MGWCC crossword 2:50
meta DNF 
[3.43 avg; 7 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #938 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Compare and Contrast”. the instructions this week ask for a 5-letter … adjective I hope you wouldn’t apply to this meta. okay, what are the theme answers? presumably they’re the five longest acrosses:
- {Cuts} MAKES A SNIP.
- {Where you might share a recipe} PERSONAL BLOG. this would not have been very high on my list of plausible answers to the clue, but then again, i’m not in the habit of sharing recipes, so who knows.
- {1992 Meryl Streep comedy} DEATH BECOMES HER. haven’t seen it, but i’m aware of this film.
- {Light source} ELECTRIC BULB.
- {Mid-court tennis shot, often} HALF-VOLLEY. happy roland garros to all who celebrate. there’s zero drama in men’s singles, but plenty in the women’s draw.
well, now what? i really don’t know. the themers themselves do kind of suggest to me that we’re supposed to take one word from each of them and do something with it, as opposed to something like a hidden string or anything involving their actual semantic sense. but what is the thing? and which word? SNIP is PINS backward, but the others don’t have any semordnilaps (or anadromes, if you prefer that terminology).
how about the title? i guess we should be comparing and contrasting things. i’m guessing, big-picture, that there’s a word in the fill that we need to associate with a word in each of the themers somehow, and then compare/contrast the two. but i’m really not seeing anything specific.
what about change-a-letter? you can get BULL and CALF from BULB and HALF, which is interesting, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. HER -> HEN is at least another farm animal, but there’s nothing doing in PERSONAL BLOG or MAKES A SNIP. i guess “compare and contrast” could suggest antonyms—maybe there are antonyms of theme words, like MAKES / BREAKS, PERSONAL / ???, DEATH / LIFE or maybe HER / HIM. actually, HIM is in the grid clued as {Yonder dude}, but it’s not really an antonym … and there’s really no antonym of ELECTRIC or BULB. this isn’t it.
looking through the clues, there weren’t anything that really jumped out at me for being sus. some of the fill was questionable, but i think SURV as an abbr for SURVEY was the worst, and it’s constrained to _U_V by the themers, so i think there was always going to have to be some kind of sludgy answer there holding the puzzle together. AMP is in the grid twice, but matt told us to ignore that, as well as the misspelled “possesess” in the HATH clue. there’s also the wrong year in the ELENI clue—the movie is from 1985, not 1995—but that also seems more likely to be a typo than a hint.
oh, this clue is an interesting to compare and/or contrast: {Weston of “Alice”} CELIA. that’s an anagram of ALICE. are we doing anything with this? alas, i don’t see any other places where this is happening.
okay, well, i guess i’m throwing in the towel. what’d i miss?
I couldn’t solve this, but I followed exactly the same path as joons did so this is a win in my book.
Additionally, one of the clues started with [Makes public], which PERSONAL is an antonym of and the first themer starts with MAKES so I thought it could go somewhere but alas.
Thanks, joon — 160 right answers this week, 74 of which were solo solves.
Seems like the first step either jumped out pretty fast or not at all. Change the last letter of the last word in each theme entry and reverse it to get a color:
SNIP –> PINK
BLOG –> GOLD
HER –> RED
BULB –> BLUE
VOLLEY –> YELLOW
Then find a thing of each color in the grid:
pink — Sow
gold — Honey
red — Apple
blue — Denim
yellow — Yolk
First letters of those spell contest answer SHADY.
welp, i tried both reverse and change a letter but not both. a bridge too far!
And here I thought the pink thing was meant to be 54D’s “slip”
When you have __ H A D Y already, all the ‘S’ answers look pink!
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3.5 stars
And this was only Week 4…
I get the “compare” part, kinda, but don’t see the “contrast” part…and changing a letter AND reversing seems like a stretch without some hint toward colors. JMO.
