MGWCC crossword 3:34
meta DNF 
[4.35 avg; 10 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #934 (i think it’s #934, even though the puzzle title says #935) of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Stay Cool”. the instructions: This puzzle’s meta answer, which is 12 letters long, is something you might do (to me) if you don’t like this meta. hmm, i could think of a lot of things, but hopefully i won’t need to. what are the theme answers? well, i don’t know—there are no long answers in the grid. but surely it is relevant that the grid’s center square is rebus, with {Hits for a pop fly, say} GET[S UN]DER crossing {Ends at} RUN[S UN]TIL at the SUN. the 25-down answer could be RUNS TIL with no rebus required, certainly, but there’s no way to make GETSDER fit the across clue, so it’s at least a one-way rebus and the whole thing makes perfect sense as a SUN rebus in both directions. that also fits with the title.
okay, now what? we need 12 letters somehow, and “stay cool” does suggest getting shade from the central SUN. perhaps the black squares are providing shade? hmm, that’s an interesting idea—i don’t know what the rest of the grid would be doing in that case, but the answers at 7- and 66-down and 39- and 43-across are all 3 letters long and “shaded” from the SUN. can we do anything with these 12 letters? clockwise from the top, we have:
- {___ Darya (Eurasian river)} AMU.
- {Marseilles Mrs.} MME.
- {Speed Wagon maker} REO.
- {Nashville-based org.} CMA.
if there’s a way of ordering those 12 letters into a sensical message, i’m not seeing it. i also, on general principles, don’t think that this is a really logical way for a meta to work in a 15×15 grid, by using only one central rebus square and then these four little 3-letter words around the grid—and the fill in the corners is too iffy to be totally unconstrained by the meta. the downs in the northeast, for example, contain H AND M (a swedish clothing company i’ve never heard of), partial NOW I, obscure foreign word ESEL, and terrible plural abbr STRS, not to mention the glaring dupe of CBD OILS crossing OLEO OIL. (there’s another bad dupe elsewhere with SALT COD and ROCK SALT, but at least those don’t cross each other.) none of these are anywhere near the four answers AMU/MME/REO/CMA.
for that matter, the fill in the middle looks sus, too—why ATYM/BY TO instead of ATOM/BOTS?
so this shade idea might not be totally wrong, but if it’s right, that isn’t exactly the way it works. what else might we try? are there other things we might do with the idea of hiding from the SUN or blocking it? perhaps we need to be thinking about the blocks in the grid (i.e. the black squares)—but i don’t know what to do with them.
okay, i have to throw in the towel here—what’d i miss?
Thanks, joon — 190 right answers this week, 100 of which were solo solves.
You had the right idea of seeking shade from the SUN. There are four three-letter trees radiating out from the central SUN: ASH, ELM, OAK, and YEW. Seek shelter in the shade (i.e., the three squares on the other side of the tree from the Sun) and you get contest answer THROW SHADE AT.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
Good lord.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
What Doph127 said.
Could we throw things other than shade at Matt? Asking for a friend.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
Amen!
ATYM/BYTO is definitely relevant, and HANDM also couldn’t be HANDS, OUTDO couldn’t be OUTRO, and DAK actually couldn’t be OAK either, for meta reasons!
I’m not sure how I saw what I did after five hours of searching, but printing the puzzle out and going on late-night scavenger hunts was vintage for me, so it brought me back a bit.
Something is emerging from the sun! I’ll let someone else explain, haha.
I call foul on both of the clues 37A and 37D: AB NEG comes alphabetically before A NEG, and as best as I can tell, the company Atym, Inc. is headquartered in Austin, not San Francisco. One third-party source does list them as SF, but all other sources I can find say Austin.
That said, the square at 37 couldn’t have been anything else (ABTYM isn’t a company name anywhere), so I figured these were just errors and not part of the meta.
I think A NEG would be alphabetized before AB NEG because of the space
I’m sad I missed the meta, but at least 20-A reminded me of this banger song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2chB6YNjyEA
“Bacalao Con Pan” from Irakere, a brilliant piece of Afro-Cuban jazz.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
After whiffing on a lot of Matt’s recent metas, I managed to find this one pretty quickly. But that’s mostly because I tend to look at the diagonals if I’m not making any progress. A wasted effort 99% of the time, but this week it paid off!
This puzzle brought to you by Mitch Hedberg.
MGWCC used to be good…
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
Is this the first MGWCC to have the meta hidden on the diagonals?