MGWCC #912

MGWCC crossword 2:59 
meta DNF 3 days [4.50 avg; 6 ratings] rate it

hello, and welcome to episode #912 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 guest puzzle constructed by Patrick Berry called “The Bottom Line”. the instructions this week tell us that we’re looking for a four-letter word. what are the theme answers? four long across answers span the grid, each of them a silly made-up phrase comprising three five-letter words:

• {Presents avant-garde musical drama?} SHOWS NOVEL OPERA.
• {The Sowbelly of Damocles?} BACON ABOVE RULER.
• {Sample extreme baking product?} TASTE ULTRA FLOUR.
• {Hermits commandeer mountainside spot?} GURUS USURP LEDGE.

what can we do with these? i have no idea. i did notice that GURUS and USURP have four out of five letters in common, but that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere—there’s no such overlap in the other themers. there are some words hidden across word breaks like ELOPE (and very nearly ENVELOPE) in SHOWS NOVEL OPERA and OVER in BACON ABOVE RULER and PLEDGE in GURUS USURP LEDGE, but nothing that i can see in TASTE ULTRA FLOUR.

what about the title? aside from its idiomatic meaning (the sum total on a balance sheet or other financial statement), it could also refer literally to the stroke that distinguishes one letter from another in some fonts, like E from F. that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here, either—i don’t see any word that would become another word with the addition or deletion of such a stroke.

what about the bottom row of the grid? now this is interesting—all of the across answers in the bottom row are plurals, meeting the down at a plural, some of them quite awkward: REPS / GUNS, ILKS / MIRES (okay, clued as a verb instead of a noun, but still clunky), EYES / GEMS. if this were any constructor other than patrick berry, i might not bat an eye, but … this is patrick berry we’re talking about. i am pretty sure i’ve seen him quoted (possibly in his own constructing manual, which is basically the constructor’s bible) as saying it’s inelegant to cross two plurals at the S, and his puzzles are reliably elegant. so i am inclined to think this is either a deliberate hint, or forced by some extra constraint of the grid beyond the four 15s.

what about other clues in the grid? {Start of a Tolstoy title} for ANNA (karenina) caught my eye because it could also be a clue for WAR (and peace). and WARM is in the grid. is this anything? i don’t know why i would connect these two random fill word to each other; neither connects to the four themers. {Without turbulence} also caught my eye as a clue for SMOOTH because this is the kind of wording that normally indicates that the answer is an adverb, like SMOOTHLY. or perhaps SILKILY, which is pretty close to ILKS. but again, nothing about the four themers.

what about initials? i often miss this when it’s the key, but taking the first letters of each word of the themers spells out SNO, BAR, TUF, and GUL. that’s interesting because those are all consonant-vowel-consonant, and might take an extra letter at the end to make a new word. i can’t imagine these 15-letter made-up phrases are being used solely for their initials—you could certainly do this with real phrases—but perhaps it’s at least a part of it. do we need to look at least letters too? SLA, NER, EAR, SPE—those look promising as well, actually.

okay, geez. maybe we need to look at all of these! i.e., convert the 3x5s into 5x3s by stacking the three 5s on each other and reading down:

• SHOWS NOVEL OPERA => SNO / HOP / OVE / WER / SLA. all look like word fragments.
• BACON ABOVE RULER => BAR / ABU / COL / OVE / NER.
• TASTE ULTRA FLOUR => TUF / ALL / STO / TRU / EAR.
• GURUS USURP LEDGE => GUL / USE / RUD / URG / SPE.

oh boy, i bet what’s going to happen is we can make a word by adding a fourth 5 below the stack to make five 4-letter words. like the first one can take either BERET (making SNOB, HOPE, OVER, WERE, SLAT) or TENET (SNOT, HOPE, OVEN, WERE, SLAT). the second appears to be STAND (BARS ABUT COLA OVEN NERD). the third is TYPES (TUFT ALLY STOP TRUE EARS) and the last is FREED (GULF USER RUDE URGE SPED).

yeah, this is it. if we take BERET instead of TENET, then each one can fit a different clue in the grid:

• {Soft brimless cap} TAM / BERET.
• {Get up from a chair} ARISE / STAND.
• {Varieties} ILKS / TYPES. justifies my suspicion about patrick relying on the ungainly ILKS here!
• {Released from jail} LET GO / FREED.

the first letters of these spell out TAIL, an apt ending. geez.

okay, so i did just solve this at 11:59 which is why the post is slightly late going up. but hey, i made it just under the wire! whew, what a rush. great puzzle, too—after solving a different variety crossword that involved piecing together 4×5 stacks over the weekend, perhaps i was more primed for this coming back to it on tuesday morning than i was on friday when i first looked.

how’d you like this one?