MGWCC crossword 3:01
meta 2 days 
[3.50 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #888 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 1 puzzle called “One Way or Another”. i did successfully manage to solve this week 1 puzzle without the instructions. mostly, i’m glad i was able to solve it at all, breaking an unseemly skid. what are the theme answers? there are three long downs in this bizarre-looking, asymmetric grid:
- {Fourth wall creator, on stages} PROSCENIUM ARCH.
- {Non-profit founded by FDR, casually} THE MARCH OF DIMES. i didn’t realize this was “casual”—apparently the official name at founding was the national foundation for infantile paralysis.
- {Microsoft Word feature} GRAMMAR CHECKER.
okay, so all of these contain MARCH—that much is clear. but that doesn’t explain the strange, asymmetric grid or the absolutely wild fill that inhabits the grid, mostly concentrated on the right side. EEAAO, RRRR, TWO CMS, ROS, EAL, ICER, AGREER, AEAEA, both NINE and NINTH, and, perhaps wildest of all, the lower-right down answer LRLRL… and that one is the key, since it’s clued as {Common march cadence in the military, for short}. so we’re supposed to do something with this cadence.
LRLRL, although never really written this way, stands for left-right-left-right-left. i didn’t know what to do with this on a first pass, but picking the puzzle back up a few days later, i realized it had to be suggesting looking to the left and right of the letters in MARCH, which you can do because the MARCHes are all oriented downward. i’ve circled the letters in the screenshot above. the MARCH of PROSCENIUM ARCH has the letters RIGHT on its L-R-L-R-L, which seems like it must be a good start. moving over to THE MARCH OF DIMES, we get TOBEA, which is less promising, and then finally over on the right we get RARMS. putting it all together gives the phrase RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS, so either that’s the answer itself, or it’s something like “the second amendment”.
i guess it’s time to look at the instructions—but i’m going to count this as a no-instructions solve since i feel i have done all the solving, and all that’s left to see is what form the desired answer needs to take. okay, 15-letter phrase, so it is indeed just RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS.
zooming out a bit, i thought this meta mechanism was pretty cool. it’s definitely an original idea, and i can see how the various pieces fit together—the idea of using the L-R-L-R-L march cadence as an extraction method, and then once you land on that, you’re looking for a 15-letter phrase to be the final answer. maybe RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS is attractive because it’s got an entirely different sense of RIGHT than the one used in the march cadence. on the other hand, it’s a major downer for me and i’m sure others—i do not want to be reminded about the second amendment or the gun lobby or the epidemic of gun violence in this country. i would definitely have preferred something like RIGHT ON THE MONEY (which also looks like it might have made for smoother fill).
downers aside, the execution was also evidently so constrained that the fill was wince-inducingly bad. i don’t want to harp on it—it doesn’t bring me any joy to point this stuff out. but i’m really disappointed—and a little relieved that i didn’t try to solve this downs-only, which is a week 1 option that matt provides, but should not have been an option this week because the fill isn’t consistent enough to make the downs-only solve possible (let alone enjoyable). and ARMS in the final answer with ARM (and ARMIE!) in the grid was rather inelegant. the right side of the grid was indeed the most constrained area, where the last five letters of the extraction required across entries with the awkward bigrams RM, AA, RR, CM, and SH and then LRLRL in the corner led to the all-vowel AEAEA alongside.
the last thing i’ll note is that aside from everything else, this felt more like a week 3, or perhaps 2 at the earliest, than a week 1. there are some leaps of faith required to solve the meta, in addition to the actual crossword being quite hard to complete because of the awkward fill.
so, overall, i can’t put this one up there among my favorite MGWCCs, despite the solid concept behind the meta. what’d you think?
Going LRLRL around the 3 MARCHes never occurred to me. Instead of seeing 15 as “5 x 3” I saw it as “number of rows in the puzzle” and couldn’t make anything work.
Definitely agree with Joon’s editorializing…I don’t mind not solving one with such a big ick factor. Somebody keep Matt away from the red pills….
It’s a military-themed puzzle (published on D-Day), and the LRLRL cadence required a 15-letter answer (no way to fit four in, two was too few), and RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS is 15 letters and fits perfectly since it’s both military and gets the “right” in from the theme.
