Title: “Pent-Up Aggression”
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a musical act.
Answer: Five for Fighting
Ack! forgot the Muller Meta was already out this month and only realized in the final hour. Luckily the meta fell fast for me. We had five squares in the grid that were a V one way, and a rebus word synonymous with “fight” going the other way:
17-A: [What you might keep if you keep cool] = S[TIFF] UPPER LIP, crossing LEVENE at the V
11-D: [Automated extraction of online info] = DATA [????-ING] on the down, crossing PREVIN at the V. Is “Min” a slang word for fight that I don’t know? Or is it not DATA MINING there? The other four work out so this has to be right, but someone hip me to this one in comments.
39-A: [Tires] = G(ROW) WEARY, crossing RVS at the V
38-D: [Prestigious college outside Philadelphia] = S(WAR)THMORE, crossing CAVS at the V
61-A: [Gets frustrated] = LOSE(S PAT)IENCE, crossing PIVOT at the V
So that’s TIFF, MIN or something else, ROW, WAR, and SPAT, which are all conflict-related, crossing the roman numeral V (5), and there are five of them to boot, so gotta be FIVE FOR FIGHTING, a one-man band named after a hockey penalty.
3 for 3 in ’22! You too? This one played a little tougher than the first two of the year, with just 342 right answers just before closing time.
4.VV stars. See you in April!
Data Scraping was your missing term, with SCRAP being the synonym. 25D is also a meta hint.
Aha, thx!
I also couldn’t figure out how to work MIN in, and I also missed ROW because I had GETS WEARY. But I had the other three so the meta still fell easily.
maybe 7 d is a meta hint also
Ooh, good catch! That whole middle column – NHL, TIMEOUT, SIT – seems to be a meta hint.
I’d never heard of FIVE FOR FIGHTING, so it took me a lot of googling different combinations of keywords before I found them. I was planning to submit RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE is my Hail Mary if I couldn’t figure it out, which I knew was wrong, but it was the closest thing I could think of off the top of my head.
11D is supposed to be DATA (SCRAP)ING, which also was not trivial to figure out (I too wanted it to be DATA MINING for a while).
I wonder what all the Hail Marys were? I sent in FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH, myself.
Love the nod to the five-centric prefix “penta-” in the puzzle’s title “Pent-Up Aggression.”
Ah, that is good
Thanks Matt
342 correct this month & it did play tougher than usual for a month 3.
Pretty impressed that you learned this was an MMMM week at 10:30 ET and you solved the puzzle before the deadline!
I spent quite a while trying to figure out if perhaps there was a band inspired by the comic/movie “V For Vendetta”, before remembering the actual answer.
I went with “Rage Against the Machine” as in “Rage v. the Machine” … Like if the band was actually named after a court case in a comic book story.
The answer to this one didn’t immediately come to me, and a quick Google search turned up a band called ‘V for Violence,’ which appeared to me to capture the theme well enough that I submitted it right away. Oops!
Those not familiar with Five For Fighting by name would probably know him best for the song “100 Years,” an absolutely massive, tear-jerking adult contemporary hit from 2003. (“You’ve only got 100 years to live,” etc.) And yes, he’s a solo act despite the name suggesting a quintet.
Thanks! I have heard that one. After getting the answer, I listened to other songs of his but didn’t recognize them.
I am probably going to give partial credit for “V for Violence,” “Five Finger Death Punch,” and (maybe) “Rage v. the Machine.”
I can’t give credit for “The Clash,” “War,” “Foo Fighters,” or others that don’t connect to the “V” rebus.
:)
Argh, there goes this year’s streak… due to my total unfamiliarity with this musical act and my foolish pride-based reluctance to Google or Hail Mary!
One cool thing about this meta that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that Pete did put some significant confirmation of the “correct” meta answer down the center column: 7D is NHL = [Org. that has penalties for excessive aggression] (tieing to the “aggression” in the title); 25D is TIMEOUT = [Rink penalty, in a way]; and (more vaguely) 62D is SIT = [Remain on the bench, say]. When Five for Fighting popped into my mind and I was still not 100% sure if it was the right answer, seeing these three entries in the puzzle got me confident enough to submit my answer.
I sent in the Dave Brubeck Quartet because they sang Take Five. You have to take the V (five) out to put in the rebus answers. There were five of them and the NHL time out is five minutes. But, if I had thought of Five for Fighting I would have picked it. Drat!
I, thankfully, was familiar with Five for Fighting and therefore this one came pretty easily. I, too, struggled with Data Scraping, having never heard the term before. But I figured it out as a synonym of the other four words.
Instead of paying attention to the V, I focused on the fact that the five synonyms for “fight” were each “boxed” in a single cell, and the unusual prompt regarding a “musical act” rather than a band name. That, to me, spelled BEAT-BOXING.
And like Matt… and last month, I forgot the Muller puzzle was released. ARGH!
But once I got to the puzzle, had the same confusions over “MIN”ing, but the other 4 rebuses led me pretty quickly to the meta answer. I would’ve been 3 for 3 this year if I had been on time and paid attention! DOH!
Quick nit on the solution above: 42A is MAVS with “AMOR PROHIBIDO” for 36D.