MGWCC crossword 2:09
meta 0ish/5ish 
[3.33 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #932 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Opening Number”, in which matt challenges us to find how old my mother is today. first of all, happy birthday, ma gaffney! second, what are the theme answers?
- {Boycott’s cousin} CANCEL CULTURE.
- {1998 Disney/Pixar hit} A BUG’S LIFE.
- {Phone game that delivers all the stress and tension of restaurant work, yet people still play it} DINER DASH. can’t say i’m familiar with it.
- {It’s been bestowed upon Celine Dion, Mike Myers, and Alex Trebek} ORDER OF CANADA. nor this one, although i did know all these people were canadian.
based on the title and instructions, my eyes were immediately drawn to the first word in the first theme answer, CANCEL, which is synonymous with the number 86. i know matt is a bit older than me, although i did not remember his exact age. that said, mgwcc has been going on so long that i was pretty sure i’d be able to find it mentioned one of these weeks… and indeed, according to my blog post of mgwcc #232, he turned 40 on november 13, 2012. so mid-50s now, making 86 quite a plausible age for his mom.
that said, i did not know what was going on with all the other theme answers, none of which evoked numbers for me. eventually i realized that if you just take the first words of all of them, you get CANCEL A DINER ORDER, which is a longer and slightly more specific synonym for 86. so the answer is indeed just 86.
as a theme mechanism, i think this one ended with a bit of a whimper, with CANCEL = 86 evident right up front and the other three themers doing very little of the lifting. relatedly, it felt a little odd to have A BUG’S LIFE doing so, so little—it’s only there for the initial A, and even that A is the fourth-most important word of the four-word phrase where the first word carries 95% of the semantic content. so, not my favorite meta of the series, but i think it is interesting to try to extract a number from a meta crossword.
that’s all for me this week. how’d you like this one?
Never even came close. Although as someone with an 87-year-old mother, perhaps I should have.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 2.5 stars
No idea 86 referred to the cancellation of a diner order. Not a chance.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
Same here. I have a vague recollection that “to 86 someone” means to kill them, maybe from an old James Cagney movie or Dick Tracy or something. But even if I’d found the phrase “cancel a diner order”, I just tried googling “cancel a diner order number” and it gave me a bunch of phone numbers for various restaurants/delivery services instead. Ah well, still fun to solve and it’s a nice tribute, even if it’s outside my wheelhouse. Sure beats the “World’s Best Mom” mug I got my mom at any rate. Happy belated birthday, Ms. Gaffney!
This was an entirely legit Week 2 meta, sabotaged by two unfortunate distractors.
If you title a puzzle “OPENING Number”, don’t put “OPENING trio” as the clue for 1D, of all places, when neither the clue or the associated entry (ABC) have absolutely nothing to do with the metanism. I heard of any number of solvers who were struggling to make something of A’s, B’s and C’s.
Similarly, the Opening Number title itself was an unintended time sink. You can’t blame a soul for thinking that the word “number” in that title was meant to direct solvers to look at, or for, numbers. Opening numbers. Numbers in the clues, numbers in the grid, numbers derived from the clues or grid. As nearly as I can tell, this reference to “number” was only a second reminder that the solution was a number. We already had that from the prompt.
In its simplest form, this puzzle required nothing more than taking the opening word of 4 obvious themers and reading out the “definition” of the answer. One Down and the title completely obfuscated that.
Agree with this 100%. I was also distracted by AGEGAP at 7A given that we were looking for someone’s age.
I counted 33 As, Bs, and Cs in the grid. Adding that to Matt’s age (53, per Wikipedia), gets 86. (Why do that? Maybe he was hinting at her age when he was born?) I was going to guess 86 as a Hail Mary and then noon rolled around and it was too late. Dang.
But yeah, when the answer is a piece of information we have no way of knowing and no way to confirm, the solution path should be dead easy to spot.
… and here I just went with 80, since there were “Eight T’s” in the puzzle, and I thought I was somehow just missing an “A”-link, from pointing to A, in the “opening number” box to clinch it (somehow making an “A”-“T’ link).
The initials of the theme entries are:
* C = 3
* A = 1
* D = 4
* O = 15
which are the opening digits of pi, so I took the next two digits and submitted 92
I can’t believe someone in his 50s didn’t toss in a Get Smart reference somewhere as an additional wink. :)