Except….there wasn’t any reference to D-Day anywhere in the puzzle and the phrase “Right To Bear Arms” has no military association whatsoever. I think even the morons who get the 2nd amendment decals for the back windows on their gigantic trucks know that. It is mostly associated these days with f**kwits who think there’s only 1 amendment to the Constitution that actually matters.
Yeah, I’m with Michael – I thought 15 letters was a definite tip-off in a Week One puzzle that it would involve one letter from each row or column. I must have tried fifty approaches to “march” left right left right left. The letters around MARCH wasn’t one of them. This would have made an okay late month meta, (admittedly, I’m not a great meta solver, rarely getting a Week 4 or 5) but it wasn’t a Week One. Not unless the wording in the LRLRL clue was something like, “Common military cadence heard around a march.” I also agree with Joon that RIGHTONTHEMONEY (or maybe something like RIGHTTHISSECOND) would have been a better answer. An answer emphasizing gun rights seems pretty tone deaf at this moment.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3.5 stars
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the three incidences of MARCH was
In like a lion, out like a lamb.
This is a well known phrase about March. Another one is, “Beware the Ides of March.” Neither of these is 15 letters.
Then I thought there might be something of a hint somewhere, so I scoured the clues and the grid. The only thing that stood out was the clue with march and its answer of LRLRL. My first thought was to toss that, because this is a week one. My second thought was that Matt maybe just wanted to see how clever solvers could be, so I went with that.
I had two ideas — one which held to March being a month of changeable weather or as a month of seasonal transition, and the other just a cutesy idea.
For the first (and what I submitted): March into Spring
For the other: March is Charming
Charm, of course, is an anagram of March.
The fill wrecked this one for me. Probably the only MGWCC I have ever said that about, so Matt’s 887-1 record is still amazing.
I agree. Between the asymmetry, sooooo many partials & abbrevs, and just-plain nonsense (EEAAO, AEAEA, RRRR) I just couldn’t get into it at all.
Thanks, Joon — 325 right answers this week, so definitely not Week 1 territory.
I also completely agree with all of Joon’s editorial comments. This is definitely no Week 1 challenge, I focused on a 15 letter phrase including MARCH, was going to submit ‘Mad as a March hare’, but when I couldn’t find any way to get either MAD or HARE out of any part of the fill, I gave up…there’s no joy in getting a correct solution with a more or less blind stab.
I hardly ever get a meta beyond Week 2, and I quickly gave up on this one. But since there were so many strange grid entries, I googled the three MARCHes and found this bit of trivia:
http://www.marchmarchmarch.org.uk
If you can’t be bothered to look at it, I’ll just say that the organizers describe it as “pointless.”
Politics aside, I have never really related to crossword puzzle litmus tests. I could be completely naive on this point, but I have never assumed that a creator’s wordlist represents their world view, or, necessarily condones the person, place or thing referenced.
An encounter with the phrase “Right to bear arms” needn’t ruin anyone’s day.
Unless you’re a bear.
I actually never thought to try something as tricky as looking at the letters to the Left or Right of MARCH simply because that is not typical Week 1 territory. Went out on a limb and said MARCHING IN PLACE as the answer. Ah well.
Given that it is a week 1, what is wrong with “Hut two three four”? it is a 15 letter phrase that is directly related to marching and LRLRL. I get that it ignores all the crazy entries – – but it is a week 1 (which it clearly is not).
And I was so certain that the answer was “Beware the Ides of March.” Straightforward week 1. Fifteen unique letters (B,E, W, A R, T,H, I, D, S, O, F, M, C, H). Boom, done. I did not bother to complete the entire fill, because, frankly, as noted by others, it was a bit … unusual. And there was no need because I had the solution. So I was a bit perplexed after I submitted by solution and never saw my name pop up. Huh? Could I have miscounted the letters?
Clever mechanism for sure. Especially for a week 2+. I’m sorry I did not get the chance to admire it firsthand in working the actual solution.
Given it was a week 1 and all the palindromes and the title, I thought “back and forwards” and done. Sigh the real solution is much better…