I had the title "Read Between the Lines" scrawled down for a few months but had nothing to do with it. And then I was like, "Oh! Of course." Yes, on particularly hard WSJ and MGWCCs, the failed metanisms for those are a wellspring for the future!
Explanation: The title says it all! Treating the "I"s as lines, the nine letters between them in standard top-bottom spell out SHELF-CARE, the answer to the meta, an apt pun on self-care, and what I hope to get on my vacation! I'm currently at 50 books read this year, which is a bit behind my pacing for my goal of 124 (100 plus year). Here's to reading! Let me know any great recs in the comments!
HeadinHome 2:12 · 2024-07-20T19:42:50.293Z
Had to reveal to finish the top right corner! ECHT is a completely new word to me, and did not know VAIO (and it didn’t come up when I googled “Sony brands” .. ?? Odd). I had ELSE for “alt.” (thinking “alternate”). So yes, the mechanism was a cinch, but the grid was actually kind of hard! (Kemba Walker was almost all cross-grid solving — just don’t know sports names.) Thanks for the Saturday diversion!
I have a weird habit of making grids harder than the metas, haha. I think that's happened before on WSJ! I would have qualified "echt" with something like a German city, since that's the language origin - but that word has come into English! Gabrielle Zevin's incredible book "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" used that, amongst tons of other amazing vocab words, in her inventive story about two video game programmers. That might have been where I learned about it as well!
Heh. I ran across ECHT just a week or two ago trying to constructa a crossword that fell by the wayside. Didn't help me remember though. I got this all by the cross clues. Merriam Webster page on ECHT is pretty fun read though.
It stuck in my mind mainly because there was much discussion about filling grids in upper or lower case and Sally (the original cruise director) said she couldn’t be expected to solve that one because she used lower case and dotted her i’s with little hearts like a schoolgirl so they didn’t look at all like lines :)
Complete coincidence! I do plan to back-solve all the WSJs down the line! That's wild - I wonder if anyone solves crosswords in lowercase. I'm capitals, all the way!
Dare I say, solving this was an ... absolute.... delight?
I was going to say as a level one it failed the "have the answer jump out at you as you solve on a small screen in bumpy car going 70mph over the Sierras and the wife yelling at you 'put down the damned phone and look at the view'" test, but then ... it utterly passed that test as the metanism jumped into sight.
Fun puzzle - enjoy your vacation!! Sorry I don’t have any recommendations, I barely read I’m so uncultured… the only culture I get is from yogurt
DIS 🤓4:40 · 2024-07-22T19:22:46.661Z
This should have been # 101. Other than that it really hit tome.
Steve M 42:08 · 2024-07-23T16:22:46.467Z
Briefly looked for things that could somehow be between the lines, but quickly spotted the “I”s. Nice one!
Meta World Peace 3s · 2024-07-26T18:28:07.512Z
It paid to have your blinders on when solving this week! I dearly want to try banana split OREOs if they ever return to the supermarket--birthday cake is my reigning fave.