meta
hello, and welcome to episode #855 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 puzzle called “Think Twice”. this week’s instructions ask for a six-letter adjective that I hope you’d apply to this meta. what are the theme answers? six long across answers are silly made-up two-word phrases:
- {Public’s first look at 1970s actress Cheryl’s new product line?} TIEGS LAUNCH.
- {Zest for playing a wind instrument?} HARMONICA SPIRIT.
- {Hank living in a Middle Eastern capital?} CAIRO AZARIA.
- {Actor Jack taking jump shots on the court?} LEMMON HOOPS.
- {South American animal that makes everyone laugh?} AMUSING CAPYBARA.
- {Not-that-great morning’s catch for a fisherman?} TWO HALIBUTS. i think this is a nonstandard pluralization (it should be TWO HALIBUT), but i don’t really think that has anything to do with the meta.
so what’s going on? i have no idea.
the title suggests pairs or twosomes, but all of the themers have odd length (two 15s and four 11s). so perhaps there is one odd letter out each time, and we extract that odd letter out of each of the six themers to get our six-letter meta answer. that’s as good a working hypothesis as any for the overall structure—six long themers is already a lot for a 15×15 grid, so i wouldn’t be surprised if these six contain the entire meta (rather than there being extra theme hidden in the fill; the clues also did not strike me as being awkward enough to have hidden theme content). let’s see if we can flesh out any more of the mechanism details.
the theme phrases themselves seem to have nothing in common. “think twice” could suggest double letters, but only LEMMON HOOPS contains any. TIEGS LAUNCH is an isogram (i.e. there are no repeated letters at all), but the others have one or more repeated letters; CAIRO AZARIA and AMUSING CAPYBARA contain four A’s each, for example.
the overall letter frequency of these entries is a little bit unusual—there are only two E’s (one each in TIEGS and LEMMON), but lots of A’s and I’s. that might be noteworthy, or it might not. i’d be more interested if there were no E’s at all.
what else is there? i’m quite stuck. i even tried combining all of the theme answers into one big pile of letters and seeing if all but six appeared an even number of times. despite a promising start (A through K are all even frequency), i ended up with eight different odd letters (LPRSUWYZ), disappointingly.
LEMMON and HARMONICA both contain the trigram MON (like in monday). this is interesting, but there’s no continuation of it anywhere. in the clues, {Bart-hating bar owner} for MOE repeats the trigram BAR… but again, this goes nowhere.
ok, here’s an idea: are the theme clues the relevant bits, and not the answers? LLAMA is a south american animal. maybe one that makes everyone laugh could be a DROLL LLAMA. oh, and {Actor Jack taking jump shots on the court} could be WEBB B-BALL. this might be something!
- {Public’s first look at 1970s actress Cheryl’s new product line?} well, cheryl LADD of charlie’s angels is another 1970s actress. maybe this is LADD D-DAY?
- {Zest for playing a wind instrument?} … how about KAZOO OOMPH?
- {Hank living in a Middle Eastern capital?} gotta be SANA’A AARON.
- {Actor Jack taking jump shots on the court?} WEBB B-BALL.
- {South American animal that makes everyone laugh?} DROLL LLAMA.
- {Not-that-great morning’s catch for a fisherman?} this is the vaguest one yet, but given that the letters wo have already spell DOABL_, this is probably an E, so THREE EEL(s) here.
wow, that was difficult to see, but yes, in the end, it was indeed just barely DOABLE. i wonder if matt wanted to make the answer DOUBLE, but the options for ___UU UU___ phrases are, um, rather scant. MUUMUU works fine, but then nothing really starts with UU unless you really dig finnish or greenlandic geography.
whew. how’d you fare on this one?
I thought it was quite doable, but I had
DIDGERIDOO OOMPH and
GOOFBALL LLAMA
File this under the “never in a million years” category. I’m not really fond of metas that can technically be solved without filling a single letter in the grid (unless I’m missing something)
How is this possible?
Is the grid used at all, either to hint at the mechanism or as part of it?
