Grid: untimed; Meta: three minutes
Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Hidden Track” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for a #1 hit song of the 1980s. There were five long theme entries, each containing KARMA in varying order:
WSJ Contest Solution – 08.25.24
- RE(MARKA)BLYGOOD: [Outstanding]
- D(ARKMA)TTER: [Astronomical concept]
- DMITRI(KARAM)AZOV: [One of three title literary characters of 1880]
- FLE(AMARK)ET: [Eclectic assortment of merchandise]
- VIVE(KRAMA)SWAMY: [Noted 2007 Harvard graduate]
The KARMAs changed like a chameleon changes its colors, leading to our contest solution KARMA CHAMELEON, a hit song of the 1980s by Culture Club. Solvers, please share your thoughts.
Dang! I kinda saw the ARKs and even the MARKs but that’s as far as I got.
I saw mixed-up MARKs while solving the grid. As I was highlighting them to work on solving the meta, I noticed the extra A’s adjacent to each one and immediately knew the answer.
I thought it was a super easy meta, but I remember when “Karma Chameleon” was a hit. I wonder if younger solvers had trouble with it.
Uncle Bob seems to have answered your question…I wondered the same thing.
Hard fill but easy meta.
I was stumped. All I could derive was a mishmash sound of the word CAR so I submitted FAST CAR by Tracy Chapman.
I could see KARMA scrambled 5 ways, but I never heard of Karma Chameleon. I submitted plain KARMA.
I thought this pure genius by Matt Gaffney! In the chorus, Boy George sings Karma Chameleon 5 times! Brilliant! Nice one Matt!
Agreed.
I’d like to know how he finds entries that fit this pattern and have symmetry in the grid. There’s no easy way to look them up.
After I finished the puzzle, I was wondering why Matt didn’t use the opera The Makropulos Affair (or some part of it) instead of the green paintish “Remarkably Good.” I was thinking that the keyword could be MARK but then I saw that extra A and laid out the theme answers and KARMA popped out as the missing part of the various anagrams. I’m old enough to remember the song KARMA CHAMELEON easily. They played that video on MTV all the time. Fun meta. And cleverly conceived, even if not exactly a three-day head-scratcher. Kudos!
“The Makropulos Affair” doesn’t work because the A of “Affair” is separated from the “MARK” anagram. Also, even without the definite article, it’s 16 letters.
But kudos for finding a challenging theme entry that almost works.
Thanks Eric. I was thinking of MARK only at that point. I didnt explain myself very clearly. It was just after filling the grid. Not yet doing the meta. That’s what helped me see I also needed the A.
My daughter just Googled “80’s hits Karma” to find the answer (although I would have helped if asked).
I shouldn’t comment on a contest puzzle since, after all this time, I’m still somehow totally blind to meta and don’t think I’ll ever learn. (I wish.) Still, this time I came awfully close. Indeed, I always look first to see if the long answers have something in common in content or spelling, and just this once I seemed rewarded. I saw MARK twice and its letters the rest of the time.
Then I saw they hid a five-letter block with an A as well. But I was torn. Surely the TRACE in the puzzle’s title was significant (really our only clue), and it means the same as MARK, as in a creature leaving its trace or mark in the dirt. That left no room for the A, unless I ignored it in favor of the letters. But how? No chance. I’ve never heard of Karma Chameleon, so I wouldn’t have got it anyway. Oh, well, as always just not for me.
After filling the grid, this one popped out immediately to me; thank goodness for that, because I hate to stew over these. Then the song was in my head all weekend.
I had the pleasure of meeting Boy George in Washington, D.C. when he was touring book stores after he wrote his memoir and his solo album came out. He signed his CD, Cheapness and Beauty, for me. My wife is a big Culture Club and Boy George fan.
If you ask
1980’s number 1 hit song with karma in the title
on perplexity.ai it tells you the name of the song. Try it.
I solved the meta, and this makes two times in a row that I’ve done that with Matt Gaffney puzzles, and I’m glad that he makes some metas pretty solvable to keep up in the interest in them for us mainstream solvers.
As for Mike Shenk metas — “fuhgeddaboudit”!
I can solve maybe half of Matt Gaffney’s WSJ metas and maybe a quarter of Mike Shenk’s. But I keep trying anyway.
GAMS are groups of whalers (whaling ships) not whales.
I’m new to the concept of metas, and I still haven’t managed to understand one key component of how they work: All the sources I’ve found talk about “theme entries”, but nothing I’ve found has explained how you identify them? Are they marked in some way, or are they always the long ones, or do you just have to guess? In which case, is there a convention that theme entries are always across rather than down? They’ve always been across in all the solutions I’ve seen so far.
In general, meta theme answers are the longest across (sometimes down) entries—but not always. Part of working metas is figuring out which are the theme entries! Occasionally the crossword might not have theme entries at all—if, for instance, there were an acrostic message formed from all the clues, or if the clues all share an unusual characteristic pointing the solver toward certain otherwise unremarkable entries.