Title: “Double Meaning”
Prompt:The meta for this puzzle is a famous band.
Answer: U2
Season 10 of the Muller Music Meta starts now! Coming up on a decade of these beauties; I’ve enjoyed blogging them immensely, and thanks to Pete for producing them. Impressive that his ideas in the most recent seasons are as novel and intriguing and those of the first few seasons. Not an easy thing to engineer, but engineer it he has.
The opener for this season is a slow pitch right over the heart of the plate, a suitable confidence-builder for January. With over 600 correct entries so far, which I believe is a record, it looks like just about everyone knocked it out of the park.
The four obvious (by length) theme entries are:
17-A: [“Capeesh?”] = DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
32-A: [Forever, after “in”] = PERPETUUM
42-A: [Range with infinite gradations] = CONTINUUM
57-A: [State where there’s no head of state] = POLITICAL VACUUM
But there are also a couple of bonus entries, much shorter:
5-A: [E-cig company whose name sounds like a well-known singer] = JUUL. The singer being of course Jewel (Kilcher).
64-A: [Capital of Greenland] = NUUK
So each of those entries contains two U’s in succession, making U2 our contest answer.
4.15 stars for a gentle beginning puzzle, but we all know he’s going to rev the engines up soon enough. I haven’t had a perfect year in quite a while, so I’m determined to make it happen in 2021. Who’s with me??
Thanks Matt
We did indeed break 600, and that’s definitely a record (470 was the previous high).
The first three this year will be pretty easy…and then a gentle slope to November where I plan to challenge that perfect record if you still have it :)
Thanks for blogging every single MMMM!
Pete
Had a doh moment, as I first spent a little time looking at letters above, below, or around the UUs! Liked it anyway!
It was indeed easy as a meta, but as a feat of engineering it was elegant: note that there are no U’s in the puzzle other than the doubled ones.
thanks for noticing!
With or Without U…
If that turns out to be the mega meta …
My first MMMM, and one of my first metas ever. I, too, looked at the nearby letters and then started thinking about bands that start with “W” (double U) until I somehow stumbled upon the answer. I’ll keep trying, but I fear that slope Pete mentioned, no matter how gentle, may get too steep for me.
I’m a MMMM veteran and I, too, was fixated on “W” and never got past it. I can’t stop kicking myself, but at least I feel a little bit better knowing I wasn’t the only One.
Rachael, do NOT kick yourself: I too had the same problem at first, going so far as to wonder if the answer was The W’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_W%27s), or possibly Whitesnake (since a lot of their albums covers feature prominent “Ws”), or even the Wu-Tang Clan, who have released the album “The W” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_W). It’s only when I scrolled through Britannica’s “List of Bands” (www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-bands-2026814) in search of famous “W” bands (The Who, maybe?) that I chanced upon U2, four lines above the Ws!