MGWCC crossword 4:06
meta 3 days 
[3.33 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #897 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Numbers Game”. the instructions this week tell us that we are looking for something you might eat for breakfast. what are the theme answers? the clues to seven long(ish) across answers in this slightly stretched (15×17) grid each contain a parenthetical city, and the corresponding answers contain a hidden number in the language primarily spoken in that city:
- {Welfare option (Madrid)} BASIC INCOME. anyway, CINCO is spanish for 5.
- {Mexican delicacy whose less-appealing English name is “corn smut” (Paris)} HUITLACOCHE. was not familiar with this, and indeed i had no idea it was one word (it looks like three). HUIT is 8 in french.
- {Posted (London)} STATIONED. ONE, in english.
- {Investigations demanded by the people (Montreal)} PUBLIC INQUIRIES. CINQ is 5 in french—a close cognate of CINCO.
- {Peter Gene Hernandez, to his fans (Buenos Aires)} BRUNO MARS. UNO is 1 in spanish.
- {Rabbis interpret it (Mumbai)} HALAKHIC LAW. never heard of this, either. i am familiar with LAKH, which means 100,000 in the indian numbering system, but i am guessing not everybody will be. (a related word is CRORE, which means 10 million, and appears in the title of the hindi version of the game show who wants to be a millionaire?, kaun banega crorepati.) also, i’m a little surprised to see 100,000 here among all these other single-digit numbers. we’re definitely not taking the 100,000th letter of the answer or the grid, which is what we often have to do with numbers in metas.
- {America’s Cup entrant (Hamburg)} RACING YACHT. ACHT is 8 in german.
oh, okay—we just need the first letters of the words for the numbers, which spell out CHOCULA. so the breakfast food we want is COUNT CHOCULA, quite an apt answer for this puzzle involving numbers. though i’m sure you wouldn’t want to be counting to lakh over breakfast.
i’m still slightly bemused by the fact that we have extracted numbers but we’re not doing anything with their numerical values—this exact meta mechanism could have been used with any group of things (colors, animals, plants, names of particular people, etc.), but i’m so conditioned to use numbers for their numerical value that this change-up had me unreasonably flummoxed. i had to put the puzzle away and come back to it days later, after lollapuzzoola. just like matt to try to double-cross us like this, even as early as a week 2.
bits and bobs:
- {1960s council convened by Pope John XXIII} VATICAN II. i have to say, this is an entry that you don’t see in crosswords all that often. in fact, the only time i’ve ever seen it before is when i put it at 1-across in one of my first ever themeless constructions, 16 years ago. 16 years is a long time—long enough ago that amy’s review of that puzzle is on the old crossword fiend blogspot site.
- {“___ Out There” (2018 slasher pic with no famous actors in it and a 3.3/10 rating on IMDb)} HE’S. this clue was so striking that i was convinced it was part of the meta (especially with those extraneous numerals appearing in it). but no, just a colorful way of cluing a slightly awkward entry.
- {Kafka’s most famous character} SAMSA. i mean, maybe? josef k, from the trial, is close.
that’s all i’ve got this week. it was great to see many of you at lollapuzzoola last weekend—indeed, one of you (whose name i didn’t catch, sorry!) came up to me and said how much you enjoy reading these blog posts every week. that was a lovely moment. it was also nice to see some of you back in boston on sunday for BAPHL 24.
how’d you all like this one? i hope you’re not still counting to lakh.
Thanks, joon! 329 correct entries, so this did play a little crunchy for a Week 2/5. A lot of solvers mentioned the same thing you did — that not using the numbers in those seven entries threw them off the trail for a bit. But no, you’re just using their “number-ness” to get the COUNT part.
Also, Count Chocula commercials scared the s*** out of me when I was a kid
For the Hindi number, I only looked up the numbers 1-10, since the others were so low as well. None matched, but I thought ACH was close enough to the word for eight that maybe it was just a different transliteration. I also didn’t even bother trying the first letters — I thought, “Surely it can’t be that simple, the numbers would be pointless in that case, it’s gotta be something else.” Oh well.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3 stars
+1
The numbers weren’t pointless at all; they were the key to the meta since they both spelled out CHOCULA and implied the COUNT half of the cereal (serial?).
That they weren’t used in the usual way is feature, not bug!
Also, that clue for HE’S was so specific and silly that I was sure it had to be meta related. That’s why I never really understood the solving technique of “Make note of clues that seem weird.” If a constructor is creative (as Matt obviously is!), they’re going to throw in interesting and unique clues all the time just to liven things up.
I didn’t know this but the Monster cereals (Franken Berry, Boo Berry, and Count Chocula) are now only available in September and October so you can’t have it for breakfast year around unless you’re truly dedicated and buy a year’s worth.
When I worked for General Mills, I was actually able to get the Monster cereals year-round (jealous?), but they were only available to the general public during the pre-Halloween season. That perk came in handy when Al Franken was elected to the US Senate and I was able to give my conservative brother-in-law a box of Franken Berry with Al’s face pasted on the box!
omg ugh.
I glommed onto step 1 easily, as I’d remembered HUITLACOCHE from the LL General Knowledge Puzzle League ML (MD9), where the mechanism was concealed foreign number -> index to get letter. (Huitlacoche came up in the Championship).
Following the same mechanism here, I had COSIB?A (not having found LAKH yet), which looked promising, like it should be something (e.g. an anagram of NABISCO).
Then I discovered LAKH was 100000 which ruined everything and I never saw the CHOCULA in front of me.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
Joon wrote, “i’m so conditioned to use numbers for their numerical value that this change-up had me unreasonably flummoxed.”
That was me, exactly.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
Vatican II was the inspiration for the song “Vatican Rag,” by the recently-passed Tom Lehrer. Coincidentally, I just did a puzzle in the past few days with a reference to a lyric from that song, cluing ELEISON with “Everybody say his own Kyrie _____ .” Can’t remember which puzzle it was, though; might have been an old one.