meta
hello, and welcome to episode #881 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 puzzle called “Playing Both Sides”. this week’s puzzle challenges us to find a seven-letter type of person who might appreciate this meta. it’s rather early in the month for me to be extending a streak of misses to two, but here we are—i don’t know how to solve this meta. but here we go anyway. what are the theme answers? the five long acrosses all contain a three-letter palindromic word:
- {Winter fun} TET FESTIVAL. pretty vague clue.
- {Barely get by} EKE OUT A LIVING.
- {1950 drama featuring Marilyn Monroe} ALL ABOUT EVE.
- {Southern California phenomenon} SANTA ANA WINDS.
- {Mathematician in many xwords} ADA LOVELACE. not that the clue is by any means incorrect, but i’m wondering about “xwords” here instead of just “crosswords”. might the x be significant? i don’t know. it feels possible.
as there are only five theme answers, and we’re looking for a seven-letter final answer, i’m guessing we’re going to get the middle five letters of a seven-letter palindrome and then have to add on to the beginning and the end. if that hunch is right, the answers is probably going to be something like ROTATOR. but let’s see what happens.
along those lines, i do think we probably want to extend these three-letter palindromes into five-letter palindromes. there’s one clear way to do that for each of the first four: (S)TET(S), (D)EKE(D), (L)EVE(L), and (X)ANA(X)—the latter being the reason i think the x of “xwords” might be relevant. however, ADA can become either (R)ADA(R) or (M)ADA(M), both common words. perhaps this ambiguity will be resolved when we can figure out the next step.
the other x thing that jumped out at me was the clue for USN: {Org. that helped clean up the Exxon Valdez oil disaster}. while that’s true, i assume, it’s not really a normal cluing angle for that entry (the u.s. navy), and maybe the xx in “exxon” matters—we’re trying to put two X’s around ANA to make XANAX, so it makes sense to take note of where we might find two X’s.
well, while we’re here, are there clues that contain ss, dd, ll, and either mm or rr? why yes—and in fact, there’s exactly one of each, so i suspect we’re onto something here.
- {Sassy space creature} ALF. you can’t say he wasn’t sassy, but you rarely see this word in clues for ALF.
- {Maneuver in the middle of the road} UIE. again, this is true, but “middle” doesn’t appear that it really needs to be present for the clue to work.
- {Get more copies of Elle, say} RENEW. this one had caught my eye earlier because “elle” is itself a palindrome.
- {Org. that helped clean up the Exxon Valdez oil disaster} USN.
- {Hummer, e.g.} AUTO. there’s no clue containing “rr”, so i guess that settles that—we want MADAM, not RADAR.
so, where does this leave us? the first letters of the answers to those five clues spell out AURUA, which is itself palindromic. alhough AURUA isn’t itself a word, it’s the middle five letters of the seven-letter palindrome NAURUAN, the demonym for the tiny oceania nation of nauru. so that must be the answer to the meta. i have to say, it wasn’t one of the seven-letter palindromes i would have randomly guessed, if i had to randomly guess—but it is a seven-letter kind of person.
i’m definitely relieved to be back on target after missing week 2 last week, and overall, i did like this meta. but i was certainly aided by ctrl-F in finding those double-letter clues (and confirming their uniqueness); that would have taken significant time and effort to do by hand. it’s not that i couldn’t have done it, but it would have been boring work, so i’m glad to have the tech assist on that one.
i thought it was interesting (and elegant) how the instructions subtly suggested the solving path. there were five obvious theme answers, with three-letter palindromes, and we were asked for a seven-letter answer. that suggested that the lest step was going to be extending five letters into seven, and therefore the first step (well, okay, the second, after finding the three-letter palindromes in the first place) was going to be extending the three-letter palindromes into fives. if matt had written the meta so that the answer was itself just a five-letter palindrome, i think it might have been much harder.
that’s all for me this week. what’d you think?
Interesting. Nauruan was definitely my guess among the list of 7-letter palindromes, which is shorter than you might realize. There felt to be too much in the clues beyond just palindromes, but my list of suspicious words/clues only turned up a couple of that list. I was more suspicious of the 21 PIPs clue and the AAAs answer than most of the ones presented, though “Elle” did catch my eye.
Either way, I am happy that my day-1 guess was good enough!
I thought of making XANAX, DEKED, etc., but it never occurred to me to look for the missing letters in the clues. I went down the rabbit hole of thinking all the theme answers could have alternate answers involving CROSS — Marilyn Monroe was also in Right Cross in 1950, and Wintertime fun could be cross-country skiing. In particular, this would explain why the 57A clue conspicuously avoided “cross”. But I couldn’t come up with any more, or a way to use the 3-letter palindromes.
Thanks, joon — 167 right answers this week, of which just 44 were solo solvers.
Every puzzle so far this month has been a week more difficult than advertised, so I guess we go back to Week 1 on Friday? Or just crank a Week 5 instead?
Wouldn’t 44 solo solves be more like a week 5 than a week 4?
I was torn on this one, I got as far as DEKED/STETS/LEVEL/MADAMorRADAR, but completely whiffed on XANAX. I kept getting distracted by 62 across which could have been STAGES or what appears to be its French counterpart ETAPES, but could not find a click that made ETAGES work for me, so I thought maybe “Playing Both Sides” referred either to something that could either be in French or English, but of course that was a dead end as well.
Ok people. HOW do people solve these things??? Every step that Joon mentioned, with the exception of recognizing the 3-letter palindromes, seems completely random. Was his path the intended path, or did he kind of reverse his way into it? I just never would consider making the 3-letter palindromes into 5. And what pointed to the added letters being found as double letters in the clues? There just doesn’t seem to be a forward path to this, just the backsolving that Joon did. I mean, big props to those who solved it, but I just don’t understand your brains.
As a B-tier solver who was one of the lucky 44 soloists this week, I did a lot of grasping and put it down twice before getting things to fall:
– The title was super helpful (which I come to expect from week 3s and 4s but tends not to be true for week 5s) and made me wonder what I could do to both sides of these little palindromes, and EVE to LEVEL was the most obvious.
– The request for a seven-letter answer from five inputs also hinted at adding something to both sides.
– As it’s a 72-worder I don’t expect a lot of extra theme/mechanism outside the five long entries.
– Looking for “weird” fill, only ESD stuck out but I can see why it was there.
– Looking for “weird” clues, I see the palindrome ELLE and the odd reference to EXXON and starred these for later, though not due to double letters at the time.
– I saw something on XANAX while not trying to solve it, and it clicked that there’s two X’s.
Moderate level of flailing but not as much as the 30 things I tried on last week’s anagram before backsolving with what things I know about Arnold Palmer…
Congrats on the solo! That’s awesome!
After 9 hours of solo flailing, I group-solved with someone who mused on the XANAX/Exxon connection and that got us there. Wish I saw it, in retrospect! Found the five palindromes (with MADAM/RADAR in question) but it just one of many possible paths, and I didn’t fully take it to its conclusion.
It did help make many of the other observations (why Marilyn Monroe and not Bette Davis? Why xwords and not crosswords? Why that magazine? Why Exxon-Valdez?) crystallize, so I like when that happens!
Fun, memorable puzzle!
I got there with a welcome assist, but it didn’t help that I included a sixth palindrome: the IVI from 20A. I turned that into CIVIC, but found no corroboration in the clues. Once I finally tossed it overboard as not being a stand-alone three-letter player, I was able to continue on my way.