meta: 35 min, the last 20 mins of which were totally unnecessary
[4.20 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
“Cored Progression” by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a famous singer.
Answer: Frank Sinatra, found by 284 solvers
Once again, as I have been all year, I’m precisely on Pete and the Gang’s wavelength this month (except for a bizarre hiccup that more than doubled my meta-solving time! see below). 8-for-8 now and starting to get overconfident. I’m the king of the world!
Our theme entries for this one were:
19-A: [Is intoxicated, idiomatically] = FEELS NO PAIN
26-A: [Wild Bill Hickok’s last poker hand, purportedly] = ACES AND EIGHTS. The “dead man’s hand.”
34-A: [Emulate Spock, in a way] = THINK LOGICALLY
45-A: [Words that might accompany “tow away zone” on a street sign] = NO PARKING
53-A: [Stranded, metaphorically] = LEFT HIGH AND DRY
62-A: [Paris landmark in the center of a roundabout] = ARC DE TRIOMPHE
75-A: [Minneapolis nightclub frequented by Prince, or a Manhattan thoroughfare] = FIRST AVENUE
As you can see, each theme entry contains a 5-letter string consisting of five consecutive letters of the alphabet with one letter changed:
LSNOP –> LMNOP
DEIGH –> DEFGH
HINKL –> HIJKL
NOPAR –> NOPQR
EFTHI –> EFGHI
ARCDE –> ABCDE
RSTAV –> RSTUV
The consecutiveness-ruining letters spell out contest answer (FRANK) SINATRA.
I saw all this quickly, so why did it take me 35 minutes to get the meta? Answer: carelessness! Check out my solve, where instead of correctly extracting SINATRA from those seven and getting the meta in 15 mins, I bizarrely got IINAGBU (!!) which has only three letters in common with SINATRA, the INA!. Anatomy of a setback:
*** I had written the replacing letters first, thinking that would be the key, which was reasonable. You can see that I correctly put M, F, J, Q, G, B, and U in.
*** That’s clearly nothing, so then I looked at the replaced letters, which if you do it correctly, spells out SINATRA, so game over.
*** But I must’ve been distracted since I started by misreading the letter under the M in the first one as an I (see to the right of the grid) instead of the correct S. Then I got the I and N right after that, but then inexplicably switched back to the replaced letters mid-stream and got QGBU (put the correct A over the Q only later on. So IINQGBU was nothing and I was lost at sea!
Only a few minutes later did I realize that that letter under my first M was an S from FEELS NO PAIN; my brain had made it an I from FEELIN’ NO PAIN (which illegally reuses the N but oh well). Then the IN was right, but then I made the idiotic switch back to replacement letters to get GBU instead of TRA. Oh well — all’s well that ends well!
Nice job and a lovely theme. I’m surprised it has not been done before! I noticed as a teenager that this guy’s surname contains five consecutive letters if you change the C to a J, and bonus points because you also get a sixth letter from the G that ends his first name (so GHIJKL). But I never thought to make a theme of it!
4.5678 stars, keeping with the consecutive-ness idea. Well done! See you back here next month, where I’ll seek to keep my perfect 2025 MMMM streak intact.
Again a fun one, and with just 249 answers with 75 minutes left to go, this’ll be breaking a few streaks. But not mine! I’m 8-for-8, baby.
Thanks Matt!
255 correct this month…
we will try to break your streak soon :)
good luck
I got to SINATRA quickly but got stuck there — I wasn’t sure if I had completed the puzzle or if there was something else (either more letters somewhere, or a connection between the mechanism and the singer) disambiguating Frank vs Nancy! (I emailed Pete and he said either once worked.)
Same here. Eventually I just used the Jeopardy! trick of submitting only the last name.
I noticed the NOP/RST/CDE in the theme answers, but didn’t see the broken 5-letter alphabetical strings, so I did not get this one. Extremely clever puzzle this month!
In the title to the puzzle, is “cored” referring to the removal of one of the letters from the alphabetical string, similar to coring of an apple?
Yes, exactly.
We received a number of FIONA APPLE guesses because of that title word.
I saw the same thing. What’s worse, I noticed DE..GH, HI..KL, EF..HI in the other theme answers, but I was stuck on that. It didn’t make any sense to me that there were strings of three consecutive letters in some theme answers and two strings of two letters in the others. Maybe if I had circled those consecutive two letters, it would have occurred to me that there was something going on with the letter in the middle. Oh well.
This was really well done!
Sigh