MGWCC crossword 3:04
meta DNF 3 days 
[3.70 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #919 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Constructor Search”. the title pretty much says this, but this week’s instructions asked us to find a well-known crossword puzzle constructor. what were the theme answers? i don’t know for sure, but i’m guessing the five longest acrosses:
- {Einstein was born there} ULM, GERMANY.
- {“Pay It Forward” director, 2000} MIMI LEDER. i’ve heard of this film, but not the director.
- {Snitch} NARC SOMEBODY OUT.
- {Any of about 2,085 in the U.S.} JIFFY LUBE. what an unhelpful clue!
- {Far from sugar-coated} WARTS AND ALL.
i’ve actually just noticed that the grid is asymmetric—WARTS AND ALL is an 11, but the corresponding entry ULM GERMANY is only 10. there’s a 1×3 column of black squares (to the left of squares 63, 66, and 69) that has shifted one place relative to the locations of their symmetric partners to accommodate this mismatch. as a result of the asymmetry, there are three (not four) 9s in the downs, that i suspect aren’t thematic despite being the same length as MIMI LEDER and JIFFY LUBE: CAMEMBERT, GOLDENEYE, and NORTHEAST. but i’m keeping them in the back of my mind just in case.
anyway, so… now what? i don’t see a crossword constructor hidden in any of these theme answers, although there are other hidden words like MILE in MIMI LEDER and SANDAL in WARTS AND ALL. but if there’s anything hiding in the other themers, i’m not seeing it.
another possibility suggested by the title is a word search in the grid more generally—across, down, backwards, up, or diagonally. but word searches are pretty hard when you don’t know what words you’re looking for.
sometimes when i can’t figure out what to do with the theme answers, it helps to look at which clues were sus in the rest of the puzzle. this one had {Only country that begins with a certain letter} OMAN, but which could also clue YEMEN. there was {Noted sixth, briefly} JQA (john quincy adams), which is probably totally innocuous but definitely had me trying JUN off the J before i got the other crosses. then there’s {Alfalfa amigo} STYMIE, who is one of the our gang characters, but also a common english verb and usually clued as such, so this is a clue i would strongly associate with DARLA or maybe BUCKWHEAT. having said all that, i don’t see what to do with any of these alternate answers. if YEMEN were hanging out in the grid word-search-style, we’d be in business, maybe… but it isn’t.
what else is there? i do think each of these themers has one word that looks like it is more likely to be part of the meta than the others: ULM, LEDER (there are other MIMIs but not other LEDERs, probably), NARC, JIFFY, and WARTS. WARTS is STRAW backwards, which is interesting, but what are we doing with STRAW? oh, hmm, if it’s not JIFFY but LUBE we’re interested in, that’s an anagram of BLUE. BLUE and STRAW are berries—perhaps we want patrick BERRY, aka the 🐐? yeah, NARC is CRAN and ULM is MUL and LEDER is ELDER, all ___berries. that’s just it, then.
gosh, i think this one was very tough for a week 2. it’s not that what you had to do was so difficult, but it seems to me that the signal-to-noise ratio is low. there’s nothing in the title or instructions that suggests the actual mechanism, so there’s a vast array of possibilities you could try. picking one word out of each themer and anagramming it is just one of those many things, and even once you think to do it, you have to pick the right word, and you also don’t know what you’re trying to anagram it into. that’s a big search space. for this to have landed at week 2 difficulty, i think there would have needed to be something indicating anagrams in the title.
i’m a little bit curious about the asymmetry, but after looking at it some more, i think matt chose a pretty good set of themers. raspberry is famous and SPAR is there, but there aren’t really expressions that include SPAR (or PARS) that are really in-the-language phrases.
that’s all from me. how’d you like this one?
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
Alternate title that would give a bit more away: “A Berry Good Puzzle”
Fun one – but not sure how I got it. I think the NARC and JIFFY LUBE entries were the most suspect, and I couldn’t quite find any hidden words but then think I caught CRAN and BLUE as anagrams.
Fun meta – but just really well-hidden!!
Seriously, Mikey? A “Berry” Good Puzzle?
That’s the biggest giveaway since The Louisiana Purchase
That was the joke, hahaha.
I think “Food for Thought” may have been a decent alternate title. Doesn’t give it away completely, but I did see CRAN and STRAW in my anagram (backwards) search, and may have made the connection there.
Alas another week 2 fails hits the books!
Wow yikes! Huge search space indeed, with nothing to indicate anagramming. And with those weird clues, and the suspect fill (JQA, SHS, SETHS, etc), I was sure the grid was going to be more constrained. I’m really surprised at what the solution turned out to be.
Good meta, wrong week. Unclear title, asymmetry a huge red herring, cluster of Ms at the top and Os in the middle another one (especially since the title indicates “search”).
A title that uses a cryptic indicator for anagram (confused maybe?) to qualify constructor would’ve helped just enough.
Agree with all of that — the Week 2 curse continues…
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
I got stuck in a giant rabbit hole of my own making, seeing the SE entry (often a nudge) whose clue referred to Fashion Finds. In my mind, that was deliberately chose: to “fashion” is to “construct” and “Finds” correlates to “Search”… Ah well, I didn’t expect to have a perfect year, but I kind of hoped I could keep it up until the first Week 4.
182 correct entries these week, of which 84 were solo solves. Wow! I know it’s not fun to have me go “Wow, I can’t believe so many of you missed this one!” after a W2C puzzle, but: W, ICBSMOYMTO!” I thought it would have a little crunch but not left-out-on-the-kitchen-counter-for-three-weeks crunch.
Me too on the Week 2 curse… I never submit a wild guess as an answer, but if I did, it certainly would have been Patrick Berry!
Essentially the same metanism as MGWCC #252 (https://xwordcontest.com/2013/04/page/4). But, that was a week 5 and only 28 solvers cracked it.
i’d forgotten about that one! i think this one was considerably easier since some of the ___berries were words in their own right—certainly i would not have gotten there without noticing STRAW and BLUE, which are words. when i’m anagramming, i’m trying to find words, not fragments like THURS or SATUR.
Yes, good point, “uns” to “sun” notwithstanding.
Kicking myself because I was sure that’s who it would be. Just couldn’t find it even though I saw straw.
Now seeing the solution which I never got within light-years of, I can’t help but note the downright Berry-esque subtlety in this one.
South Park fans who recall the “Member Berries” may have enjoyed an Easter Egg of sorts at 3D.