meta DNF
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hello, and welcome to episode #877 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 (of 5) guest puzzle from jeff chen called “What a Nightmare!”. this week’s instructions tell us that Someone is hiding in this grid! This week’s contest answer is the two-word, 11-letter phrase that describes their hiding place. what are the theme answers? i have no idea. there are no long answers in this grid, and nothing stands out to me as being obviously thematic. what does stand out is that the grid is in two entirely separate pieces, with black squares comprising the entirety of row 9. combined with the left/right mirror symmetry, it gives the grid a striking look, almost like it’s supposed to be a picture of something, perhaps something avian or chiropteran.
there must be some thematic reason for the split grid, as it’s a fairly obvious violation of normal crossword rules. my first thought was putting letters in some of the black squares there to make words reading down across the wall, but i don’t see much that’s of interest there. nor do i have any idea what to do with the title. as for the instructions, it does seem plausible that the all-black square row could be the hiding place, but i can’t think of an obvious way of phrasing that in two words and 11 letters.
what about sus clues and answers? there wasn’t a lot here that really caught my eye, but i have nothing else to go on, so let’s take a look at some of them:
- {Officer often flying incognito} is an air MARSHAL. incognito is one way of being hidden, so perhaps this is related to the instructions.
- {Ingredient often used in “Is It Cake?”} FOOD DYE, which, yes, but i sure did try FONDANT once i had the FO-. not sure if this was a deliberate trap.
- {Drug for the Merry Pranksters (Abbr.)} LSD. however, ACID is elsewhere in the grid, clued as {It’s definitely not a 10 in chemistry}, so i thought there might be something here. on second look, though, if we were supposed to note ACID as an alternate answer to the LSD clue, there wouldn’t have been the (Abbr.) tag in the clue. it could have been “for short” or “in brief” or just no tag at all, but ACID is decidedly not an (abbr.).
- {Musical title role for Rachel Zegler in 2025} EVITA. i did not know this, but i did know that she’s playing the title role in the new live-action snow white, which opened last week. i believe it is a movie musical, with several of the songs from the original 1937 animated film and a handful of new songs by pasek & paul. that said, i don’t know if we’re supposed to be thinking about snow white here, or if this is just an interesting current events clue for EVITA, a very common five-letter crossword answer.
- {Large jazz group} NONET is yet another very common five-letter crossword answer, but i couldn’t help but notice that THE MUSES are also in the grid, and there are 9 of those. i guess the muses would more aptly be called an ennead than a NONET, though, both because they’re greek rather than latin, and because they’re not a musical ensemble.
- {Place for some crosses} is a very tough boxing clue for RING. there are plenty of other correct answers to this clue, though.
well, all that and i really haven’t got anything. i suspect this is a very clever meta, because jeff is a {Grizzled vet} OLD PRO who knows what he’s doing, but it flew completely over my head, unfortunately, so i haven’t really got anything to say about it. what’d i miss?
The clue for TAKES ([Double ___ (second looks)] is a subtle hint, but there are four words in top portion of the grid that each can drop two consecutive letters to make a word that corresponds with the clue for the answer in the same column.
DOODLING – OD = DOLING –> [Parceling (out)] = METING
PAYS RENT – YS = PARENT –> [Nurture] = RAISE
CAR SEATS – SE = CARATS –> [Mass measurements] = UNITS
THE MUSES – US = THEMES –> [Big ideas] = MOTIFS
The dropped pairs of letters spell ODYSSEUS who’s hiding in the puzzle. From here it’s a bit of a leap but Odysseus famously hid in the TROJAN HORSE in the Aenead, and the title hints at a punny description (a “night mare”) of the Trojan Horse since the Greeks snuck into Troy at night.
*Aeneid, sorry
Who knew the horse was female?!?!
The Trojan Horse is often depicted as a stallion in art. While “What a Nightmare” is a clever title, it doesn’t really help.
I also think the mechanism was very clever, but I’m with Joon about the solid line of blocks. If you’re going to cut off the bottom, this conspicuous breach of crossword rules should be related to the meta. IMO, it would have been better to expand the grid if the cut-off was the only way to allow for the significant answers in a 15×15.
My first published crossword actually had a line of blocks cutting off the bottom. When David Steinberg edited the Orange County Register crossword, he ran “Prison Break” as a 16×15. The black squares hid SECRETPASSAGEWAY. These letters formed a bridge between Down answers in the top half and Down answers in the bottom, making longer words that fit their definitions.
It is closely tied to the meta. That is the wall that the Trojan horse is breaching. Odysseus and the troops can only enter when he’s hidden.
