MGWCC crossword 2:14
meta DNF/0:01 
[3.50 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #923 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 1 puzzle called “A Time to Chill”. i attempted to solve this one without the instructions. what are the theme answers? four across answers span this somewhat non-square (17×14) grid:
- {Winning quarterback in the 2006 and 2009 Super Bowls} BEN ROETHLISBERGER.
- {AARP concern} AGE DISCRIMINATION.
- {Person already discussed} THE AFOREMENTIONED. not entirely sold on how crossworthy a phrase this is with the definite article included.
- {Evidence-gathering technique} DNA FINGERPRINTING.
okay, so: it appears that the grid is 17-wide to accommodate all of these answers that have enumeration (3, 14). i strongly suspect that is literally all that is going on with these four themers. but what is the meta answer? if this puzzle were coming out in march, i’d want it to be PI DAY. on the other hand, i also remember that matt has kind of already done this meta, for MGWCC #510, which ran on pi day back in 2018. back then, the meta answer was, in fact, ben roethlisberger, though i suggested (tongue half in cheek) an alternative of ian nepomniachtchi, who was at the time “merely” a top chess grandmaster but who has since played (and lost) in two world championships, in 2021 to magnus carlsen and then again in 2023 to ding liren. he’s still not a household name, exactly, but he’s certainly more notable now than he was then.
anyway, i don’t think i can really guess at this one without the instructions. the title is not as helpful as it could be; there is only a weak “click” with the idea of chilling and pi(e), although “time” goes nicely with day. and it’d be almost a perverse choice to run such a meta in february instead of march. so maybe the answer really is just pi day, but i don’t feel great about submitting it blind. let’s take a look at the instructions: This week’s contest answer is one of the sixteen sports at the Winter Olympics in Italy, which begins today.
well, i’m glad i looked at the instructions! the answer is not pi day, that’s for sure. it’s SKI MOUNTAINEERING, a sport that is making its olympic debut this year… and also a sport i had never heard of back when it was a theme answer in MGWCC #510. i don’t think the ski mo competition has yet begun at milano cortina, but i’m looking forward to checking it out.
anyway, the puzzle. i do feel a little awkward about pointing out the previous use of this meta mechanism, which was 8 years and 400 MGWCCs ago. it’s certainly understandable to have less-than-perfect memory of every puzzle you’ve made for the last 923 weeks, but perhaps not totally unavoidable, either. the part i find strangest about it, honestly, is that pi day (and/or the numbers 3 and 14 generally) appeared to have nothing in particular to do with the meta this time—it was just a coincidence. i suspect the puzzle arose because matt noticed that ski mountaineering had the (3, 14) enumeration and wondered if there were many other common phrases like that (there aren’t). whereas back in 2018, the seed of the puzzle was definitely pi day itself.
that’s all i’ve got this week. how’d you like this one?
Hated it…in addition to the ‘3 – 14’ pattern being the sole justification for the answer, I don’t see how the title is slightest bit relevant, other than this is a sport in the WINTER Olympics — quite a stretch.
Wayyy overthought this one. I didn’t even bother to ask myself what the themes had in common. This was definitely confirmation bias but there seemed to be a lot of country- and location-based clues this time around which had me looking for IOC codes- the first theme seemed promising with BEN, ETH, BER, and GER but that quickly went nowhere.
I found ICEBERG, ICE AGE, ICEMEN, and ICE PRINT could come out of the long ones but couldn’t divorce myself from that scheme once I knew it was wrong. I don’t know what SKI MOUNTAINEERING is but it sounds like a cool sport!
Took a while for me to notice the 3,14 pattern but got it pretty quickly after that. Spent a lot of time looking for the word ICE in the clues. There are three clues with ICE hidden in them. The answers to those clues almost anagram to some kind of EXERCISE…it fell apart at that point.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
Easy peasy, Week 1 breezy, and given that the clue pointed straight to the answer, I don’t see a problem with the title being a bit tangential.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
By all means, this was a trivial and paper thin metanism, but those of you saying “I would never have thought to look at that” – that’s a little superficial.
The very first step in approaching an “obvious themers” puzzle is “do these themers have anything in common?”.
They’re all two words, they’re all seventeen letters, and they’re all in the form “three letter word plus fourteen letter word”, and this isn’t slightly notable?
To further highlight the oddness of the set of 3+14s, the grid itself is a bizarro size (17×14, as Joon pointed out ). Odd grid sizes happen for a reason; meta creators have something they need to shovel into their grid – when you see an odd size, it’s a hint.
I’m not mocking anyone who said “I spotted ice words”, “or I spotted Olympic country codes”, but those are third level hypotheses in a Week One puzzle. Is it highly likely that a grid has four seventeen letters grid spanners, but the solution has nothing to do with them? It’s unlikely that the grid was oddly shaped just to work in a few more Olympic country codes.
Week three, week four; solvers are excused from devoting much time to patently obvious commonalities, like four spanners of 3 and 14 letters, but even then, that’s odd enough to give pause that this has to have some relevance.
I’ll admit that my original thought was “can it be THIS simple?”, but the discovery of a 3+14 Olympic event was too much of a coincidence to look any further.
Wow – we got told.
You can take a strategy tip from a Gaffney veteran with 300 solves, or you can make a churlish remark.
Whichever.
Everyone’s mind works differently and what’s obvious to one person may not be to another. This was one where the answer was more obvious after I saw it but not before due to focusing on the meaning of the themers and the title rather than the letter count. Like a Magic Eye puzzle, you see only when you change your focus.