Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Follow the Money”—Laura’s review
WSJ Contest – 9.14.18 – Solution
Matt challenges us to find “an adverb describing how you need to solve [the contest puzzle].” Our first hints are the title — are we supposed to find money and then follow it? — and this central clue/entry:
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[31d: Pieces of ___ (old coins, and a double hint about how to follow the money): EIGHT.
I printed out the grid once I filled it, and yelled “Show me the money!” at it — and whaddayaknow? There’s the money — i.e. global currencies hiding in the eight-letter entries, of which there are eight (hence our “double hint”). There’s a twitter bot that satirizes tired adages like “there’s no I in team” so I’ve been on the general lookout for unlikely hidden words — I found EURO first, then referred to this handy reference to find some of the others:
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[17a: Obsessive-compulsive, e.g.]: NEUROTIC (EU)
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[21a: Local news hour, often]: ELEVENPM (Bulgaria)
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[57a: Court specialty]: TRIAL LAW (Iran, Yemen, et al)
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[63a: Run-of-the-mill]: ORDINARY (Iraq, Jordan, et al)
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[11d: Uses as a cover for]: DRAPES ON (Mexico, et al)
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[18d: Feature of all living cells]: RIBOSOME (Kyrgyzstan)
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[32d: 1980 tribute album to R&B great Stevie]: WONDERIN (North and South Korea)
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[37d: He played Robbie Douglas on “My Three Sons”]: DON GRADY (Vietnam)
That’s the first step! Next, follow the money — if you take the first letter after each currency, in order of grid position (see my marked up grid, left) you get the adverb TENDERLY — as in legal tender, or authorized currency. Follow the money to pieces of eight, tenderly. A few of the eight-letter entries needed to put this together were a tad obscure (RIBOSOME, DON GRADY), but overall I thought it fit together beautifully. Your thoughts?
I spotted EURO, PESO, RIAL, and DINAR pretty quickly, and I picked up the puzzle several more times looking high and low at the remaining long answers, but with no luck. I even took some stabs and surfed the Web, which I hate doing with a crossword. (Could there be a “deri” or an “onde” or a “rin”? Nope.) So glad everyone liked this one but way too obscure for me. I could have kept inventing words like that forever.
Oops, pardon. Memory failing after 3 days. I looked things up in RHUD, not Google. FWIW, I looked just now for SOM and DON without seeing currencies. Go figure. I’d have said that means highly obscure (when I’m not even talking MW11C), but obviously I’m in a minority, so I won’t insist.
JohnH, serious question: why do you solve my metas?
You hate every. single. one. I can’t remember one you’ve liked.
They’re clearly not your bag. So why solve every one, and then comment on them? It’s a big world out there.
Imagine a guy who hates a certain restaurant, every single meal, yet still goes back there week after week, then writes a new Yelp review after each meal, explaining how much he hated it.
People might ask: why does he keep going back?
To be fair, Matt, I don’t think he hates your metas; I think he hates all WSJ metas. (See https://crosswordfiend.com/2018/09/09/wsj-contest-friday-september-7-2018/#comment-365701; https://crosswordfiend.com/2018/07/29/wsj-contest-july-27-2018/#comment-361528; https://crosswordfiend.com/2018/07/15/wsj-contest-july-13-2018/#comment-359655 …)
He’s got to fill time somehow between his 30-ish trips to museums and symphonies every week.
Seriously, though, it seems like this guy just hates crosswords in general.
Or, rather, he’s got a certain knowledge base (which he considers “common knowledge”) and anything outside of this is completely and totally unfair. Hence the hatred of Googling. First ran into this guy complaining about a BADU and BBCARABIA cross, or something, claiming that it was totally unfair when BADU was certainly very much part of the culture and I thought BBCARABIA was strongly inferrable.
Some people just like to moan.
Matt, I’ve worked in restaurants all my life and can assure you your proposed scenario is not at all imaginary. I thought this puzzle was totally decent; there was a nice range of difficulty in finding each clue, and the meta mechanism was simple yet elegant. No matter the overall difficulty of the puzzle I’m always impressed with the precision required for it to work well.
Great analogy and clever puzzle!
Why doesn’t this comment have a like button? I’m conditioned to click buttons when I like things.
Hm. What to do?
Hm.
Dear Matt,
I like your comment. Thank you for your puzzles.
