be going on over there, perhaps also in retrospect.

Ah, but Mike's is even harder to construct because all of his letters also had to fall at starts of crossing words given that the "numbers" were all clued answers. Additionally he had fewer letters to work with that way because he would run out of prime numbers much quicker than Peter. To come up with those words that left out the important parts of the answer and fit them exactly into a puzzle with just the right number of prime number "squares" and moreover to have the numerical part of the answer be a prime number itself...well; advantage Mike! It's the cat's pajamas (and no Ginger Cat I'm not talking about your onesies). Having had my share of "number squares are needed letters" puzzles, the amount of heartache and hair pulling they entail (before metas I had a full head of hair!) and how easy it is to go wrong...well this was a Herculean effort. (none of this is to demean the Muller puzzle which, with the number of letters he used, had to be equally as tedious to build)

My plan all along! Ginger approves, haha.

You are so glued to the black squares at that point. I constantly have to make sure that adding a black square doesn't change the number pattern.