Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Minority Report” — Conrad’s writeup.
This we’re looking a six-letter word. There were three long two-word theme entries:
- POSSESSPIZZAZZ: [Have a lot of flair?]
- MOMMYBOOBOO: [Scrape on a parent’s knee?]
- ATACAMADIDDLED: [Negative report on a time-wasting South American desert?]
WSJ Contest – 11.03.2024
I noticed the doubled letters, then noticed that some words didn’t have doubled letters, and eventually realized that each of the two words in each themer had a lot of the same letters.
I wish I paid more attention to my initial reaction to STOKER’s clue: Spooky author. I thought KING or POE. I stumbled into the rabbit hole, but wandered right past it. I eventually wandered back. Matt gave us a classic vaguely-clued meta this week. POSSESS becomes POE when you delete the S (the word’s most common letter), leaving the minority of letters behind. The rest of the meta fell quickly:
Pia Zadora and Rik Ocasek on the set of Hairspray
- 1a STOKER: [Spooky author] -> POE (POSSES)
- 7a EGAD: [“I’m sorry to hear that!”] -> OY (MOMMY)
- 14a CAROLE: [King of music fame] -> BB (BOOBOO)
- 29a TOUR: [French word on maps of Paris] -> ILE (DIDDLED)
- 43d OWN: [Cable channel named for a billionaire] -> TCM (ATACAMA)
- 58d RICKI: [First name on posters for the movie “Hairspray”]: PIA (PIZZAZZ)
The first letters of the mapped entries spell our contest solution SECTOR. I enjoyed this meta: complex and logical. My kind of meta. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
Never in a million years.
Guessed the mechanism right away, but took me soooo long to track down the other answers. Probably should’ve have taken me that long. Nice meta!
I see now that the northwest corner is heavily constrained, but boy that’s a tough corner. I had to look things up. Almost every single every is a proper noun or an obscure word.
Pia Zadora was in Hairspray? lol. What about Voyage of the Rock Aliens? keeping with the horror theme. :)
I had POE but came up with MOBY for MommyBooBoo. and had TCM but could not figure out how it fit in (was it the initials of an author?) And frankly didn’t care enough to dig deeper. I love Matt’s puzzles in general but the themers here were too Gobbledygook for my taste.
PS. Does anyone know why there was a question mark after the clue for TEA? (48D). The three themers all had question marks, but that was the only other clue in the puzzle that had one (other than the Macbeth quote that didn’t actually end with the question mark.) And I thought maybe it was relevant. Also the use of REPORT (as in “Minority Report”) in 61A struck me as curious. Any thoughts?
I thought that question mark was weird too. I knew it wasn’t relevant to the theme, but it doesn’t seem like it needs a question mark.
Its minority report, the movie. Where the theme answer sector comes from. I think. Never saw the movie.
My guess about the 48D clue [Drink in the afternoon?] is that it’s an attempt at misdirection, trying to make us think about someone consuming alcohol before happy hour. It didn’t fool me.
Too bad the meta wasn’t as easy as the rest of the puzzle.
It’s actually 43d, cable channel owned by a billionaire.
Fixed, thanks!
I don’t understand 43d. Channel owned by a billionaire. I have OBN (over the counter, Brit and nines). What channel is that? I could understand TBN but then is the 43a answer, TTC, med requiring no rx?
https://www.oprah.com/app/own-tv.html
https://www.tcm.com/
Oh, that channel. Thanks.