Mikey G getting this in 14 minutes has to be one of the most impressive meta solves of all time, hats off
I wouldn’t have done the meta if the six-letter VOLLEY/YELLOW hadn’t existed. I thought that pushed it over the line into fair territory. Barely?
oh my comment wasn’t intended as a knock on the meta (which i was not remotely close to getting but don’t think was unfair), just game recognizing game
VOLLEY/YELLOW was my in for this meta. If that hadn’t been there, I would not have gotten this.
If Ángel Hernández were calling it, sure ;)
You, e.a., are a legend and make me a better solver.
I appreciate the kind words, though I think this was more of me not seeing much and just thinking, “Well, VOLLEY is kind of YELLOW backwards, haha.”
And that was it!
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
The middle section was too far out of my wheelhouse with knowledge of baseball players, Gore Vidal books, and India politics all required. Plus I had ECG in there which made OUSTS hard to see. I kinda guessed at HOYT but thought the India PM might be DELHI which gave me MYTH for one of the Gore Vidal clues and I was lost after that. Ah well, at least I got two books added to my reading list.
Kyle
I think most meta solvers agree that Googling is fair game when solving meta puzzles. The constraints created by the meta design frequently require less than stellar fill – it would have been okay to check the unfamiliar names of Gore Vidal books, lesser known Indian Prime Ministers of the 1970s, and UNESCO cave sites. The challenge is to solve the meta, not to know obscure trivia.
Let yourself look up or verify the stuff you don’t know, so you can get to the challenge of ferreting out the hidden solution.
Just my opinion.
Nope, sorry. I have both applauded and criticized Matt’s metas, but this one goes on my naughty list.
First of all, the title was beyond unhelpful. It’s not “can you tease out the connection after it’s done”, the question is “does the title help, or at least not hinder the solving process?” Compare and contrast are loaded words that suggest that the title might be instructing solvers to play one thing off against something else. I heard many people saying “Am I supposed to be thinking that “Make” goes with”Destroy “, and “Personal ” go with “public “, and that sort of thing?” Nope, not in the slightest.
As for the metanism, sure, Mikey G more than demonstrated that it was possible to immediately discover that if you took only the last word of each themer, reversed it, changed a letter, realized that you had found five color names, searched the grid for items that are iconically those colors, and took the first letters of each of those grid finds, they would spell out an actual word that could potentially answer the utterly non-specific prompt, to which I say “Way to go, Mikey!!!”, but…. Why?
Sure, these are all things you sometimes see in a meta solution, but have we really reached the point where meta solving is nothing more than “randomly try everything that you have seen before, in combination with other sometimes meta things and see if the right combination produces an English word?”
There was nothing about the puzzle, clues, grid or title to suggest any of those steps; either you eliminated anagrams, state abbreviations, chemical symbols, acronyms, first letters of the themer phrase words, alternative answers, hidden words, plays on words, homophones, references hidden within the clues…or you didn’t. When there are no cues anywhere to be found, this type of puzzle becomes an exhaustive inventory of all the tricks that sometimes appear in metas, rather than a fair solve.
I say all of this, and yet, I solved it (with a friendly point), but solving did not make for a pleasant experience.
I’ll be back to praise the next quality MGWCC, because they frequently are exceptional. This one… wasn’t.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3.5 stars
This will probably have me looking at reversible words that become a color by changing a letter from now on. :-(
My “in” was APPLE. You compare apples to oranges. PERSONALBLOG contains all the letters for oranges. The word opposite from APPLE is HONEY. And honey is orange. Wait, no. Honey is…yellow? Not really. But I see “yellow” (almost) backwards in VOLLEY. So maybe it’s colors? Could HER backwards be enough for red…which is what apples are? And then…OH…GOLD. Honey is GOLD. Any other things that are specific colors? Denim is blue…blue…blue…BULB!
PINK and SOW took me a while, but that was my odd way of getting to the meta. Just proof that some AHA moments are actually AHA minutes.
I thought APPLE as the final entry was the key, since there are pink, gold, red, and yellow apple varieties, but I couldn’t make myself visualize blue apples. “Pink slip” was also my first find on alternate entries; never thought of SOW.
I also had Pink Slip, not Sow