I don’t know how I saw what I needed to see Friday night into Saturday (past midnight), but I will let someone else explain while I just reflect on a red herring, haha.
On the strength of NIGHTMARE having no repeated letters, I was thinking isograms for a bit:
SLED (RED WAGON)
FOODDYE (BAKING POWDER)
ARC (HYPERBOLA)
ESPY (FINALS MVP)
UNITS (KILOGRAMS)
ROLO (GUMDROP)
Other non-isograms that screamed for alternates were SNOW WHITE for EVITA, GOLF BALL for TEE, and MIDNIGHT for NOON.
Probably spent 8 hours or so trying to hammer this into reality on Friday; UNITS was blazingly vague, though, and that one did bother me the most. That will be relevant, as you’ll soon see!
I got as far as this:
If you take two letters out of the 8 letter down entries, you get a word that fits the clue for the word directly below it:
-DO(od)LING/METING
-PA(ys)RENT/RAISE
-CAR(se)ATS/[TROY] UNITS
-THEM(us)ES/MOTIFS
The discarded letters spell ODYSSEUS. He famously hid (with other Greek soldiers) inside the TROJAN HORSE, which they use to breach the wall in row 9.
I believe the title and TROY confirm this, and Matt gave me and my partner in crime credit for it. Not 100% on the click or if there was anything I missed.
I also got hung up on the “related” entries – in addition to LSD/ACID and NONET/THE MUSES (which seemed *super* non-concidental), I had (with varying degrees of “relatedness”) MSG/UMAMI, FWD/SPORT (as in 4 wheel drive/SUV), ARC/TALE, INK/DOODLING, TEE/RAG, RAISE/ERECT, DURUM/CEREAL.
I found ODYSSEUS but couldn’t breach the wall to the answer, wound up hail marying UPSIDE DOWNS as my answer since, hey, he was hidden in the down answers on the up-side of the puzzle. Wonder if there was any other way besides NIGHT-MARE to connect our cleverly hidden hero to the meta answer?
How does the unusual grid relate to the meta? Why the black row? Why ask for the hiding place and not the figure himself? Very strange and not really satisfying. Unless I’m missing some additional layer, which I’d be delighted to hear.
If you try you can fit the letters HORSE in some of the black spaces but not in a neat or coherent way.
I also found it curious that LSD was clued with (Abbr.) but the very next clue for SSN was not. I messed around with the long-ish downs (is it THEM USES and CARS EATS?) but never got close. If the prompt hadn’t specified two words, my eleven-letter Hail Mary would have been UNDER THE BED relating to nightmares and monsters hiding under the bed, which is what I thought the black row was meant to be.
I got basically nowhere but submitted MAGIC MIRROR in a futile hope that the theme was Snow White related.
In my spreadsheet for “alternate answers” I did indeed have DOLING and THEMES. I had neither PARENT nor CARATS, though naturally I had GRAMS, OUNCES, POUNDS, and a few other units of mass/weight. But I do not think I would have gotten it without many more days–the sheet makes it hard to place things in the grid, and there were enough other clues with notable alternate answers that were not just downs (36-A, 37-A, 53-A, 63-A).
It did not help that I was very sure it was related to bats or Batman!
Thanks, Jeff — 184 right answers this week, 42 of which were solo solves.
The idea of breaking the grid in two was meant to call attention to the pairs of vertical words. Unorthodox but I didn’t think it was unfair, since once you see one of them you see them all and it can’t be a coincidence.
I also found TRO in the black squares after TEA (giving the plausible entry TEATRO) and JAN in the black squares after RAG (giving the much less plausible entry RAGJAN (hey! it googles!))
I put in FOUR CORNERS and added the note (Bono is the famous person hiding) into my entry. I imagine that the lack of “nightmare” content in U2 songs and albums convinced Matt to give it the old “Nahhhhhhh”.
I found OD-YS-SE-US and jumped right to Trojan Horse. (The enumeration clinched it for me.) But I felt like I had missed some intermediate step somewhere in the grid or clues. I love CanNibble’s suggestion that the black row represents the walls of Troy!
Interesting red herring that each of the first four rows has one clue (on alternating sides of the grid) with notably many words that begin with vowels:
{Unjustified Auras Of notoriety}
{Officer Often flying Incognito}
{Ingredient Often Used In “Is It Cake?”}
{IRS ID, Often}
I found Odysseus in 45 minutes and almost immediately thought of TROJAN HORSE and then spent the next three hours trying to convince myself that this was right. I think the lack of a clear path from Odysseus to TH is a real weakness of this puzzle.