SPECIAL ZOOM EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT!: This coming Friday, September 17th, at 8:30 PM ET, Pete Muller and I will be holding a Zoom talk to celebrate 10 years of the Muller Monthly Music Meta. We will discuss the history and future of the feature, analyze a couple of favorite MMMM puzzles from the past decade, and Pete will take questions, both those sent in before the talk and from solvers who want to ask Pete a question live.
More details forthcoming from both Pete and myself this week, but mark your calendars for this Friday, Sept. 17th, 8:30-10:30 PM. Should be a lot of fun!
Now, on to this month’s meta…
Title: “Odd Men Out”
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is an alternative rock band.
Answer: Muse
Getting late in the year and fearful of PYRMs (Perfect-Year-Ruining-Metas). This one fell quickly for me, though, so 9-for-9 now in 2021 and loving it.
Four clearly-indicated theme entries from Pete, which are:
20-A: [Desert surfers (4)] = SANDBOARDERS. Surf’s up, dunes!
32-A: [Fight from behind (2)] = UPHILL BATTLE
40-A: [Mule-like quality (3)] = STUBBORNNESS
53-A: [Sonic backdrop (1)] = AMBIENT NOISE
With a cue from the title, I crossed out every other letter in the theme entries (the odd-numbered ones, of course), which left me with this:
ADORES
PILATE
TBONES
MINNIE
Obviously I was quite certain this was the correct path after ADORES and PILATE were things, but then panicked suddenly when I saw TB????. But TBONES saved the day.
Now what? Scanning the grid, I saw MICKEY in the lower-right and remembered its notably dull clue [Famous Disney mouse]. Now I saw the reason for it: that clue would also work for MINNIE. Our three other extracted words can also be satisfied by other clues in the grid:
ADORES could answer [Loves to death], which clues EATS UP at 14-A
PILATE could answer [Bad actor in the Bible], which clues USURER at 12-D
TBONES could answer [Some cuts of beef], which clues SHANKS at 44-D
Getting closer! Let’s now arrange the four in-grid answers to those clues that satisfy our odd-lettered extracted words, using the parenthetical numbers in their clues as our guide:
(1) = MICKEY not Minnie
(2) = USURER not Pilate
(3) = SHANKS not T-bones
(4) = EATS UP not adores
At first I had mistranscribed T-bones instead of SHANKS so I had MUTE. Didn’t ring a bell but it’s an amusing alt-rock band name (as in, if they came on TV you’d want to mute them). Google didn’t turn anything up, but I soon realized by error and found contest answer MUSE. Who I have heard of, even if I don’t know their music.
Not my cup of tea, but YMMV. Estimated budget for the video: 500 quid.
Fell quickly for me, thought just 267 right answers with an hour to go so played reasonably tough. I liked the extraction mechanism, though .10 ding for MICKEY and Minnie sharing their first letter. Typically wide-open Muller grid with lots of good mid-length fill like EINSTEIN, NANOBOT, ALIBABA, MANILA, and BIGEYE.
4.50 stars. Unstumpable in 2021! Ready for the pain starting in October.
Thanks Matt!
272 correct this month.
Congrats on 9 for 9!
I’m looking forward to our Zoom interview Friday…hope to see a lot of folks there…
Pete
I made the same mistake as Matt – accidently put TBONES in my solving list and came up with MUTE – which Google listed as a punk band. LUckily I double checked my work and came up with MUSE before submitting.
Same! I spent a good 5 minutes trying to figure out if Mute was something the kids are listening to these days.
Is there going to be a general trend of these getting easier on a crossword level? This one was rather surprising on that front compared to the usual trends for some reason.
Hi Glenn
The difficulty of the crosswords varies between Tuesday and Thursday NYT, in a mostly random way.
The metas gradually get harder throughout the year, with a pull-back in December.
I originally planned for this puzzle to just be titled “Alternative Rock,” but I thought that would make getting the meta a little too hard. Using “Odd Men Out” seems to have made it easier to get than the last few months.