Sincerely,
Neal
I googled “international currency list,” got a nifty list that was surprisingly quick & easy to scroll through, & had them all in short order.
So many obscure currencies! Looked up currencies on google/wiki and none of those came up. Don Grady?? Not my favorite of Matt’s.
oops my mistake on Don Grady. Thought it was the whole clue not “dong”.
Francly I yen for more puzzles like this that are not riyal hard and can pound out before dinar.
But in truth I had not heard of 4 of the currencies and went to the same handy reference in wikipedia. I knew they had to be there since the other 4 were obvious.
Nice puzzle making by Matt to fit them all in the only 8 letter “words” in the grid, having pieces of eight in the clue, and making the answer, tenderly, match the theme also. Hats off!
Well played, Blair!
Simple enough to figure out with Wikipedia. I knew EURO, PESO, DINAR, RIAL and WON, but the rest required a list. TENDERLY is a nice way to tie it all together. So, all in all, it was fine — far from Matt’s best, but serviceable and fair.
My currency list was from when the USSR was still around so I had to check something newer to find som. The break-up of the Soviet Union has really helped crossword constructors. Hats off to Gorbachev!
I think this is my favorite Fiend comment.
I thought this was just about a perfect Week 2 level of difficulty meta.
The title was perfect and informative.
The inclusion of “adverb” overtly instead of being implied immediately had me looking for LY.
EIGHT at 31-d and eight symmetric entries of eight letters led directly to the theme answers.
Common currencies for me, PESO, DINAR, EURO, and DINAR put me on the right path. I recalled LEV as a crossword favorite.
I took a brief detour looking at TIC and ENPM before I found my L and Y at the bottom.
Put the letters I had and TENDERLY jumped out and I could then back solve DONG and WON.
The final level of enjoyment was, as a solving friend put it was “A real groaner at the end which I enjoyed.”
the only one that fell on the wrong side of obscure for me was SOM, which i’d never heard of and never even seen clued as the currency in a crossword. the others were familiar enough, the mechanism was great, and the answer was a real groaner. five stars.
a nit–I don’t consider the Euro to be an “old” currency.
Pieces of eight are old coins.
The double hint elements are: (1) coins (2) n=8
The double hint I intended (as Laura mentioned in her writeup) is that the eight 8-letter words are where to look.
Totally missed that! Duh! Good puzzle, just not that smart. Look forward to them as always! Boy you have to look at everything.
I really enjoyed this one. I like metas that are multi-layered both in terms of solving experience and post-solve revelations.
I first found all the currencies in the 8-letter answers. Their initials didn’t give me anything, so I decided to write down the list of countries they represent. However, I thought, with entries like Euro that would be too vague. And a few minutes later it hit me: Follow! And what’s more, the answer we get is also a pun! Noice!
WSJ metas have been on a roll lately. Yes, we’ve got a couple of super easy ones, but the last time it was a meh-ta for me was “Marking Time” and that was the prompt’s fault, not the puzzle itself. Thanks, Matt and Mike.
I give this puzzle a thumbs-up. A couple of the coins in question (especially SOM) may be a little obscure, but I think the elegance of the construction (eight eight-letter words, each containing the name of a coin), the fairness of the hints (“pieces of eight,” “follow the money”) and the aptness of the pun in the ultimate solution all make this one a perfectly satisfying solve. Ka-ching!
In WONDERIN I saw RIN, which is 1/100th of a Yen. Somehow I missed Won when going through the currencies of the world this weekend.
I found the eight hidden clues but missed the word spelled out after them. Luckily I traffic in puns so still submitted a correct response. Really enjoyed the puzzle even though I had to Google a few currencies.
I can’t believe that I missed this one. It seems so obvious now and I travel internationally enough that it should have popped. Five stars!
Matt, Rule #1, never feed the trolls!
Just what does that refer to? Rule #1 is never to respond to someone who uses the word troll. (Besides, I am actually droll.) I still think that the term “old” was misleading, but that does not take away from the overall puzzle.
I don’t believe it was referring to your comment.
You really make it appear so easy along with your presentation but I in finding this
topic to be really one thing which I think I’d never understand.
It sort of feels too complex and extremely huge for me.
I am taking a look forward for your subsequent publish, I’ll
try to get the hold of it!