An hour to go before deadline, and I’m stumped. Solved the puzzle on Friday and have been looking at it over the weekend, but nada is jumping out at me. With an hour to go I’m going to give it the ol’ blog-it-and-see-what-happens final effort. You never know…it’s worked before!
Title: “Resounding Success”
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a well-known singer.
Answer: DNF
puzzle 10ish; meta DNF (Matt)
Lovely and wide-open grid with five long theme entries on the acrosses, which are:
18-A: [What many Healthline visitors don’t want to do] = SEE A DOCTOR. Is there a meta-related reason this first theme entry starts in the 6th column instead of the 1st?
23-A: [Like some vehicles and people] = HIGH-MAINTENANCE
34-A: [Only WNBA player in history to achieve 50% field goal percentage, 40% three-point field goal percentage, and 90% free throw percentage in a season] = ELENA DELLE DONNE. This Tuesday at 12:01 PM ET I will tell you a funny story about this entry.
44-A: [Elephant seal, but not an elephant, say] = PREDATORY ANIMAL
52-A: [“For reals”] = I’M TELLIN YA
That’s a lot of theme and the grid is far more wide-open than it had to be; there are an incredible eight 9-letter entries on the Downs, even with two 10s and three 15s on the Acrosses, so I’m assuming these five Acrosses are the only themers. Also guessing with a high degree of confidence that there is nothing else thematic in the grid besides those five since there just isn’t much room for flexibility in this 70-word monster.
So let’s assume I’m right and focus on these five alone. The title is “Resounding Success,” which begs to be parsed as “re-sounding success,” i.e. sounding something a second time. What could that mean?
Well, SEE in the first one could be “sea” or the letter C. HIGH could be “hi” or “hie” or even “hai” which is the Japanese word for “yes.” DONNE could be “done” since it’s pronounced that way. But I don’t see anything to work with on PREDATORY ANIMAL or I’M TELLIN’ YA.
Let’s focus on that last entry for a minute. What would make Pete use that entry? If I needed a YA in an entry, this might be what I went for.
Seeing nothing, so maybe there’s a hint in the clues that I overlooked. Fast-forward 20 minutes: if there’s a sus clue, I ain’t seein’ it. Not much else to say; I can’t even find a good lead, much less the meta answer. Someone tell me in comments what I missed!
Didn’t get it either.
Feel like I was close, and that it was somehow basketball related with CANS, LOBS, and TRES in the corners. And the numbered squares at 50%, 40%, and 90% percent of the highest numbered clue (30, 34, and 54) spelling AHA (a moment I didn’t have).
Bizarre; I missed seeing those three as basketball-related, but was also mining that vein because I saw LEBRON (LEcrae/BRONc) and SPREWELL (SPREe/meantWELL) and wondered whether “Resounding” somehow represented a play on “Rebounding.”
I heard one named singers – Sia, Tina, Adele, Rihanna, and Enya – in the long answers. Their first letters spelled Stare a song by Prince – another one name singer. But this was wrong.
Haim instead of Tina makes it SHARE which sounds like Cher. That must be it.
Oh, that’s odd — I somehow never heard RIHANNA in PREDATORY ANIMAL even though now I sorta can. I instead heard RETTA who isn’t a singer but I figured that with HAIM that would make two names that aren’t one-named musicians rather than one.
Either way, yes, the answer is CHER (made from SHARE).
Interesting, kind of tortured
Yeah it’s definitely Cher. That’s what I submitted and my named showed up on the leaderboard.
I couldn’t get it either. I thought it might be something about songs with reduplicative names: there are well-known songs called Doctor Doctor and Ya Ya, and I found listings of various songs titled High High, Elena Elena, Donne Donne and Animal Animal., but they mostly seemed too obscure to be part of the answer.
Matt Gaffney, you’ve made me feel so much better about not having gotten this meta. I went through the same steps as you did and, like you, got nowhere.
If the mechanism proposed by Mike W as modified by andeux is correct, I would call it more than tortured. We’re supposed to have pulled Rihanna out of PREDATORY ANIMAL? Haim from HIGH MAINTENANCE? (And yes, I know how the Haim sisters pronounce their surname.)
Srsly?
In the abstract, this hypothetical mechanism makes sense. But getting to those five artists just seems like a huge stretch. Of the five long answers, only Sia from SEE A DOCTOR and Adele from ELENA DONNE DELLE really seem to work.
