meta DNF
hello, and welcome to episode #880 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Jacket Required”. with the masters being played this past weekend, matt challenges us to find a Masters-champion golfer. and i’m guessing the answer isn’t rory mcilroy, unless matt was extremely confident for whatever reason when he sent out the puzzle on friday. what are the theme answers? these four made-up 15s:
- {Remove an ancient European kingdom from your crossword database?} DELETE MACEDONIA.
- {Dipped author L’Engle in a vat of chocolate?} COATED MADELEINE.
- {Funny story you have to click on?} EMAILED ANECDOTE.
- {Described an actor’s brief film appearance?} DELINEATED CAMEO.
these are all anagrams of the same 15 letters: AACDDEEEEILMNOT. so, since it’s only week 2, presumably we just need to look through the list of masters champions and pick out the one whose name anagrams to these letters, right?
… right?
well, no. not right. there isn’t anybody on the list who fits. hmm.
what else is there that we can even do? not a whole lot. the title is worth thinking about—the masters famously awards a green jacket to the champion, with the previous year’s champion helping the winner to put it on. i noticed that COAT is in the COATED MADELEINE theme answer, and of course that’s just a synonym of jacket. but i feel like if we were supposed to use COAT, then COAT wouldn’t appear like that in one of the themers.
is it something to do with GREEN, as in the green jacket? a handful of masters winners have had all of those letters in their name: ANGEL CABRERA, BERNHARD LANGER, and GENE SARAZEN. but if this is all there is, i don’t know why we have been given this specific set of 15 letters that we haven’t used at all.
my fear at this point is that we’re supposed to come up with some other anagram of these 15 letters that is a clue phrase for the winner, rather than the winner’s name itself. i really, really hope it isn’t that, because that would be … bad. just no fun. fifteen fairly common letters with plenty of vowels—there is far too vast a search space.
the bad news is, i don’t really have any other ideas. so i guess i’m stumped. what did i miss?
The letters anagram to ICED TEA & LEMONADE which is of course ARNOLD PALMER.
I stumbled for same reason joon did ultimately. Found COAT NEEDED (a synonym of “Jacket Required”) among the anagram pool and spent far too much time chasing that dead end (A LIME COAT NEEDED, that’s a green jacket!). Ah well.
I found A LIME COAT NEEDED, too. I didn’t think Matt would expect solvers to use this on a week 2, but I still explored whether a shade of green might “jacket” one of the winners’ names. Best I could come up with was BENHOGAN bracketed by BEAN. Not a shade of green, but maybe (green) BEAN? Or BERNHARDLANGER bracketed by (green) BEER? I wasn’t hopeful enough to try these as an alternate answer, of course. BTW, Nick Faldo anagrams to Find Cloak and Scottie Scheffler anagrams to Clothier’s Effects.
Wound up hail-marying SAM SNEAD, the first recipient of the world-famous Lime Coat. He certainly did find cloak.
Also found A LIME COAT NEEDED fairly quickly, figured I at least had the rabbit’s tail, but alas.
Thanks, joon — 250 right answers this week (ARNOLD PALMER was the answers, anagramming lemonade + iced tea), of which 156 were solo solves.
I was concerned about some solvers not having heard of the drink. Considered putting “drink” or something in the title but was afraid that would give the answer away right off the bat.
I don’t know if it was purposeful or not but Arnie was also the only four time winner of the Masters, which led me to the meta when I looked up his Wiki entry for inspiration and saw the drink.
I was seeing if there were any other two-word anagrams and came to LIMEADE ANECDOTE, which of course wasn’t used in favor of E-MAILED. And I was thinking, “What’s wrong with limeade? That’s fun!” And I just went to LEMONADE, ICED TEA, Arnold Palmer after that. One of my favorite summer beverages!
I haven’t heard of the drink. Even though I saw LEMONADE in the fodder (amongst many other 7+-letter words), I didn’t see ICED TEA for the rest. And wouldn’t have thought of mixing the two ingredients, and looking up the result. The title was doing nothing in this puzzle (and therefore just sending us off down rabbit holes). As Joon says: “fifteen fairly common letters with plenty of vowels—there is far too vast a search space.”
Viciously tough.
I was pleased with myself that I decided that DECODE ANIMAL TEE just wasn’t tight enough to denote Tiger Woods and found the right one 5 minutes later.
Same experience as joon: knew it was an anagram, didn’t feel like playing the endless-option anagram game. Cool anagram phrases though.
Same here. Figured it was a nickname like “Golden Bear” or something else famous related to a golfer, but the options for anagrams were just too onerous. Fun phrases though! I feel like I should have been able to backsolve it because I am very familiar with the beverage, but no.
I used oneacross.com to find the anagram. LEMONADE ICED_TEA wasn’t very far down the list.
Thank you for pointing out that oneacross.com can be used to find multi-word anagrams like this. None of the tools that I tried found anything other than the anagrams already in the puzzle.
Good tip!
I agree with Joon. Getting to the final step was easy but anagraming those 15 letters to get to something useful was unnecessary drudgery. Great work by Matt to find four phrases for the grid with those letters; horrible idea to make the solver come up with a fifth to solve the puzzle.
I tried to get ChatGPT to help me figure out possible multi word anagrams and it wouldn’t even count the letters right. So there’s that.
Had the same experience with ChatGPT so that was a dead end. I thought for sure that since Jacket Required means Coat Needed and removing those letters leaves Emil A that maybe there was a golfer with that name? But not a masters champion…
Arnold Palmer is also the only golfer to win the Masters exactly 4 times (Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus have more). So the anagram appearing four times in the puzzle could be a supplemental hint.
The double-edged sword of having exactly one notable non-golf thing of all the folks on that list. Once you see it, it’s the obvious correct answer. Getting there is annoyingly hard without additional clues, but I can’t think of ways to hint at it without making the meta immediately guessable sans grid
It needed a better title.
“Jacket Required” ended up having nothing to do with the solution.
It was unnecessarily redundant, as the Masters was already mentioned.
I was prompted with “Mixed Drinks” which immediately lit up the lightbulb.
This is so interesting! I had no idea the Arnold Palmer drink wasn’t that known anymore; I feel like I grew up on this stuff!