MGWCC crossword 3:14
meta DNF 
[3.80 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #887 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 5 puzzle called “Connect Four”. this week’s puzzle challenged us to come up with a familiar four-letter proper name that begins with a consonant. i am in the midst of extending my losing streak, as for the third week in a row i have not even the slightest idea what is happening here. what are the theme answers? at least i can answer that part, as there are four wacky across entries:
- {Planned California city to be named for podcaster Marc?} SANTA MARON.
- {Kids’ sports league founded by gridiron coach Ewbank?} WEEB T-BALL.
- {Bird’s nest owned by a boot-making company?} FRYE AERIE. fraught crossing here, with the Y in the never-heard-of-this-company FRYE coming from never-heard-of-this-guy {Celebrity psychologist Eugene} LANDY. but i guessed it right.
- {Boxer Mayweather who really needs to change up his moves?} STALE FLOYD.
after that, i’m pretty much at a loss. the title suggests finding four in a row of a letter, as in the classic game, but this is nowhere to be found in this grid (it would have to be on a diagonal, of course, as it would stand out pretty obviously if an across or down entry had four of the same letter in a row). and, of course, this mechanism is totally unrelated to the four overt theme answers.
i suppose we could look for four in a row using not just one letter, but the letters of BLACK and RED, the two sides in connect four (which, at least in its classic version, uses standard checkers). these occur many times—indeed, there’s a huge pile-up in the middle-left section of the grid where ALACK and SITS BACK cross AFLAC and BLACK itself. but somewhat surprisingly, i can’t find four in a row of RED, even though all three of these are common crossword letters.
if it’s not something to do with the game connect four, it may well be that we just need to connect sets of four things, like in only connect, or connections. and, i shudder to say, there’s ERIE again hanging out at the end of FRYE AERIE, taunting me after i missed it hiding backwards in the groups of five earlier this month.
okay, i have something: you could change one letter in each word of SANTA MARON to get SANAA AARON, both of which are valid entries, and then you’d have four A’s in a row. yeah, this is it. then WEBB B-BALL, FREE EERIE, and STALL LLOYD. so then you’d have AAAA, BBBB, EEEE, LLLL. that must be the first step.
is there a second step other than “arbitrarily anagram these four letters into a four-letter proper name starting with a consonant”? i kind of hope so, because BALE (as in christian) and BEAL (as in bradley) and BELA (as in lugosi or fleck) are all pretty familiar. so i really hope there’s something else.
we’re given the AAAA, BBBB, EEEE, and LLLL in alphabetical order. should we be looking at the letters changed out? probably not, would be my guess, but it can’t hurt to note them: T/M -> AA, E/T -> BB, Y/A -> EE, and E/F -> LL. not sure what we’d do with them, though.
the corners of the puzzle are also interesting—there are black squares in all four corners, and the fill in the NE and SW corners is pretty shocking considering there is no apparent constraint from the theme at all. and in general, there is surely more theme in this grid than just the 10+9+9+10 squares we have. so i’m side-eyeing that HOOO/ERHU/BORS cluster in the NE and MORO/PRIE in the SW pretty hard.
let’s look at HOOO a little closer. why isn’t square 15 just a P or a T, to make HOOP/PUT or HOOT/TUT? i actually had HOOT there for {Owl’s call} before looking at the 15d clue {Loose, as a pet}, which doesn’t work for TUT. oh, but actually, it does work for FREE, which is one of our implied words. interesting. and 11d DOHA is clued as {Middle Eastern capital}, which works for SANAA. okay. let’s just look for clues for all eight new words:
- SANAA goes with {Middle Eastern capital} DOHA.
- AARON is {Judge on a baseball field} UMP. clever!
- WEBB is {Actor Jack} BLACK.
- B-BALL is {LBJ’s activity} HOOPS.
- FREE is {Loose, as a pet} OUT.
- EERIE is {Strangely unusual} ODD, which is a strangely unusual clue because it’s quite redundant.
- STALL might be {Lag} DELAY. it actually goes better with DELAY than with {Lag}, honestly. but i couldn’t find anything else that goes with STALL.
- LLOYD is {Actor Christopher} REEVE.
okay. so, what now? we’ve gone from four letters to eight extra theme entries. their first letters spell out DUBHOODR, or in grid order, HDOBDUOR. that’s nothing. i also don’t know how we’re getting back down to four letters for our final answer.
are we supposed to come back to the letters A, B, E, L somehow? perhaps DOHA UMP, BLACK HOOPS, OUT ODD, and DELAY REEVE give us some kind of ordering on those four, though i don’t love how open to interpretation that would be.
well, i might have failed again, but at least i’ve given a better accounting of myself than i did the last few weeks. i suppose i might as well guess one of BALE/BEAL/BELA—let’s say BELA. but i kind of wish we’d extracted 8 letters that disambiguated which one. oh well.
what’d i miss?
Amazingly, DOHA/BLACK/OUT/DELAY and UMP/HOOPS/ODD/REEVE don’t contribute to finding the meta as far as I can tell.
The quadrupled letters from changing the theme answers spell out ABEL. There are four other odd clues in the puzzle that hide “Abel”:
[Record labels release them] = CDS
[A bellow of despair] = ALACK
[Like the Bab-el Mandeb str.] = INTL
[A belittling rejection] = NAA
Their first letters in grid order spell CAIN.