I think it was Pete Muller who once wrote something like, “If I have done my job as a meta constructor correctly, when you get the right answer, you’ll know it.”
I’ll be very interested to see Pete’s write-up on Tuesday.
Agreed Eric—about Matt’s write-up, and the execution of the—admittedly ingenious, and no doubt well-intended—mechanism.
The title made it clear that this was going to be a pronunciation one and I absolutely hate those so I was already down on it.
I noticed the NYA for the last one and thought “this will somehow tie to ENYA” so that was my entry point. I then saw ADELLE, focused on pronunciations that span multiple words (for the longest time I tried to make AYME (Aimee?) happen), got SHA*E and then basically plugged in letters from the 4th themer (SHATE? SHARE? SHAYE?) Matt had a meta this year where the answer was Cher so I thought “oh wait that’s what’s happening”.
Rihanna from PREDATORYANIMAL is brutal. Never in a million years would’ve figured that one out.
I’ll give this one credit for 1. consistency and 2. having a strong nudge in the title, but yeah, not my favorite.
I saw a bunch of ENs and YAs and leaned toward ENYA but never felt like it was a done deal.
Loved the puzzle. Lots of nice long entries. The only not-so-great fill is SAS and RUSSE.
Took me forever to see the meta, but I eventually got SIA and ADELE, then RIHANNA (absolutely loved this one) and ENYA. Figured S_ARE would lead to CHER. Reasoned that the missing one had to be HAIM, which isn’t a mononymous singer like the other 5, so a ding there, but pretty solid!
I got the R with Red. I _think_ that’s the name of a singer because I _think_ it was part of an MMMM a while back. Wouldn’t swear it.
Thanks Matt
Only 174 correct this month – the puzzle definitely played harder than expected.
And I unexpectedly stumped you too!
ADELE in ELENA DELLE DONNE (where have we seen that before?) was the way in for most people that got it.
I’ll take the ding for Haim being a trio vs. the others being female mononyms. My longtime solver Abby B pointed out that I could have used H.E.R. instead…wish I had thought of that!
I’ve never heard of either of them. I had to backsolve for the H. I’m on solid ground if the artists are before 1990. Otherwise I only know them if they make headlines.
I thought Tina (for Tina Turner with “Tina” as the Broadway show for her) completed the set of female mononyms. Prince as the solution (with Stare as one of his songs) reinforced the mononym theme. Definitely was not a solid click, but I thought it made sense.
This reminded me of the crosswords whose themes are puns based on homophones – they only work if you pronounce the words the same way as the constructor. For me, the “ni” in “animal” sounds different than the “nna” in “Rihanna.” And the “in'” in “I’m tellin’ ya” is a short-i-sort-of-schwa sound that is different from the stressed short e in “Enya.”
I can see these homophones if you force me to, but there is no way I would have come up with them on my own so as to solve the meta (and given the puzzle’s title, I sure tried to).
I stumbled a bit with preda-TORI (amos)-animals
and
imtel-LIN (manuel miranda)-ya (or Jeff Lynne of ELO ?)
or maybe imt-ELLEN-ya (must be some Ellen somewhere)
I’m glad that I’m not the only one who struggled with this one! I saw the ADELE (or rather, ADELLE) but didn’t use that to try to find other names in the other theme answers. Not sure I would have gotten Rihanna or Enya, anyway, and I didn’t know how the Haim sisters pronounced their name until just now.
Got this with a helpful hint- SIA and ENYA stood out right away.
Actually back solved the H… Haim? Never heard of them. After solving this puzzle I asked a whole bunch of people I know, from their 20s to their 70s, and no one had ever heard of them. I’m guessing Pete planted a fake Wiki article to make the puzzle work. ;)
I have a couple of Haim songs in my collection. They’re the kind of songs that when they pop up in the listening rotation, I wonder why I don’t have more of their music.
Note one of the Haim sisters (Alana) starred in the 2021 movie Licorice Pizza. She was nominated for a Golden Globe.
I guess I can pat myself on the back for getting a meta that played so difficult for others, including Matt (usually it’s the other way around).
It wasn’t easy, but my gateway was noticing SIA, ADELE, and ENYA. This had to mean the other two also had homophones (allowing for some leeway based on differences in pronunciations). RIHANNA finally came to me and if I could’ve given Pete a pat on the back for that one, I would’ve. The final answer had to be CHER and from there it was a backsolve to HAIM, whom I am familiar with even if they don’t quite fit with the others. But I’m willing to overlook that.