By Prof. McGonagall weeks belong to a set, such that their an- swers form this meta. Those answers are Solution to STEPS TOLD: reproduced below for your convenience. Thegridwiththewhiteandblackcircles Especially now, without a title or flavor- (ignoring the letters for now) is the Nikoli text to give outright hints, it is important logic puzzle ‘‘Masyu’’. Solving that puzzle to keep in mind Rule 9: Always be on the yieldsapaththroughthegrid. Takingeach lookout for themes and patterns. Para- letteralongthatpathspellstheinstruction graph breaks in a block of text, repeated ‘‘MAKE A CRYPTIC CLUE BY USING THE words or letters, apparent typos or non- REMAINING LETTERS IN ORDER’’. standard word selections -- these all can When read left to right, top to bottom, point to clues. Keep your eyes open, and the unused letters in the grid spell the investigate anything that looks unusual. phrase ‘‘SILLY SEATS RING RED PEERS’’. Enjoy your last day of class, and as This is read as a cryptic crossword clue: always, if you think you have the answer, the definition is ‘‘peers’’, and the wordplay submit it on our website below. tells you to mix up the letters of ‘‘seats’’ We’ll see some of you this Sunday at and place them around the letter ‘R’ (for the Berkeley Mystery Hunt! red). This results in the answer, STARES. The title is another wordplay clue to the METAPUZZLE same answer -- ‘‘told’’ indicates a homo- phone of ‘‘stairs’’, a synonym of ‘‘steps’’. DOTING Congratulations to Jevon Heath and REDUB Melinda Fricke, who first submitted the COLORED correct answer to this puzzle. ONES STARTING This now brings us to the metapuz- REDSTAR zle, a new puzzle consisting solely of the COSTARRED answers to all previous puzzles. As we STARES mentioned in the first column, the eight puzzles we have presented over the past http://puzzle.berkeley.edu 1.