crossword 3:15
meta 2 minutes
hello and welcome to week #301 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, “Is That A Titleist?”. the instructions this week tell us that we’re looking for a past or present champion at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. we had the following silly theme answers:
- {Johnny Bench and Yogi Berra, always looking on the bright side?} SUNNY CATCHERS.
- {Wants in on a hand, at the 11-year-old girls’ poker game?} ANTES SCRUNCHY.
- {Choreograph a dance of half-men, half-horses?} SYNCH CENTAURS.
- {Makes a shocking announcement at a diplomat’s building?} STUNS CHANCERY.
well, these are all anagrams of the letters ACCEHNNRSSTUY, and so is one former champion: nancy schuster, who won the first ACPT in 1978 and is now a tournament official. here she is in a photo by the other nancy s., with janet bradlow, norma mindell, and judie berger.
we didn’t get to see matt at ACPT this year, but i did see nancy and this puzzle was a nice way of honoring her. honestly though, i am still exhausted from the tournament (plus the double whammy of daylight savings), so i find that i don’t have a lot else to say. it was easy for a week 3, but for ACPT weekend i don’t mind that in the least.
anyway, the whole weekend was, as usual, a great deal of fun. i got to talk to many of you in person, so hello again! let’s hang out again at lollapuzzoola in august and then next year in stamford. cheers!
can’t tell if this is another of joon’s jokes that went over my head but this was a week 1…
same here
Joon has always been an over achiever, so maybe he set the clock ahead two weeks. :-)
I liked the crazy clues and answers, very nice tribute puzzle.
apparently daylight savings messed me up more than i thought. geez. so confused.
well, no wonder it was so easy for a week 3!
Can someone explain “Antes Scrunchy”, specifically the relationship to 11 year olds? Is it just the fact that they wears crunches in their hair? There must be more to it than that because girls of all ages wear them – I was expecting some reference to “Tweens” based on the clue (which obviously doesn’t fit with the meta). I finished the puzzle and got the meta, but this particular answer still has me wondering. Thanks.
Doh! I get it now… We’re anteing a scrunchy! I was following the pattern of the other clues – catchers, centaurs, and chancery were specifically described in their clues, whereas scrunchy is an item that’s desirable to an 11 year old. Makes sense now that I’ve twisted that around a bit.
This took me longer than last week – go figure! I was convinced that it was going to be initials. Saw three sets is SCs and one AS. When I looked at the link I thought it would be someone with AS initials who won 3 times in Stamford CT. Took me two days to shake that out of my head and see the anagram. Was feeling pretty dumb!
Also I have two daughters age 15 and 20. Both used scrunchies as Tweens and still do. The connection came immediately!
Note too that all the anagrams also match the 5+8 letter counts of NANCY_SCHUSTER. The hidden NYC in sunNYCatchers suggests another 5+8 ACPT titleist ELLEN_RIPSTEIN but that’s a (surely unintended) red herring.
i totally missed the 5,8 enumeration, but as you can already see, my brain was so scrambled i didn’t even know which week it was, so it’s not surprising that this escaped my notice.
Q. Know how to make a Week 1 really hard?
A. Solve the wrong puzzle.
Somehow when I opened the downloaded puz. file, up popped the BEQ Hair Curlers puzzle from a few weeks back that I had not gotten around to. Only after solving the puzzle and trying to figure out what the curled around h-a-i-r meant for quite some time did I return to mgwcc and realized that the titles were different. If a former champ had had the initials R.I., I would have submitted it and not realized my error.
All theme answers are 5,8!
Done on purpose? Wow.
One thing that I found interesting. 3 of the 4 clues were two words starting with S and then C. The fourth had SC together. She won in Stanford, Conn. Coincidence…….