MGWCC #936

MGWCC crossword 3:14
meta 1ish [3.60 avg; 5 ratings] rate it

hello, and welcome to episode #936 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “I See Your Point”. the instructions this week: This puzzle’s 10-letter contest answer is what you need to do to get that answer. okay, what are the theme answers? only one, the last across clue: {What a dog may chase…or, what the southeast-pointing part of a certain uppercase letter is called} TAIL.

it wasn’t hard to figure out what this referred to, because there were ten Q’s in the grid. ten Q’s in a grid is a lot (like, a lot a lot), and it was very noticeable: some of the Q-containing words were unfamiliar (QUAVO), awkwardly inflected (STATUS QUOS), partials (Q AND), or worst of all, QUES which is both an unusual abbreviation and a dupe of Q AND.

anyway, putting that aside for now, let’s solve the meta: the clue for TAIL hints that we should look to the southeast of each Q. those ten letters, circled in the screenshot above, spell out FOLLOW A CUE, which is the answer to the meta. it’s a nice punchline, because we’re both following cues and following Q’s.

despite that, i found this puzzle not that much fun to solve, because the strain on the grid resulting from jamming it with ten Q’s was really too much for a 15×15, in my opinion. a lot of the resulting fill was bad enough that the crossword was just unpleasant to solve, and the grid pretty much checked off every kind of bad fill. in addition to the Q words themselves, you had a passel of partials, nine by my count: A SEC, A REAL, A ROOM, OWE A, EAT A, A DEAN, RISE A (!?!), and worst of all, HOP ‘O (in addition to Q AND already mentioned). there were other awkward plurals like ATTA BOYS and NOTS. there was the presidential monogram RMN. there were people i’d never heard of like alfonso ARAU and people i’d heard of but still think of as fusty crosswordese like max EUWE and joseph ALIOTO. there were uncommon foreign words EDEL (clued as a prefix, even!) crossing DESDE, variant form EUCALYPT, and blatant dupe EAT A / EAT OVER. about the only kind of crummy fill it didn’t have was a random roman numeral. overall, it really made me wish this had been a 17×17 (or larger) and then we could have had the same meta mechanism but hopefully without all the forced fill.

some bits that i did enjoy:

• {Home to Canyonlands National Park} UTAH. we just went to UTAH in april for the fourth time, and are now utah national park completists. canyonlands is, i believe, the least visited of the five national parks in utah, but it’s quite lovely.
• {They go in one ear but not out the other} Q-TIPS. that’s a good clue! (yes, i know you’re not supposed to put Q-TIPS in your ear but obviously people do.)
• {Hit 2012 South Korean historical comedy} I AM THE KING. i wasn’t familiar with this fim, and it doesn’t appear to have been a hit anywhere other than in korea, but reading up on it, it looks interesting. it’s a version of the prince and the pauper, set in the joseon dynasty.

that’s all i’ve got this week. how’d you like this one?