MGWCC crossword 0:40
meta DNF 3 days 
[4.50 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #911 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle co-constructed by matt, Frank Longo, and Corey Kosak called “Change Is Good”. the instructions this week tell us that we’re looking for a 9-letter noun that I hope you’d apply to this crossword. what are the theme answers? i’m guessing either all of them or just one—the final across in this midi (9×9) grid, PENNY, clued as {Coin the U.S. Mint announced last week that it has permanently ceased creating; hopefully you have one around the house today}. i do have some pennies lying around, but also, my eyes are so bad i can no longer really read them, so i’m going to rely on images from the wikipedia article.
the small grid size with no other obvious theme material definitely suggests to me that we are using all 81 squares, or rather, all 69 letters in the grid (as there are 12 black squares). that’s the kind of thing we’ve seen before with smaller grids, such as MGWCC #100.
how many letters are on a penny? well, the front (obverse) has IN GOD WE TRUST (12 letters) and LIBERTY (7). the reverse has UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (21), E PLURIBUS UNUM (13), and ONE CENT (7). that adds up to 60, so yeah, the math checks out—there are 9 letters extra in the grid that aren’t on the coin. let’s find out what they are.
there are various ways to do this, some more tedious than others. i used a bunch of google sheets formulas to find the letter counts in both the penny text and the grid. what i found was that the grid contained the extra letters AEINNOSST. i can see one anagram in those letters and it’s SENSATION, which is a 9-letter noun. i don’t think there’s any way to get the ordering from the puzzle, so anagramming is the only way to do the last step, but i don’t have any problem with that given the constraints from the instruction—turning a set of 9 letters into a one-word anagram (a noun, even) generally only has one solution, tops. (indeed, i checked afterwards and there are no other single-word english anagrams.)
now, i have to admit, i did give a little bit of thought to the extra letter on the obverse—it’s a mint mark underneath the year, still having fresh in my mind the microscopic EZS from MGWCC #52 (even though it was 16 years ago!). but this letter varies from coin to coin depending on where it was minted, so i don’t think it can really be part of the solution. at any rate, i was glad when the letter counts worked out without including the mint mark.
i thought this meta was fine, but i have to admit, i was expecting the final answer—which, unless i’m missing something, could have been any word the constructors chose—to have a stronger click with the mechanism and/or the theme of the puzzle. sensation is just … a word. i don’t know. i was expecting, if you will, the penny to drop in a more satisfying way. almost as long as i’ve been expecting the penny to be dropped by the united states treasury, but hey, better late than never. take that, big zinc!
well, that’s all from me. how’d you like this one?
I’m guessing it’s SENSATION because the first syllable sounds like “cents” …?
Either way it’s a stunning feat of construction, and also a meta that felt way, way harder than a week 2. I kept trying to eliminate all instances of each letter in E PLURIBUS UNUM and IN GOD WE TRUST (so like all E’s and U’s and N’s in the grid, etc.) rather than as many letters as there were in each specific phrase. So close yet so far.
oh, okay—that pun totally missed me, but i’m going to say that’s my fault rather than the constructors’.
also my fault: i found the answer while blogging, but did not remember to actually submit it to the website before noon, instead continuing to write the blog post. oops.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
My guess is that this puzzle was a true CENT-sation, haha.
Fantastic puzzle! It just made cents to me.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
I’ll blame the fact that I’m not from the US for this one and don’t have ready access to US coinage. But I almost certainly wouldn’t have thought to look at the words on one, despite wondering about the weirdness in the clue. Instead found red herrings everywhere: the letters in COIN in a box in the center. And also in order in COSINE. Almost all the letters in NICKEL in a box surrounding another letter near the center. The word ONE which I thought could’ve related to one cent. Nothing that seemed promising but that’s where the brain goes, I guess.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
A good meta but not a week two in my opinion. Subtracting the total number of letters from both sides of a penny from the total available letters in the grid is sort of a “and then a miracle occurred” moment as my friend Kathy used to say. I got out three different pennies but decided that the “change is good” title must have something to do with the different backs (shield, Lincoln memorial, etc.) As always, impressed by the construction and the people who solved it!
I think the ‘miracle’ only works because the PENNY is disappearing from circulation, like the letters. Otherwise, I’d agree that finding that step would be difficult (impossible for me!)
Oh, I like that, it had not occurred to me at all.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
I ran into a bit of a red herring with LIBEL at 6D, which shares a lot of its letters with LIBERTY. I noticed that you can get all but one letter in LIBERTY using a prefix of LIBEL and a suffix of STY, leaving R as a possible extracted letter. Then you could do the same thing with UNITED from UNSER and MUTED to extract an I.
But after that it kinda falls apart. How could that mechanism possibly work for the shorter words like E/OF/IN/WE? And ONE at 2D a the full word on the penny.
That idea is really more of a week 4 or 5 mechanism than a week 2.
I was so sure the “Big Zinc” link would be to this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWpPrWHBHcQ
lol. maybe it should have been! man, i’d forgotten about this scene. brilliant.
Way too hard for a week 2, but thanks guys for putting LIBEL and ONE and NICEST in the grid and clustering many U in the same area as a bit of a guidepost…..
Thanks, joon — 255 right answers, 166 of which were solo solves. No ESTONIANS submitted the correct answer (that I’m aware).
I naively thought I would be able to fit the needed letters in by hand. Consigliere suggested a Scrabble board. After 45 minutes I started to wonder if I’d need some computer help, so I asked Frank what he thought. It took him and Corey about 3 hours!
Agree with the “then a miracle” mechanism for a Week 2, cripes. Tried hard to somehow “change” the NIC of NICEST into nickel, then the backward IME of SEMINOLE into DIME, and, of course, all that U, A,, R, T, E, R stuff going on in the lower left into QUARTER, but alas.