MGWCC #937

MGWCC crossword 2:30
meta DNF 3 days [4.58 avg; 6 ratings] rate it

(i apologize that image uploading is not currently working for me, so there’s no grid screenshot here. it’s been finicky for a couple of weeks.) hello, and welcome to episode #937 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 puzzle called “I Will Follow You”. the instructions this week ask for a 6-letter kind of person who might be able to help you with this meta. okay, what are the theme answers? not sure, but my best guess is the five longest acrosses:

• {Got to the other side of, as a river} SWAM ACROSS. right away my spidey sense was tingling on this one, because it looks like a clue written to accommodate the alternate answer FORDED, which is more of a thing than SWAM ACROSS anyway.
• {“Only Murders in the Building” actor} MARTIN SHORT. this could also apply to STEVE MARTIN, of course, or SELENA GOMEZ in the gender-neutral sense of “actor”. or, i guess, lots of other people who are in the show but not one of the three leads, but i don’t know any of them off the top of my head.
• {Levy on profit made by selling an asset} CAPITAL GAINS TAX. well, this kind of punctures my theory, since the clue is pretty specific. it’s interesting that there’s another clue starting with “levy”, that being {Levy or Hurley} DAN.
• {They’re often by the front door} COAT CLOSETS. WELCOME MATS, among other things, are also often by the front door.
• {“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” actress, 1941} LANA TURNER. also starring INGRID BERGMAN, not that i knew that without looking it up. (and spencer tracy as the title character(s), though the clue doesn’t apply to him as there’s no gender-neutral sense of “actress”.)

so i don’t really know what to do next. four of those five theme clues are definitely giving schrödinger clue vibes, but the one for CAPITAL GAINS TAX is very much not. i guess CAPITAL GAINS TAX could be hinting at the meta mechanism in a different way, maybe? the title suggests the letters I and U (in the opposite order). i don’t know what to do with that either, but it might be connected to CAPITAL GAINS somehow—gaining a capital I or U or UI?

the other clue that i thought was super sus was {First word in a Scorsese title} NEW. that’s just not how you write a clue if all you want to do is clue NEW; that’s how you write a clue if you want it to work for both NEW and a mostly unrelated word like MEAN or TAXI or RAGING or GANGS or KILLERS. similarly, {Alcoholic beverage} for EGGNOG was … well, first of all, it’s not really true. you can spike EGGNOG, of course, but you can spike any drink, and EGGNOG per se is not alcoholic. but secondly, it looks like a clue that is written to allow for an alternate answer.

the last thing i noticed on the first pass that i can’t really do anything with yet: i have no idea how we’re going to extract a 6-letter answer here. there are either 5 theme answers, or 4+1 if we think maybe CAPITAL GAINS TAX is somehow different from the others.

oh, okay, how about this: TAX becomes TAXI if I “follows” it, and TAXI is the first word of the martin scorsese film taxi driver. is this it? that feels important. yeah, okay—i think all of the themers can get an I appended:

• SWAM (ACROSS) gives SWAMI, which could be an alternate answer to {Wise person} SAGE.
• MARTIN (SHORT) -> MARTINI, an {Alcoholic drink} for that EGGNOG clue.
• (CAPITAL GAINS) TAX -> TAXI, which fits the clue for NEW, as discussed above.
• COAT (CLOSETS) -> COATI, a {South American animal} like the SLOTH.
• LANA (TURNER) -> LANAI, which is an {Island often seen in crosswords}, though not as often as ELBA. (i’d say LANAI is more often clued as a porch than the hawaiian island.)

taking the first letters of those alternate entries gives us SENSE, so we can “do the thing one more time” to get the six-letter meta answer SENSEI. that’s beautiful. i appreciate the elegance of the word being totally transformed in each case by tacking on that I—the only one that shares any kind of etymological relationship is MARTIN/MARTINI, which are versions of the same name in different languages. but MARTINI in an english context is much more strongly associated with a drink than a person’s name.

i thought this meta was very difficult! i don’t think the mechanism on its own was all that difficult—but there were some traps. the first was that the most natural interpretation of the title, for me, involved “you” standing for the letter U. i think this might have been a deliberate red herring on matt’s part, which we don’t often see. if the title had just been “i will follow”, it would have been much easier to see what to do.

the second big distractor for me—and this one i think was less intentional—was the fact that four of the five theme clues seemed like they were cluing something else. (indeed, either STEVE MARTIN or MARTIN SHORT would have worked equally well as the second themer.) that said, having my antennae up for this type of clue might have helped overall, since it did get me to notice the similarly ambiguous clues for EGGNOG and NEW, which eventually did crack the meta for me.

last week i spent a good bit of my blog post excoriating awful fill, so in fairness, i feel i should point out that this week’s was much better. i kind of even liked the 8-letter partial {“What I meant” or “What I said” lead-in} THAT’S NOT, since (even though it wasn’t clued that way) i could imagine somebody saying just THAT’S NOT as a kind of “i can’t even”. in the other long fill, MIGHTN’T was a little dull but CRAWDAD and especially CLAPTRAP were great.

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