The solutions to the Wacky Wordies appear to be:
| That's beside the point |
Higher education |
Every dog has its day |
| Mixed nuts |
Increase Mather |
Top of the morning |
| Vacant lot |
Back in my day |
Upside-down cake |
| Three little pigs |
Tree pruning |
Out of Africa |
| "Nothing left to do but cry" by Lulu |
The "to do but cry" part of the title of the song by Lulu is not
clued, and perhaps the title was abbreviated to the first two
words somewhere. And the last two boxes just tell you these are
Wacky Wordies. The initials spell THE MIT V. BUTTON. Not sure what
this means, though.
Then we have the blanks:
There is an HTML comment at the bottom of the page which says What
are you doing reading this? Go watch the movie!
First off, we don't know how solvers were meant to reach this
page. But the page was discovered in 2021, and a
thread on Reddit has a comment from a member of Palindrome
saying she found this page on her computer, suggesting it was
meant to be part of the Hunt.
There are 13 of these numbered sets of blanks and 13 Wacky
Wordies, but the blanks do not match the lengths of the wacky
wordie answers. It's not clear how they are meant to go together.
This file was available a couple years before the Wacky Wordies,
and some analysis was done on it, thinking it to be the whole
puzzle at that time. Some of the enumerations are difficult to
match, such as #6 (3 3 3 3 2 3 3) and #13 (7 3 3 5 4 2 4). #8 is
given with a comma and most sensibly matches the phrase "shake,
rattle and roll" and #6 only reasonably matches the phrase "let
the cat out of the bag." Given the comment, an attempt was made to
match this against script text, DVD chapter titles, etc, in some
dream-related movies, and against movie titles in general, but the
difficult ones again generally had no matches. One of the Wacky
Wordie answers is a movie: Out of Africa. I didn't find
matches for #6 or #13 in its script.
The extraction from these numbers is probably meant to work the
same way as in 19.7 Cryptography from
freshman year of this hunt; that is, we take all the letters that
fall on the 1s and anagram them into a word, then all the letters
on the 2s, and so forth. That means we are extracting a seven-word
phrase with enumeration 4 4 5 5 8 6 7.
We are told in the metapuzzle solution supplied with the new
archive documents that the final answer is AL.