Solution to Evan Birnholzs Oct. 2 crossword, Building Blocks

Since you know I like metapuzzles, I wanted to point your attention to a fun metapuzzle suite by super-solver and friend-of-the-show Paolo Pasco called “Remedial Chaos Theory.” It’s six puzzles, each with its own meta answer, leading to a final seventh puzzle and overall mega-meta answer. Some of the metas are trickier than others, but trust me, the whole set is really cool and made me legitimately laugh out loud a few times while solving. If you get stuck, feel free to sign up for a free account at the XWord Muggles Forum, where you can reach out to others if you need a hint. Paolo might be able to give you hints, too, if you ask him.

Today’s puzzle has seven starred answers whose first words grow or shrink by one letter at a time:

When I first started this theme idea, I was going to work by building the letters of two different building-toy brands, LEGO and K’NEX. The letters of K’NEX won’t yield any phrases that start with a two-letter word KN, or a three-letter word KNE, so I would have had to contain those letters in other phrases like KNIFE FIGHT and KNEE SLAPPER and end with something like KNEX INDUSTRIES. But I thought it was amusing that LEGO could produce phrases whose first words could be any combination of those consecutive letters, so I built a LEGO set up and then tore it down. Sorry, K’NEX, for leaving you out of this. I promise Lego didn’t pay me to erase the competition.

Some other answers and clues:

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLqis8CzoKedX2d9c36OamdoaGJkwLC41K2gqKZdmsOiuoyboKummKS5u7%2BMqJqtZWJisLO70qyuqKqUYq%2B2tcudoKefXZe5sK%2FKrGY%3D