Listen With Others

“Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s … Awinger?!”

So … if you set off looking for a suitable jumble of all 50 U.S. state abbreviations – AL, AK, AZ, AR etc. – to be used on this puzzle’s missing state’s Midnight News sponsored by Minnesota Manganese (aka MN-MN-MN-Mn), when would you cut your losses?  This is when I did …

MN-MN-MN-Mn:
“Kindly sack mad Kamikaze democrats which vow to thwart savvy Donald J Trump in invoicing Mexican Wall fantasy”
[100 characters]

I strongly suspect you can do better.

Back to the puzzle:

I soon added the coastlines and the USA’s two land borders using the DCLX provided and thought I was close to finishing.  However, choosing precisely which 54 cells Awinger had in mind was a little of a challenge – I finally opted for giving Texas a bit more coastline and Mexico reaching the sea to its east (rather than extending the Pacific coastline up alongside Canada, as that gave Alaska some sea to its east which seemed wrong!).  Also the positioning of MN for Minnesota wasn’t obvious, but on my map it looked better placed just to the east of the divide between the Dakotas, where it meets all the criteria without straying into Canada.

A really enjoyable puzzle with some fun North American hints in the clues along the way!

Cheers,

Tim / Encota