MGWCC crossword 4:26
meta DNF 
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hello, and welcome to episode #895 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Use Your Head”. the instructions tell us that This week’s 7-word contest answer is something meta-writers try to do every week. what are the theme answers? i am not entirely sure, but there are four long down answers (and no long acrosses), so let’s start there:
- {89-year-old English pop singer} ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK. i am only vaguely aware that this is the stage name of an english pop singer; of course, before that, it was the real name of an opera composer. (i say “of course” because i know something about the composer but not the singer, but that’s just me. i’m sure plenty of people know the singer but not the composer, or both, or neither.)
- {Heaviest living bird native to North America} TRUMPETER SWAN.
- {Title role for Warren Beatty} BENJAMIN “BUGSY” SIEGEL. i sure didn’t know his legal first name, and i am thinking that it must play some important role in the meta, because this guy is universally known just as bugsy siegel.
- {Eponymous founder of America’s third-largest grocery store chain} BERNARD KROGER. yeah, another one where the first name isn’t very famous (the chain is just called kroger’s), and this one is also weird because wikipedia lists his name as bernard heinrich “henry” kroger. i can’t tell if that means he went by henry or just he used the anglicized henry as his middle name instead of the original heinrich. i guess the title of the article is bernard kroger.
so, okay, i really don’t have any clear ideas about the next step. the grid is very large (19×20) and asymmetric. the latter may just be because ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK is 20 letters and BENJAMIN BUGSY SIEGEL is only 19, but there’s more to the asymmetry than one extra black square—those two long answers don’t even occupy symmetric columns in the grid. all this is to say that surely there is more thematic material in the grid than these four long downs. it’s just that i don’t know what the other stuff might be yet.
the title “use your head” suggests looking at the tops of these long downs—maybe just the first letters, or first letters of each word, or perhaps the first few letters. i don’t know that it’s why the long theme answers are downs instead of acrosses—i think “head” could signal the starts of across answers just as aptly as downs. but anyway, here we are. it seems implausible that we are blessed with these weirdo 20- and 19-letter answers just for their first letters, or even their initials (EH and BBS).
okay, i have found something—there are four different acrosses that are clued as hats. given the title, this feels like it could well be relevant:
- {Topper named for a region of France} BRETON. i was not familiar with this hat—or, indeed, the breton cap which is yet a different thing (often called a mariner’s cap). i am familiar with BRETON clued as a native of brittany, so it feels like this headwear cluing angle is quite likely to be relevant to the theme.
- {Military headwear} SHAKO.
- {Artist’s cover, often} BERET.
- {Summer headwear made of straw} BOATER.
are these related somehow to the long downs? semantically, no, but perhaps lexically? they do start with B, S, B, and B, and there are plenty of B’s at the starts of the down themers too. ENGELBERT contains all the letters of BERET (plus GLEN left over); is that interesting? BERET and BRETON have very nearly the same letter content, with heavy overlap with BOATER as well. SHAKO is quite different, though, and there aren’t many K’s in the long downs—there’s one ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK and one in BERNARD KROGER, neither of which contains an S anywhere.
i can’t quite get it to work out—like what do we do with SHAKO? it feels like ENGELBERT could be tied to BERET or BOATER or BRETON with very little difficulty, but the same can certainly not be said of BENJAMIN or TRUMPETER. i think there must be something here, but i can’t quite untangle it and now i’m out of time.
so i guess i struck out on this one. let me know in the comments if i was on the right track!
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
You were almost there. Each of the “hats” has the name of a rabbit rising out of it: Thumper, Peter, Roger, and Bugs. I saw the rabbits first, but it took forever for me to notice all the hats. (There’s also The WHITE Rabbit, but I think that may have been coincidental.)
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
Yes, coincidental, as it does not terminate in the crossing of a hat.
I’m in the camp of noticing the rabbits first, although I had taken note of the (to me) oddness of BRETON (clued as a hat) while filling the grid.
When I got Mr. Kroger, I remember thinking how interesting it is that adding a K in front of the name Roger changes the G from soft to hard.
It was later that I noticed THUMP in 3D and TRUMP in 5D and thought, “Hmmm, off by one letter!” So I looked around for anything else like that, which made me notice anew ROGER, then see BUGS in BUGSY, then it was THUMPER — with PETER last.
Did anyone else think the clue for MISER important enough an oddity to suddenly want to scrutinize all the clue/answer pairs?
Thanks, joon — 185 correct entries this week.
You were halfway home — there is a famous rabbit concealed in each of the long downs (THUMPER, PETER, ROGER, BUGS), each of whom rests directly atop the four hats you mentioned. So our meta answer is PULL A RABBIT OUT OF A HAT.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
ohhhh that is good. wish i’d seen it!
“BERNARD the Bunny” yielded enough search results that I figured it was coming out of a KNITTED cap as well
The SHAKO, in fact, has two bunnies being extracted from it: BENJAMIN, BUGS
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
For others, Benjamin Bunny is a fictional rabbit character from Beatrix Potter’s classic children’s stories, most notably featured as Peter Rabbit’s cousin in “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny”
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
As a rabbit owner and lover, I found the bunnies far, far earlier than the hats. Very cute!
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
Shoot! Noticing the hats but getting no further (and, as it turns out, noticing but ignoring THUMPER”), my WAG was going to be “Pull a Rabbit Out of a Hat,” but if it was wrong, Matt would have instantly known I was totally guessing.
My rabbit hole was literally rabbit holes. I was thinking the hats were somehow capping rabbit holes… then head-slap
Kind of the same — I saw the rabbits first, and for a long time I thought it was something like “lead the solver down a rabbit hole”. I finally figured out what the title was referring to.
D’oh! So obvious in retrospect. I saw the hats crossing the long downs, but didn’t see the rabbits. I even thought that the parts of the long downs BELOW the hats might be relevant, like the hats were on top of something, even though that wouldn’t work for BOATER. Didn’t think the hats would be below.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
I got caught up in answers that could precede “hats” … like KNITTED, BEACH, OPERA, and even ANTLER (though that one was a stretch).
Never saw the rabbits…