MGWCC #894

MGWCC crossword 3:07 
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hello, and welcome to episode #894 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 puzzle called “Back and Forth They Go”. this week, we are looking for a noted American crossword puzzle writer. what are the theme answers?

• {Actor in the “Spy Kids” movies} DARYL SABARA. never heard of them.
• {Cynthia Nixon’s character on “Sex and the City”} MIRANDA HOBBES. didn’t know her last name.
• {TV character who looks an awful lot like Deacon Frye from the 1980s-90s sitcom “Amen”} GEORGE JEFFERSON. i assume because they were both played by sherman hemsley, though i do not know the “amen” role.
• {She played Phoenix in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick”} MONICA BARBARO. another person i’m totally unfamiliar with.
• {“The Beekeeper” actor, 2024} JEREMY IRONS. i suppose this is by far the most famous of the theme answers, though i don’t know this 2024 role.

so what’s going on? the title suggests palindromes, and it only took me a minute or two of reflection (so to speak) to realize that each of these themers shares a first name with a famous real person with a palindromic surname. indeed, several of them are referenced in MGWCC #92 from march 2010, which is apparently long enough ago that i did not know who jeremy renner and anna kendrick were back then! wow. anyway:

• DARYL SABARA -> DARYL HANNAH. is this the second-most famous DARYL spelled that way? no, that would be DARYL hall of hall & oates. but maybe this needed to be 11 letters.
• MIRANDA HOBBES -> MIRANDA OTTO, of MGWCC #92 fame.
• GEORGE JEFFERSON -> GEORGE SOROS.
• MONICA BARBARO -> MONICA SELES.
• JEREMY IRONS -> JEREMY RENNER.

we’re clearly on the right track here, but what is the next step? taking the first letters of the new palindromic surnames gives HOSSR, which is nothing. taking their middle letters (a reasonable thing to do in the case of palindromes) gives NTRLN, which is even worse. or, if you prefer to double the middle letters of the even-length palindromes, NNTTRLNN, which is somehow worse still.

it appears that we’re going to have to connect the palindromes either to the original names in the theme answers (like HANNAH to SABARA), or to other answers in the fill. either one is plausible, but i’m thinking the latter is more likely, because the fill was quite sticky in places—a bunch of partials (IS A, IS OR, OR AM, IN AS), some obscurities (ULENE, ABITA), awkward abbreviations (LEB, AFG, ALB—three different country abbrevs!), etc. so i’m inclined to think that some of this fill is forced by the presence of a few (probably exactly five) extra theme answers sprinkled throughout the fill. the former seems less likely to me because matt would have had considerably less freedom to pick other people with the relevant first namE—though not none, as we’ve already seen he has not limited himself to the highest tier of fame among these theme answers.

i feel i should mention here that it’s also possible that the answer is just a crossword constructor with a palindromic surname. if that’s the case, i am totally on the wrong track here, but as i said a couple of weeks ago about the week 1 puzzle, my inclination is always to use the specific fodder we’re given rather than just the general pattern of how the themers are constructed. also, i can’t think of a constructor with a palindromic surname off the top of my head. there are palindromic first names—anna shechtman comes to mind, and for that matter anna gundlach. i think it has to be more specifically pinned than this, but i’m specifically keeping bob klahn in the back of my mind—he has a five-letter surname, a palindromic first name, and i know matt revered him as a constructor. (and rightfully so, i might add.) so the bayesian priors for matt deciding to make a puzzle in bob’s honor are, shall we say, pretty good.

okay, so let’s look at the fill. good old palindromic yoko ONO is here, but that is not exactly a smoking gun, meta-wise—she’s just in a lot of grids. like, all of them.

what i’d like is to be able to use the parts of these palindromic names—HAN, OT, SOR, SEL, REN—to connect to fill answers. i guess the simplest workable way, given that some of these stubs are only two letters, would be to add a letter to each one to get a fill answer. like, perhaps IS OR is related to SOR. the problem is that there isn’t any answer that has all of the letters of HAN.

what about the clues? it’s intriguing to me that {Senseless hatred} ANIMUS contains a hidden SELES. could they all be hidden in the clues? oh yes, this must be it. okay:

• HANNAH is lurking in {It’s stronger than “nah” or “nope”} NEVER.
• OTTO is in {Away from the bottom of a map} NORTH.
• SOROS is in {They’re less prestigious than Grammys or Oscars, briefly} AMAS.
• SELES, as discussed, is in {Senseless hatred} ANIMUS.
• RENNER is in {Children nervous about Pre-K, say} TOTS.

taking the first letters of the answers to those clues in this order is NNAAT, which is nothing, but circling those first letters in the grid and reading them top down gives NATAN, the palindromic first name of crossword constructor NATAN LAST. that’s the meta answer, and it’s a good one. natan’s name has always been ripe for wordplay—his first name is a palindrome and last is literally his last name. i think i read somewhere (perhaps in the excerpt from natan’s upcoming book, though i can no longer find the excerpt and maybe this is all a fever dream) that natan became aware of the wordplay possibilities of his own name at an early age and perhaps that’s one of the things that originally drew him to crosswords.

anyway, the meta: this was really, really good. i thought the mechanism was delightful. i don’t have a strong sense of how hard the first step is (connecting the first names to the implicit palindromic people)—it came to me more or less right away based on the title and those particular first names. after that, the click is so strong that even though the next step is also unclear, it’s more or less straightforward to work through the possibilities more or less in the order i outlined above with my own thought processes.

how’d you all like this one?