The way I found it was that I saw Abel hiding in [Like the Bab-el Mandeb str.] … then proceeded to understand basically none of the rest of the puzzle without some extra prodding and without realizing I’d already found the final answer.
Unfortunately, yes, as Evan noticed, there are a whole lot of “clicks” hiding, all over the puzzle, which, seemingly exist only to say “Yes, yes ABEL”, and nothing more.
A solver daring enough to take
AAron
BBall
EErie
LLoyd
and nothing more, no alternative entries, no, “what letters were deleted to pry out the names/words Aaron, BBall, Eerie and Lloyd?”, no words/names that ended with the same doubled letter), SanAA, WeBB, FrEE, and StaLL, and none of the four clues that contained the letter string A-B-E-L, and think “Okay, Abel –>> Cain” would have solved this puzzle.
All the extra layers of complexity served to make it seem that the metanism was far too difficult to go from AAron, BBall, EErie and LLoyd to the spelled out “Abel” to Cain.
But that’s how it could have been solved.
Even the clever “Abel string containing clues link to entries that spell out CAIN” were snazzy, but unnecessary. Yet another click.
oh, wow this is how i solved it as something of a hail mary, submitting CAIN when i saw the double ABEL letters in the themers, completely missing the “connect four” letter replacement thing. i noticed AARON/BBALL/EERIE/LLOYD could be used as alt answers for other clues after i submitted but couldn’t figure out how they connected besides that. feels weird to have solved it despite missing half the solution
I thought CAIN was implied by the “twinning” of the shared double letters spelling out ABEL. I didn’t see the final step, but what other “four-letter proper name starting with a consonant” can Abel lead to? Matt is too tidy with his logic to go to some random name.
This one spiraled out of control on me, I have to admit. I started with a nice core idea but kept finding little issues which caused me to add extra parts, which then required more extra parts because everything affects everything else, and then at the end I felt like Coppola winding up with “Megalopolis” after all that time and effort instead of another “Godfather” (I haven’t actually seen “Megalopolis” but I hope this puzzle’s reviews are better than that movie’s, though they might well not be).
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
I actually liked this puzzle and found it a lot of fun with several epiphanies. I think any puzzle with one is great; this has 3:
1. Judge on a diamond = Aaron. First thing I thought of, and it was cool to see that. As a huge baseball fan, he’s having a rock-star year (and Ohtani once again!), so as much as I love my Cubbies, it might be Dodgers-Yankees again in the World Series. We shall see!
2. The above epiphany got me the last half of the entries, but I was lost as to the titular connection or why certain things were what they were. For instance, “If all I need to do is get to EERIE, why would the obscure FRYE be needed also?” That led me to see the 4-letter replacement, with the DOHA/SANAA my first in.
(I actually had HOOT for the longest time and knew that was where FREE was but was like, “How is TUT getting a pet out???”)
3. I was rearranging the 8 letters wildly and coming up with nothing at all. Finally, thinking there was more, I started going to the clues and found the “Abel” string in the clue for INTL, like Evan. Bingo! Then, I raised CAIN as my answer and submitted it. Great epiphany-laden challenge indeed!
Wasn’t there another puzzle recently that did something like this? The last “Connect Four” puzzle, maybe?
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3 stars
I got as far as making these conversions and gave up.
SANTAMARON -> San Ramon (TA)
WEEBTBALL -> Tee Ball (WB)
FRYEAERIE -> Faerie (RYE)
STALEFLOYD -> Alloyed (STF)
Totally at sea.
I saw “ABEL” by noticing “AMA”, “BTB”, “EAE”, and “LEFL” in the middle of the themers, but since 2 letters (not 1 letter) separated the “L”s in the 4th one, I stopped considering that route. Should’ve stuck with it…
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
I loved this meta! It was such a satisfying AHA for me! Even though I assumed CAIN after finding ABEL, seeing “Abel” hidden in the clues was a lot of fun… incidentally there were a couple other of those letter combos in the clues (-able, and one other I can’t remember) that threw me for a second.
Totally confused by the four cheater squares in the corner that I was positive had something to do with the meta given the title. Also, why not HOOT / TUT over HOOO / OUT? Equally confused about the HAMEL / HOOPS choice over CAMEL / COOPS. Was all but certain that crunchy fill and the cheaters were due to constraints on the grid. Interested to know the rationale with this- red herring?
Anyway that was a 4.5 from me!
Both HOOPS and OUT corresponded to words found by changing a letter in the theme entries.
TBALL –> BBALL –> [LBJ’s activity] –> HOOPS
FRYE –> FREE –> [Loose, as a pet] –> OUT
Neither HOOPS nor OUT were strictly necessary for solving the meta, but they were in the grid for a reason.
I also remember spotting “Cain” backwards in the clue for SANTA MARON: [Planned California city to be named for podcaster Marc?] and I wondered if this meant we’d need to find reversed words again like the MGWCC from two weeks ago.
Ohhhh! Thanks for this… I only saw four (not all eight) of the clues that pertained to moving the letter. I didn’t fully understand the write-up referencing the others. That makes a lot more sense now and I like the concept even more.