The Lamps & Lanterns Hunt: Clue #3

Two morsels might make a meal...

…you may have to rewind the reel. [Image: Dall-E 3]

Hello, hello!
The third clue for The Lamps & Lanterns Hunt is here! It comprises additions to two crossword prompts, a video, and some musings.

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The Additions (in italics)

1. 9 Across: a fictional creature that inspired the name of a famous masked dance group

2. 2 Down: The Book of ______; a Supernatural second name

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The Video

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The Musings

In the second clue, I mentioned breaking down a problem into smaller, more manageable parts.

I used this sentence: If it’s too big to swallow, break it down into morsels.

The reverse of this sentence can also be an essential way of thinking about problem-solving, as two morsels might make a meal.

Connections, my busy friends… sometimes connecting two things can reveal so much.

Of course, you need to be able to make them in the first place, to go back and spot the pieces that fit together.

The other thing I wanted to discuss was how crosswords allow us to step back and solve ‘around’ the problems.

Say you are banging your head against the proverbial wall to solve a prompt. And, no cigar.

So, you may ditch it for a while and deal with other prompts. And if you play your brains right, the letters from those other answers can help you return to the cigar.

Of course, it is trivial when one says it for crosswords. But that changes when you take them as a metaphor for problem-solving in real life.¹

Crosswords can teach us a lot about breaking deadlocks and using constraints to our advantage.

Incubation effect (‘ditch it for a while’) and indirect approaches² (i.e., the aforementioned solving ‘around’ the problems) seem to be baked into crosswords.

And, of course, there’s also something to be said about Systems Thinking and the interconnectedness of problems.

Ah, well, maybe some other time. In the meantime, hit me up for clarifications and banter.

Love,
waveman

1. And, mind you, whoop! is about that, too. It is a problem-solving toolkit masquerading as a weekend scavenger hunt.

2. Sometimes, a direct assault on a problem might not be effective. We may have to approach it with care and finesse. That’s akin to building contextual support for a particular crossword prompt by getting crossing letters from other prompts.