MGWCC #866

 

hello, and welcome to episode #866 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 1 puzzle called “First-Quarter Action”. i’m back in the saddle this week after my holiday vacation; thanks to ben for filling in for me last week! i did take a brief look at that puzzle but didn’t have much time to spend on it and didn’t really get anywhere near the meta. (reading ben’s post though, i was struck with one thought: what a cool meta!) anyway, that was a week 5 and now we’re on week 1, with a consequently much more evident theme:

• {It costs more at a hockey game} RINKSIDE SEAT. i was initially thrown by this clue—more than what? turns out to be “more than a seat that’s further back in the stands” as opposed to “more at a hockey game than at, i dunno, ice capades”.
• {“Shall We Dance” dancer, 1937} GINGER ROGERS. with fred astaire, of course.
• {Greece’s second-largest city} THESSALONIKI.
• {Time Magazine’s 1995 Person of the Year} NEWT GINGRICH.

all of these theme answers are 12 letters long, and the title tells us what to do with them: take the first quarter, i.e. the first three of those 12 letters. those are RIN / GIN / THE / NEW, or after reparsing, RING IN THE NEW, an apt meta answer for the first mgwcc of 2025.

believe it or not, this is the second mgwcc titled “first-quarter action”. the previous one was, fittingly, mgwcc #250, when mgwcc was one quarter of the way through its planned 1000-week run, a mere dozen years ago. the meta mechanism was totally different—which is probably to be expected anyway, since that was a tricky week 3 and this was quite a straightforward week 1. but i’m mildly curious how many times matt has reused a title. 866 weeks is a lot of weeks!

the fill in this puzzle was unexpectedly bumpy given that there were only the four theme answers. admittedly, four 12s is a slightly awkward length set for theme answers in a 15×15 grid, since they can’t go in the third row unless you load up the corners with a huge number of black squares (or violate some other rule like having two-letter answers). so the themers are squished closer together than you might otherwise expect, and that can put strain on the fill that goes around them. in fact, the grid does violate one of the standard crossword rules, as it is very slightly asymmetric: the symmetric partner of square #4 is a black square in the lower right.

so yeah, that lower right section must have been tough to fill. i was able to navigate my way through it because i’m old enough to remember bob UECKER from the 80s (though i thought he was better cast in major league), but i’m not quite old enough to remember {Wine brand known for its 1970s-80 TV ads} RIUNITE, nor do i speak enough german to have been familiar with {Theaters, in Germany} KINOS. once all the letters were in, i could see the cognate to cinema, but that was only useful after the fact. i imagine some solvers will have needed to google some combination of KINOS, UECKER, RIUNITE, and/or THESSALONIKI, most of which feature letter combinations not normally seen in english.

on the bright side, i enjoyed the colloquial SAY WHEN and the slightly unexpected ZZZ (tucked into a corner where it was not constrained by theme). but some of the demerits like random roman numeral MIV, prefix SOMNI, and unusual plural surname ITOS were reminiscent of 2000s-era crosswords, and not in a good way.

that’s all for me this week. i’m glad to be back to blogging and i did enjoy the opportunity to RING IN THE NEW with this week’s puzzle. happy new year to all of you!