Technically, one can just look at the “question marked” clues and come up with answers that satisfy the rule that is derived from the title only.
I guess in the case of TWOHALIBUTS -> THREEEELS you definitely need the grid answer to formulate it because the clue by itself isn’t meaningful enough, and I don’t get LADDDDAY but that might be applicable to it as well. So you do need the grid partially.
Between AMMAN AARON and THREE TROUT and other alternatives (echoing the Think Twice syntax of the title ie same starting letter and 5-letter pairs), this one felt like too much googling even when you had the general gist of synonyms. Not my favorite
SANAA AARON and THREE EELS. The alt-answers must have four of the same letter in a row.
Loved both this one and Matt’s WSJ this week. After talking with a fellow-Muggle post-solve, I do muse in retrospect if “Connect Four” would have been a more apropos title to get the four letters all consecutive (but perhaps that was considered too divulging for a Week 3).
Here’s to all of us cracking the Week 4 conundrum up ahead!
I had the basic concept of finding two alternates, but dove into the deep rabbit hole of seeing OBO and RIO and concluding that OBO(E) (B)RIO should replace HARMONICA SPIRIT. Looked all over the grid for partials — (F)IRE for LAUNCH, (F)ISH for HALIBUTS, Jackie (C)HAN, TRE(Y) for shooting jump shots, etc. — but never found anything close to Ladd or Aaron. I wish I had thought of Jack Webb, as that might have tipped me in the right direction. All in all, a fun mechanism and meta, DOABLE, for sure.
Thanks, joon — 207 right answers this week, with only 4 incorrect. So just about perfect for a Week 3/4.
Sorry if some didn’t get it, but take your losses gracefully please. I try to (and sometimes succeed).
+1. With puzzles like yours, we’re always winners. :)
Like Roger Ebert said…
I was initially stuck on finding alternates in the grid by adding a letter (OBO -> OBOE, ASSES -> BASSES, …), but, of course, that doesn’t lead anywhere. Needed some help to get on the right path.
I liked this one a lot! “This clue could have two different answers” is a venerable and perfectly legitimate trick, and this one used it in a clever new way. Bravo.
The eventual pathway in for me was wondering why LEMMON was clued as “Actor Jack” while AZARIA was clued as just “Hank” with no qualifier. Was there another possible Hank? Indeed there was! The idea had been vaguely floating around before but I didn’t believe there were two ’70s actors named Cheryl.
thanks, Joshua!
As I recall, Cheryl Tiegs was a model, not an actress, especially in the 70’s but even later.
yeah, this is a possible in. tiegs did technically act in some things, including guest appearances on the john laroquette show and moonlighting, but it doesn’t look like any of them were actually in the 1970s—she was pretty much only a model in those years. if anybody thought to look this up during the solve, they might have wondered why tiegs was clued this way and perhaps gotten from there to cheryl ladd.
That was my starting point!
I realize the mechanism was quite constrained, but I do wish that the pop culture references were more current. I wonder how many solvers under 45 are familiar with Cheryl Ladd or Jack Webb? I initially found someone named Cheryl Campbell via web search, which ends in a double letter but was also unfamiliar to me. Hank Aaron has had more staying power, but would not necessarily be top of mind without a sports nudge since he retired in the 70’s (I initially searched imdb for a suitable Hank to no avail).
One of these is likely backsolvable, but 3 out of 6 themers probably loses younger solvers.
I was able to WAG it by solving only half of each pair. Didn’t feel complete though.
I think this puzzle’s true enjoyment was figuring out BOTH sides of the answers- the meta solution merely a byproduct.
“i wonder if matt wanted to make the answer DOUBLE, but the options for ___UU UU___ phrases are, um, rather scant.”
I wondered the same, and looked for a signal of that in the puzzle. My first and only thought was to look at square 21 (U being the 21st letter in the alphabet), hoping to find an A there, and … sure enough.
I didn’t get that the double letters had to be connected. I had
LADD PEEK
REED KEENNESS
AARON AMMAN
LEMMON HOOPS
FUNNY LLAMA
THREE BASS