MGWCC #876

 

hello, and welcome to episode #876 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 guest puzzle from evan birnholz called “Plot Device”. this week’s instructions ask for a five-letter word. what are the theme answers? that wasn’t immediately clear to me, but i think i have at least an inkling of where to start. this is a 16×16 grid with diagonal symmetry on the negative* (NW to SE) diagonal, which is fairly unusual. there are four long answers, though, and i suspect they’re all thematic because they are all clued in such a way as to leave open the possibility of alternate correct answers:

• {Monthly Condé Nast publication} BON APPÉTIT. there are, or at least were, many condé nast magazines (and i don’t know which ones are monthly), although this one does have the pleasing feature of echoing the accented é from the clue.
• {Setting of Florence and Venice} CALIFORNIA. of course, there are more famous cities called florence and venice in italy.
• {Nickname of a Chicago Bulls legend} HIS AIRNESS. that’s michael jordan, of course, and he’s got some other nicknames (just AIR, or perhaps MJ or MIKE). arguably, there’s at least one other player who could be called a bulls legend, and i guess SCOTTIE is his nickname… maybe? believe it or not, his legal name is “scotty maurice pippen”. i don’t know why it was always spelled SCOTTIE during his NBA career, nor do i know whether i would call the alternate spelling a nickname. perhaps the weirdest part of it all is that he now has a son playing in the NBA (for the memphis grizzlies) named “scotty maurice pippen jr.” who goes by … scotty pippen jr. so he’s a jr, but spells it different from his dad, except it’s actually spelled the same way as his real name and his dad’s real name… i don’t know. i guess the weird part is still dad spelling it SCOTTIE. anyway, i suspect all of this is moot, and the relevant thing is some other nickname for jordan.
• {House location} WASHINGTON. so, sure, the house of representatives. but it could be any other house, like a monopoly house. or it could even still be the house and admit an alternate answer of, say, CAPITOL HILL.

now, after seeing those clues and considering the alternate possibilities, i certainly wanted to find those alternate possibilities elsewhere in the grid, but i haven’t. so i’m still stuck here. i also suspect there’s another important theme answer, because i haven’t been able to connect the puzzle title to anything except for the final across answer and its tantalizing clue: {Coordinate ___} PLANE. that makes me think we’re supposed to be treating the grid as an xy-plane and looking up coordinates of stuff; perhaps this is related to why the grid has diagonal instead of standard crossword symmetry. separately, the instructions make me think i’m missing a regular theme answer, since i only have four and i’m probably going to need five.

okay, so, what about coordinates? there is one X and one Y in the grid (and one Z, while we’re here). oh geez. i’m just noticing that the entries in the top row are FIND BMW GLYPHS and in the first column they’re JOCK VEX QUARTZ, which really looks like someone’s going hard for a pangram. yeah, that sure is every letter of the alphabet exactly once. so that saves me the trouble of trying to figure out where to put the origin and how to assign numbers—we’re using those as column and row headers. the top-left square is a black square, as it’s where the axes meet—the origin of our coordinate plane.

(*while we’re here, i might as well explain that i call the NW-to-SE diagonal the “negative” diagonal because it is the diagonal that has a slope of negative 1, in the algebra 1 sense. here, with the origin in the upper left, if we were using numeric coordinates instead of row and column headers, that diagonal line would have the equation y = –x.)

so, getting back to our theme answers—MJ is probably the relevant nickname for jordan because we want a two-letter coordinate pair. the letter in column M, row J is R.

what else have we got? well, presumably the condé nast magazine is GQ. that gives us a D from square 55. i would not have guessed it was monthly—the title suggests it was originally published quarterly (although now maybe GQ doesn’t officially stand for anything?). apparently there are 10 issues per year, which is not quite monthly, but it’s more than quarterly, and it’s surprising that a print magazine in the current decade is now published more often than it used to be. anyway, i suspect each issue is labeled with its month; maybe that is close enough to “monthly” for our purposes. (it has long amused me that the american mathematical monthly is also published 10x annually. feels like mathematicians should be able to correctly count how many months are in a year.)

moving on, WASHINGTON is presumably just DC which is the coordinates of the letter A. and maybe venice and florence are referring to the california ones, which are neighborhoods of LA; that gives us another A in square 66. so, no italy at all, which is another mild surprise. there are a couple of alternate interpretations, though—CALIFORNIA could just be CA, which doesn’t work as a coordinate pair because C and A are both row headers. or we could be zooming out and saying they’re both in the US. this seems loosest and therefore worst to me, but it would get us the I in square 63.

the missing theme answer isn’t symmetric to one of the existing regular themers, so the next-best thing is to have it be symmetric to the “reveal” answer PLANE—this would be {Campaign consultant’s concern} IMAGE, which suggests PR. those coordinates give us another R, and looking at the five indicated points in our coordinate PLANE we can see that they spell out RADAR from top to bottom. that’s a five-letter word, all right, and it must be our meta answer. i can see how it’s sort of related to (different senses of) the words PLANE and IMAGE. that’s yet another turn i wasn’t expecting, but it works.

i wonder if there are yet more layers of the meta that i haven’t noticed. i’d be impressed—this already feels like a pretty heavily constrained grid. having the first row and column be perfectly pan- and isogrammatic so as to enable them to act as row and column headers is a stroke of genius, but also quite constrained. they had to be matching word lengths (4, 3, and 6 in this case) because of the diagonal symmetry. the relevant coordinate pairs had to have one letter each along the two axes—it wouldn’t have worked if (say) G and Q had both been row headers, or both column headers. so i suspect the axes were fixed first, and then evan would have had to pick theme answers that gave usable coordinates. putting six more grid entries in symmetric pairs would not have been easy; i’m sure evan would have been happy to find CALIFORNIA and WASHINGTON matching in length and sharing the A in the second position so they could cross. as a final step, there were five more constrained squares scattered throughout the grid to spell out the extraction. the whole thing is a tour de force, but this is evan birnzholz we’re talking about, so he made it look easy.

i was both impressed and delighted by this puzzle. how about you?