Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Show Them the Way”—Laura’s review
This week, we’re looking for a three-word phrase naming something parents hope their kids will avoid.
WSJ Contest – 10.9.20 – Solution
We have five themers and a hinty-seeming final across entry:
- [18a: Deduce]: PUZZLE OUT
- [24a: Winery part]: TASTING ROOM
- [38a: Middle of three baseball brothers]: MATTY ALOU
- [57a: Regatta entrant]: RACING YACHT
- [64a: Chemist honored with element 101]: MENDELEEV
- [75a: “___ Is Enough” (Dick Van Patten show whose title can be applied to certain grid answers)]: EIGHT
After solving the grid, I really had no idea how to “apply” the final entry, so I put this away for a while, and mentioned to a friend that I was struggling. “Just follow the directions!” he said, so I took another look — and there it was: if eight letters are enough for each themer, what is left over?
PUZZLE OUT
TASTING ROOM
MATTY ALOU
RACING YACHT
MENDELEEV
T OOM U CHT V … or TOO MUCH TV which is a three-word phrase naming something parents hope their kids will avoid and our answer.
I definitely remember watching Eight Is Enough in my tender years, but I did not remember how closely the opening credits — freeze-frame, actor name, gentle smile — resemble the most brilliant and demented piece of comedy from recent years, Too Many Cooks. Whoever made that certainly watched TOO MUCH TV.
Yeah, the short individual words were hard to parse. I said “What is Toom Ucht V?” and chased some wild geese (looking at you, ACHT!) for a while before circling back.
Wow I feel dumb. I thought of this immediately, but I thought the remaining 8 letters also needed to be a valid entry for the clue. This, of course, didn’t pan out, so I tried looking for other things. I just tried to make it too complicated!
Putting the puzzle away and coming back to it did the trick for me. And I’m learning that usually the Meta solution is a lot easier than I make out to be! Great puzzle!
THEM/THE in the title seems also to be a clue. Nice grid and meta
I’ll spare you all the ratholes I went down save this one: There is one answer which is INB. I found four ING embedded in other answers, two INE, and one INC. That’s eight (including the INB), so I figured it must be intentional, but could not make any sense of it.
I got temporarily waylaid by all the double-letter combos in the grid: MOTT’S, PUZZLED OUT, MATTY ALOU, MENDELEEV and friends. Not sure if that was coincidental or an intentional misdirect.