meta 2 days
hello, and welcome to episode #858 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Way to Go”. this week’s instructions ask for a city often seen in crossword grids. what were the theme answers? four long answers arranged in a pinwheel pattern each contained a hidden cardinal direction:
- 3d {Can’t do it alone} SEEKS OUT HELP.
- 18a {It separates Busan and Kitakyushu} KOREA STRAIT.
- 26d {Irritations} MINOR THREATS. i had trouble solving this clue—it feels to me like the clue and answer aren’t a very close match.
- 64a {Opening line of the Journey hit “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”} HERE WE STAND. i don’t know this song. but could this video be any more ’80s? (i enjoy the drummer’s shirt that says FOOSBALL.)
so, what’s the answer? the directional part was fairly apparent—this is a fairly familiar theme. but there were a few different logical possibilities for what to do with the directions, and although the first thing i thought of was in fact the right thing, i didn’t see how it produced an answer until i picked up the puzzle again a couple of days later.
the key is to look at the letter directly to the east of EAST, to the west of WEST, to the north of NORTH, and to the south of SOUTH. taken in normal grid order, those letters are RIEE, but if you sort them numerically by the which theme answer they appear in (which is the order in which i have listed them above), they spell out ERIE, which is indeed a city often seen in crossword puzzles. it was, in fact, in last week’s mgwcc, when i remarked that it was adjacent to the meta answer (CLEVELAND). an alternative way to arrive at the same ordering is to go clockwise around the grid starting from the left.
i wonder if matt considered having NORTH and WEST read backwards in their theme answers (i.e. reading to the north and to the west). there are various legitimate(ish) entries that do contain those strings (such as TECHTRONIC and MAY WRIGHT SEWELL), but there are other constraints such as symmetry and of course producing an apt final answer. using my examples, you can get, say, CHER, but that’s a little arbitrary.
did you notice that the grid was 16×15? well, it is, presumably to ease the placement of the 12-letter theme answers containing NORTH and SOUTH.
that’s all i’ve got this week—hope you found the directions easy to follow!
I too spent way too much time after seeing RIEE. But it eventually became clear when nothing else worked.
Is Erie really that common a city in crosswords? Debatable. (My immediate guess was OSLO) But asking for a common lake would have been a slam dunk for all guessers.
I too started with RIEE but it didn’t occur to me to sort them. The only thing I knew for certain after getting the directional embeds was that Matt would never include a dogshit entry like NAMPA unless it was 100% required by the theme, either directly or indirectly. But I guess you never know 🤷🏻♂️
I predict that in the next 7 days you will come upon NAMPA in the wild somewhere. Post here if it happens!
LOL I surely will.
Thanks, joon — 421 right answers this week. Alright #421, thanks for ruining that for everyone…
Re the video: “Hey guys, here’s $50. Make a video” Also, how does Steve Perry look the same now as he did in 1985…
I did not consider the NORTH going up and WEST going left idea. Wish I had thought of it, though it probably would’ve been more appropriate difficulty-wise for a Week 2 of 4 than a Week 2 of 5.
An alternative title could have been ‘Kind of bird’…with a different solution, of course.
The most dramatic three note keyboard accent ever put on film at 1:43. Glorious
I found ERIE contained in the clues having SOUTH,EAST,NORTH,WEST. Counterclockwise: we turned our clocks back last week.
Matt, Matt, Matt, this comment
Re the video: “Hey guys, here’s $50. Make a video”
just proves that you have no idea what goes into the making of an 80s music video.
$50 for the production values, sure, but they paid Margaret Olmstead (now Margaret Olmstead Menendez) $750 for her whatever-that-was, okay?
So the budget was at least $800. Apologize to the label.