MGWCC #878

 

hello, and welcome to episode #878 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 5 guest puzzle from the married constructing team of lydia roth & christina bodensiek called “Little Morsels”. this week’s instructions tell us that the answer consists of four grid entries. okay, that’s an interesting prompt. what are the theme answers? you might think they’re the long answers in the grid, but no, what jumped out this week was the clues. the title was a hint, as it subtly suggested at morse code, and sure enough, looking at the list of clues, it’s littered with dots and dashes—in fact, almost every across clue contains at least one of them (and, tellingly, the downs contain none at all—a very elegant touch). let’s have a look:

• {Dr. Sagan who co-founded the non-profit The Planetary Society} CARL; one dot followed by two dashes, giving W in morse code. right off the bat, this clue gave off “too much” vibes—”sagan” by itself would have been sufficient to solve the clue.
• {R.S.V.P. response} MAYBE; . . . . = H.
• {One whose email address once included .edu} GRAD; . = E.
• {india.___, Grammy-nominated artist for “Testimony: Vol. 1”} ARIE; . – . = R.
• {Crosswise, to a sailor} ABEAM. no morse here.
• {Move for one’s co., say} RELO; . = E.
• {“I need to test this out … ___”} FOR SCIENCE; . . . = S. also, this is just a funny entry i’ve never seen in a crossword before.
• {That, in Spanish} ESTO. no morse here either.
• {Inventor Thomas A. who worked with x-rays} EDISON; . – = A, and again, the unnecessary middle initial in the clue was a pretty big hint. (of course, veteran crossworders know that it stands for ALVA.)
• {Antagonist of He-man and She-ra} SKELETOR; – – = M.
• {J.M. Barrie’s right-hand man for Hook} SMEE; . . – = U. by contrast, this is a fairly natural-sounding clue that artfully incorporates the two dots and one dash.
• {French state} ETAT. no morse here.
• {___ Paulo} SAO. or here.
• {Clump of dirt} CLOD. or here.
• {Breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.} MEALS; . = E.
• {Dr.’s co-workers, e.g.} RNS; . – . . = L. the “e.g.” isn’t really needed in the clue for cluing reasons, but those two dots are needed for the morse code.
• {Fly sky-high and attract upward-looking stares, perhaps} SOAR; – – = M.
• {Margaery’s blood-thirsty mother-in-law, in “Game of Thrones”} CERSEI (lannister); – – – = O. i normally see it written as “bloodthirsty” with no hyphen, but this clue works pretty well too. it’s not that easy to put three hyphens in a clue!
• {No. 1, hunky-dory, etc.} A-OK; . – . = R.
• {Author J.R.R.} TOLKIEN; . . . = S. this clue works so easily that i suspect TOLKIEN was a seed entry when filling the grid.
• {“Mr. Holmes” actor McKellen} IAN; . = E.
• {Child-like back-talk to a cruel-hearted comment} SO MEAN; – – – = O.
• {Negative contraction} ISN’T. no morse.
• {___ Johnson Sr., dad on “Black-ish,” husband to Dr. Rainbow} DRE; . – . = R.
• {Irked} ATE AT. no morse
• {Rose-Hulman, e.g.} INST.; – . . = D.
• {Dr. Jeong} KEN; . = E.
• {What our cats will eventually do to all of our window blinds} RUIN. no morse, but a lively and evocative clue.
• {Verdi opera} AIDA. no morse.
• {Regional forms of a language} DIALECTS. no morse.
• {C. maxima, large grapefruit-like fruit (largest weighs 12lb 2.9oz!)} POMELO; . – . = R. this is the fourth R and the one that made me realize how hard it must have been to write all those .-. clues. the other ones look quite smooth in comparison to this one.
• {“I ___ over it”} AM SO. no morse
• {Oprah’s giveaway catchphrase} YOU GET A CAR. no morse here either, but what a fun entry and clue (no, not that kind of giveaway).
• {Car manufacturer most likely to tell you a “sad” story…} SAAB; . . . = S, and a groaner of a pun. the unnecessary ellipsis is doing heavy duty here.
• {Performed without lines} MIMED. no morse
• {T.S. Eliot’s highly-regarded work, “The ___ Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”} LOVE; . . – . = F.
• {Feeling leading up to a once-in-a-lifetime event} HYPE; – – – = O.
• {Self-announcing lyric from award-winning mezzo-soprano Adele} IT’S ME; – – – = O again.
• {Sorrow-filled expression often used by Wm. Shakespeare et al.} ALAS; – . . = D.

taking those letters in order and skipping over the clues that didn’t contain any morse, we get WHERE SAMUEL MORSE ORDERS FOOD. that’s interesting but of course it’s not the meta answer—it’s a prompt, so that we can pick out four grid entries that would make an appropriate final answer.

what grid entries should we look at? my eye was certainly caught by 1-down, {Place to “pour over” the menu?} CAFE, since that’s a place to order food and the clue even suggests the action of ordering. more broadly, i figured that since almost all the acrosses were used to hide morse in the clues, perhaps the downs were where the answer was lurking.

the latter instinct was more fruitful than the former, as i spotted the innocuous-looking {Polka ___} DOT and {“The Incredibles” speedy super} DASH at 51- and 52-down; surely not an accident? and, in another elegant touch, their symmetric counterparts are {It may be unhinged} DOOR and {Rom follower} COM. you can assemble those four entries into DOOR DASH DOT COM, which is a simply delightful place for this meta to end. i’d never made the connection before that that url includes DASH and DOT in order. (-. is N in morse, by the by.)

this puzzle was a joy to solve from start to finish. i found it infinitely easier than last week’s impenetrable meta (on which i made zero progress); perhaps i was aided by solving on paper, as i am wont to do, because even a quick glance at the page made all the punctuation in the left-hand column quite apparent, and with the hint in the title, i was off and running. i never really slowed down until the final step, and finding that step was just a wonderful aha moment. i appreciated how the connection between morse and food made the title even tighter—i thought it was doing enough to just hide “morse”.

the constraint on the down clues—namely, that they must not include any dots or dashes—was much less severe, so lydia and christina really let their creativity shine in the down clues. some of my favorites:

• {Yank by a handle?} A-ROD. i must have written this answer into hundreds of crosswords before (not an exaggeration), but this is the first time i can remember seeing a clue for it that made me smile.
• {Honest prez who shares a birthday with Charles Darwin} ABE. not just a birthday, but a birthdate—february 12, 1809. i think i’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for this trivium because the first time i ever attended a crossword tournament was westport in 2009, and the NYT puzzle from the following thursday was the playoff puzzle. i won the tournament on that puzzle and i’ve had a hell of a good time attending crossword tournaments since then. speaking of which, i hope to see many of you this weekend in stamford!
• {Silence in a bar?} REST. a bar of musical notation. very good.
• {“I’m waiting for the right time to finish my math homework!” “Well, here’s your ___!”} SINE. another groaner, but one that i can relate to—just yesterday, i noticed a page of trig identities that my daughter had left on the coffee table in the living room. ah, to be young again and taking pre-calc.
• {“When do you need me to harvest that maple syrup? “___!”} ASAP. the dad jokes just keep coming.
• {Glam rock?} GEM. oh, but this is a good one.

thank you to lydia and christina for this wonderful puzzle! i hope the rest of you enjoyed it as much as i did.