AVCX Contest, “Yo, I Heard You Like Crosswords”, July 28, 2021

The AVCX’s submission window for last Wednesday’s contest puzzle from Francis Heaney is closed. Here’s the answer!

AVCX 7/28/21 – “You, I Heard You Like Crosswords…”

The title of this one is a reference to Xhibit’s classic way of describing the updates made to a car on MTV’s classic program Pimp My Ride, where the shop had added a fishtank or 7 TVs or whatnot to your car because it blended with your interests as a person.  Luckily, since I like crosswords, Francis Heaney has put three crosswords in this crossword, so that I can crossword while I crossword.  As the flavortext goes on to state:

“They’re all the same size grid, so I combined all the clues (in no particular order).  After you’re done, you can use them to figure out what you need to do to enjoy this puzzle.

The main crossword itself is nice, chock full of fun fill like PHENOMENA (43A, “A more impressive way to say ‘things that happen'”, and also one of my favorite Argento films), UHAUL (62A, “Rental at the end of a lease?”), and QR CODES (10D, “Item scanned to get a menu”), but the meta in this crossword is literally meta this time, and comes from finding three 3×3 grids in the puzzle that satisfy the cluesets:

• 1A: Architect/Body part/Relative
• 4A: Author/Letter/Pronoun
• 5A: Brief visitors?/Escape, e.g./Garment
• 1D: Dine/Music players/Notice
• 2D: Athlete/Jewelry partner name/Marker
• 3D: Alcoholic drink/Rapper/State: Abbr.

Looking in the grid, the first of the mini-puzzles is in the upper left corner – “Architect” is Maya LIN, “Author” is Edgar Allan POE, and “Escape, e.g.” is SUV, with LPS, IOU, and NEV. filling in “Music players”, “Marker”, and “State: abbr.” going down.

In the middle, it’s EAR, ANY, and TIE going across (“Body part”, “Pronoun”, “Garment”), EAT, ANI, RYE going down (“Dine”, “Jewelry partner name” – that’s ANI of Alex and Ani, and “Alcoholic drink”)

And in the lower right corner, it’s SON, ETA, ETS (“Relative”, “Letter”, “Brief visitors?”) and SEE, OTT, NAS (“Notice”,”Athlete”,”Rapper”).

To get our meta answer, I initially tried placing all three 3×3 grids next to one another, and got nothing.  Then, looking at the grid, I looked down the diagonal of all three grids, which gets you LOVE NESTS, an apt answer to what you need to do to enjoy this puzzle, since there are three mini-crosswords NESTed in this grid.

And now you know.  Have a great week, all!