MGWCC #872

 

hello, and welcome to episode #872 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 puzzle called “Who Loves Ya, Baby?”. this week’s instructions asked us to find someone from whom you may receive a Valentine, appropriate for a puzzle that dropped on february 14. what were the theme answers?

• {Huge fan of the local population?} NATIVE DEVOTEE.
• {Person who can’t stop acquiring diplomas?} DEGREE FANATIC.
• {Connoisseur who’s a smooth operator?} SUAVE AFICIONADO.
• {Huge fan of poet Rita?} DOVE SUPPORTER.
• {Huge fan of Paul Bunyan and “The Shining”?} AXE ENTHUSIAST.

this is a curious theme, in the sense that i’d describe my solving path as mainly vibes. these made-up two-word phrases each end with a word for a huge fan (indeed, that two-word phrase is used in the clue for three of them, and FANATIC appears in one of the others). that’s what i noticed first. the second is that DEGREE and AXE are both brands of antiperspirant. after a little thought, i recalled that SUAVE was, too, but not before the final meta answer occurred to me. DOVE makes soap, and i assume also antiperspirant; unfamiliar with NATIVE but i assume they do, too.

anyway, the meta answer is SECRET ADMIRER, the somewhat implicit sixth theme answer—the one that’s an actual phrase rather than something matt made up for this puzzle. SECRET is an antiperspirant brand that i’d rate near the high end of the familiarity scale relative to the others in the theme. but since the second word is less pinned—it’s just synonyms—i wonder how many people submitted other answers, like SECRET LOVER or SECRET CRUSH or SECRET BOYFRIEND or whatever. i think matt would have had to accept them.

other than that possible inelegance (and you might not even consider it as such), i thought this puzzle was a breath of fresh air. as i said, the solving path felt quite different from many metas—often, early-month metas are obvious at a glance, and mid-month metas are typically harder because they require multiple steps. this one required only one step, but it was an unexpected step, and although i can’t claim the meta was difficult, it was still surprising. so i enjoyed the novelty of it.

the grid is slightly funny-looking, with big fingers of black squares in all four corners due to the awkward theme lengths (15-13-13-13-13). the word count is an ultra-low 66, which would be low even for a themeless. in part, this is because of those black square fingers (there’s only one entry in columns 1 and 15 because of them), but even adding four in there would bring it up to a still-low 70. as such, long-ish fill (in the 6- to 9-letter range) abounds. i enjoyed matt’s winking self-promotion at 35d {“The Complete ___ Guide to Crossword Puzzles & Word Games” (2005 magnum opus)} IDIOT’S, and i did not know that the yugoslav city called TITOGRAD during the cold war is now podgorica, montenegro. that was interesting.

that’s all i’ve got this week. how’d you like this one?