MGWCC crossword 3:10
meta DNF 
[3.56 avg; 8 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #886 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Surround Sound”. this week’s puzzle challenged us to come up with a famous 7-letter song from the 1980s AND its singer.. for the second week in a row, i have no idea what is happening in the meta, but i haven’t actually had much chance to look at this as i was traveling all weekend. so what are the theme answers? i don’t really know. the two longest answers are a pair of 10s, {Highly enthused} ALL FIRED UP and {Underground container} SEPTIC TANK. but i don’t know what to do with that; based on the title, i thought maybe we’re looking for phonetic containers, like either STANK or SANK around SEPTIC TANK—but those aren’t very good, as they’re also orthographic containers and there would be no particular need for the word “sound” in the title. and as it’s already 11:30 as i’m starting to blog this, let’s just take the hint and see what happens.
Alternate title: “Get in Shape”
hmm, that’s interesting. no mention of sound at all here, but “get in” confirms “surround” in suggesting that we are indeed looking for some sort of container wordplay. as for “shape”, that’s not immediately helping me, but perhaps it will. i do notice that one of the 8s, tied for the longest grid entry after ALL FIRED UP and SEPTIC TANK, is a shape explicitly clued as such: {Lemon garnish’s shape, sometimes} HALF-MOON. and there’s also 22d PLANAR, which does describe shapes.
hmm. SEP(TIC TAN)K contains TIC TAN, which is just one letter off from TIC TAC, which has a pill shape. are there other things like that? the problem is that “change one letter in a contained substring” is not a very constrained form of wordplay, and if the thing we’re looking to change to is not a shape itself (which has rather a limited space of possibilities) but rather objects of a certain shape (which has many more), i’m not sure i’ll ever be able to find them. i’ll stand a better chance if i’m just supposed to be looking for TICTA and i’m going to append the C, rather than TICTAN and change the N to a C. but i don’t like my chances there, either. LEE PETTER has EPE(+E), and TAXIING has AXI(+S), but these do not have shapes in common.
1-across UTAH has an iconic, very recognizable hexagonal shape. but that’s probably not relevant; i don’t see other things with clearly polygonal shapes (or any other PLANAR figures) in the grid. 1-down ULNA is adjacent to the radius, a word closely associated with circles. but that feels too indirect.
casting about wildly for coincidences unrelated to the title or instructions, i notice that the grid has both OREO and OLEO, as well as both ELMER and ELSIE. i think that’s probably nothing. MADRE is clued as {One of Julio Iglesias’s parents}, but PADRE would work equally; that kind of thing might or might not be relevant in a later step of the meta, but even if it is, i certainly don’t know what to do with it yet.
i think i’m going to have to give up again. this is two weeks in a row i’ve gotten absolutely nowhere, which is a little dispiriting, but i’m going to chalk this one up to traveling this weekend for trivia nationals and getting home after 3 am due to various travel delays and my brain being generally fried. what’d i miss?
I don’t know what the answer is, but I looked for meaningful Utah-shaped blocks in the grid without any luck. I did notice an unusual number of groups of the letters A, L, I, E, and N, arranged into various pentomino shapes. So I submitted (incorrectly) “Rapture,” by Blondie, which is about, well, aliens.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
The letter frequency of E, I, L, and N are all higher, which made me think of Neil Diamond. Sure enough, there are 7 NEIL diamonds in the grid, which center around the letters of AMERICA.
Actually there are 8 – see the “u” next to the “i” in America.
Well, at least I was on the right track!
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
As ever, amazing idea and construction but I am a little discouraged at how poorly I’ve done in recent months. Not holding out much hope with a week five coming up either! I will say in my defense that until yesterday I misread the prompt as meaning the song and the singer were the same 7-letter word (like Talk Talk by Talk Talk, or In a Big Country by Big Country.) Not that I even came close once I realized what the prompt really meant haha!
Don’t be discouraged. I think that lately Matt has been getting extra help from the home planet.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
Some wrong ideas I had: 1/ Look at letters whose shapes were made up of straight lines only and not any curved segments, which are AEFHIKLMNTVWXYZ (assuming uppercase since very few lowercase letters are straight lines only). 2/ Look at letters whose shapes contained any enclosed area (“surround”), which are ABDOPQR in uppercase or abdegopq in lowercase in most fonts.
I was also somewhat reminded of MGWCC #2013, which was another older “grand pattern” meta involving 3 of the same 4 letters (NIKE).
I’ve been preoccupied with family stuff but metas haven’t been much of a pleasant diversion lately. I guess I just find counting letters tedious. I’ll keep solving them, but I think my days of spending a few hours on them are over.
*1
I just saw in the writeup for this week’s WSJ a reference to “mechapuzzle” that will take a .puz file and produce a letter frequency graph. If you solve on apaper, I’m not sure whether doing the frequency analysis on paper or copying the grid into a program is faster. But if you already solve on a screen, this might be quite fast.
I just put this puzzle into that website, and it said it was made up of all D’s. What’s going on there? I notice that with MGWCC, in the app I use (Cross Your Heart), I can’t reveal an answer or the puzzle or check anything. That’s probably because Matt turns that off somehow. But does that make mechapuzzle not work?
Be sure your puzzle is saved before you put it in mechapuzzle. It works for me.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3.5 stars
I’m very curious to understand the justification to just ignore the U surrounded by NEIL. I didn’t think there is any good reason to explain it, and it just came off as sloppy.
+1
That extra NEIL was completely unintended by me and I was quite surprised to find out that it existed. I had been cracking my skull to fit these NEILs in *on purpose*, so the idea that an extra could sneak in *by chance* never crossed my mind.
It’s sort of half-a-NEIL since it uses the N and L of the other NEIL in that quadrant, but of course it’s a full NEIL on its own as well. I had pre-placed TAXIING in that quadrant (and in fact had started there with the fill), since the IIN had limitations on where it could go. And then with LEIL? — ENN?? and R (or D)?G??, the natural, obvious and good fill was what I used, which was LEILA/ENNUI/ROGER with ENO/CLUE/REAIR on the acrosses.
Was so happy with the clean fill there that I never thought to check for a stray NEIL anyplace in the grid. They were so tough to fit in on purpose so how could there be a stray? But there was…
So points deducted for sure and I’m in general harder on myself than 99% of solvers could be, but I don’t feel as bad as I should about this one. Toughie to catch!
Thanks Matt – I figured it might have been inadvertant.
And, TBH, it is NOT what kept me from solving. Well done!
Wow, this is a cool one. I spent waaaaay too long staring at it and trying to make sense out of things. So many red herrings, intentional or not… The clue for “MADRE” seemed particularly stilted. Why mention Julio Iglesias, giving his entire name? And Selena Gomez in “OREO”, right next to “SALINE”, just a couple of letters off her name, could that be salient?
But I spent the most time on those short verticals in the center. “Sound” in the puzzle title made me think it would be something phonetic. The “ELSIE” clue suggested things that sound like 2 letters. So I saw “IAN” and thought oh, maybe that’s “E N”? How does that work with ENAMELER? Then I looked at “MC alternative” and thought, wait, that’s got to be something about MC Escher! And we’ve got “Roc-a-fella”, perhaps that’s a link to “John D. Rockefeller”? And look, “DEER” is a short vertical, that’s got to have something to do with John Deere tractors! And “Desmond” in that clue, maybe bishop Desmond Tutu? Maybe AMEX is “M X”? No, that’s not quite right…
And on and on and on…
Anyway, I’m glad this site’s comment section exists to give me somewhere to look when I’ve given up so I don’t keep banging my head against the wall all week long.