MGWCC crossword 2:59
meta DNF 3 days rate it
Matt here, filling in for the joonmeister. Only time for a brief post, but not job to guester Ben Chenoweth! Contest answer was A CRACK IN THE GRID, which formed from when alt-answers were shoe-horned into existing entries (see graphic).
Loved it!
Loved this! Tame for a Week 4 — which explains why I sussed it 😊 — but a wonderful construction.
Figured out from the title, the weird clues and entries, and COAT(I) right next to LLAMA that we were looking for missing letters to satisfy the asterisked clues. But I got held up in thinking the missing letters, like the I for COAT(I), would all be appended to the end — MOTO(R), FOND(A), ENDE(D), EDE(N), etc. Then SPLI(N)T told me the letters could be anywhere, so a few more fell — MAN(I)A, COD(A)S, S(C)ANDALS, BEA(R)D and AMI(C)E (which I had to Google). But then, I got stuck, and only after writing those letters into a printed grid did I realize they were all in the same “hidden” column. Not surprisingly, everything fell into place from there.
Agreed with your last point, there was an extra challenge for anyone who tracks the alt answers separately – seeing the column lineup narrowed the alt answer search significantly.
This was one where I marveled a bit at the construction, too… 30 themers is a LOT in a 15×15 (16×15, I guess?)
Fantastic!
I made this way harder than it needed to be (though still a formidable challenge!). Like Norm, I didn’t realize until the very last moment they all aligned. Chuckled when I noted that.
Fun meta from Ben, thanks for the conundrum! Great teams for metas this month – they’re alive and well!
43A (which has become 44A in Matt’s adjusted grid above) was a clue: “Gap down which
things can be lost.” SPLIT didn’t make much sense to me until after the solution had been found. Ah yes, the crack in the grid is where the grid was “split.”
Awesome meta. Had a list of seemingly obvious alternate answers going, and most were correct, but never thought to find them in the grid, which seems so obvious in hindsight…SPLINT was a no-brainer and should have lit the aha bulb with SPLIT, but alas.
I should have known something was up from the inaccurate clue for LLAMA (which is also a bit tenuous for COAT{I}).
OMG it’s in a new column? I was already impressed it involved only one of each across row that was near the middle, but to make it a perfect new column — wow. Nicely done.
I’ll send anyone a nickel who didn’t have to google “amice”…
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