41. TASTES Just Like It!

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It's the last Saturday in the month, so that means it's type for a meta! This one's actually smaller than the last one, since that was a bear to grid. See it below!

1. Puzzle #40 recap

Puzzle #40 answer: NOAH'S ARK

Correct entries: 28

Here's how success could have come your way:

1. The title obviously signals that "days" and "nights" will be important in some way, and I was expecting the TWELFTH to be an in with TWELFTH NIGHT, and then we even see OTHELLO going down for you fans of Shakespeare plays (or games with black-and-white tiles). There are other ins as well, especially knowing we have 8 letters in our answer.

There are symmetrical, and cumbersome to grid around, pairs of entries involving the words "day" and "night":

SAME (DAY), MOVIE (NIGHT)

OPENING (DAY), MID(NIGHT)

HEY(DAY), TWELFTH (NIGHT)

EVERY(DAY), GOOD (NIGHT)

2. While I want you guys to have a rocking good time doing the puzzles, since it should be more fun for the solver than the constructor, I do my utmost to minimize the size of the grid. If a 15-by-15 can hold everything it needs to, we don't need to go to a 15-by-21...so something must be up to merit that size!

I tried to get this down to a 15-by-19, and that was still quite a bear; even this required the black square percent going above 20, which is way too high in my book (I try to hit 18% max, and that's even pushing it a bit). Anyway, this cruciverbalist digresses.

The size of the grid was necessarily to begin the "second entry search," a common meta-nism but one that I still enjoy! Here's what we had, in the order their initials appear in the grid and not as the entries appear thematically. (Either is fine, as long as some spelling occurs in standard order in the end, I believe.)

EVERYDAY = "Commonplace" = NORMAL

TWELFTH NIGHT = "Shakespearean play" = OTHELLO

HEYDAY = "Certain peak" = ALP (This was one of the tougher ones, and I shout out @Abide for cluing assistance on this! And bonus shout out again to @Al Sisti for the test-solving as well! If something is in its heyday, it's at its peak.)

OPENING DAY = "Baseball fans enjoy it" = HOMERUN (go Phillies!)

MIDNIGHT = "Shade of blue" = SKY

GOOD NIGHT = "Parting words" = ADIOS

SAME DAY = "Speedy kind of DELIVERY" = RUSH

MOVIE NIGHT = "It can be held in a park" = KITE (The other tough one - and perhaps a bit more of a stretch, though I think it's fair! We're playing off "held" here, and a lot of communities - at least several in my region - will hold movie nights in parks as a way of people to gather outside and watch out mediocre cinema together.)

Put those letters together, and we get NOAH'S ARK, the answer to our meta (which connects to "40 days and 40 nights," which further gets a nod due to the SW entry).

And when the electricity went out, Noah was left in d'ark. ("How did I Noah he would post that?")

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2. Little to say as we start working on the next 40! What is hopefully a Level 2 (maybe 2.5?) can be found below.

Until next time, happy puzzling!

Mikey G

The answer to the meta is a bar food.