Spoiler Sunday: The Bottom End That Almost Ended Me
My second erratum (or "whoopsie note"), and certainly not my last.
So right at the bottom of the Ubercross Abecedaria D is the thirteenth longest answer in the whole project and third longest in the D section—it’s 99 letters. I found out too late that it should have been 98.
Without giving it away, the answer is a quote from Frank Zappa about rock journalism—a different source but a similarly jokey definition. However, I made the mistake of absorbing it from a website that wasn’t quite careful enough—a site that got a single word of the quote wrong.
By the time I discovered the mistake, fixing it would’ve required me to rework not only the D-section, but substantial parts of the H-section too, thanks to the stitches. As you can see, the bottom of the big “D” is just five spaces away from the bottom of the whole D-grid. This left me little latitude. No easy tweak could fix the issue. I would have had to spend, at minimum, another day reworking stuff that had all been designed around the incorrect version.
With all due respect to improvisational musician Frank, I thought it might honor him better to improvise another solution.
The final clue reads:
Slightly incorrect version of a Frank Zappa quote defining rock journalism (the eleventh word in his original was "talk," and the fact that some online sources fudge it may prove his point)
When you can turn your mistakes into entertainment for the solver, that may be a better course than seeking perfection. I know I’m opening myself up to criticism here. That bottom entry (D3618-Across) is always gonna bug me a little. But it’s gettable, and making a puzzle isn’t about looking smarter than your solvers. It’s about looking smart, but making your solvers feel a little smarter than you.