MGWCC #940

MGWCC crossword 2:42
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hello, and welcome to episode #940 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 1 puzzle called “Shady Business”. i attempted this one without the instructions. did i succeed? well, let’s find out—i still don’t know. what are the theme answers?

• {Melatonin secreter} PINEAL GLAND. as someone who constructs a lot of rows gardens, i have often (like, dozens of times!) been struck by the fact that the totally unrelated words PINEAL and ALPINE are the same 6-letter bloom in a rows garden grid.
• {“Emily in Paris” actress} ASHLEY PARK. not familiar with her.
• {Download it for news in French} LE MONDE APP. i guess this is a thing, but as a phrase it feels pretty weak, at least in the english-speaking world.
• {They include a scale} MAP LEGENDS. it would make more sense to me to say that “they include scales” if the answer is plural.

so anyway—these all start with names of trees: PINE, ASH, LEMON, and MAPLE. (it’s quite funny to me how MAP LEGENDS is only a one-letter change from MAPLE GENUS, a common clue for the classic crosswordese word ACER.) great. that seems to comport with the title (are they all shade trees? i guess), and their first letters spell out PALM, another tree. so i was pretty ready to submit PALM as my answer, but i checked the instructions just before submitting: This puzzle’s contest answer, which is two words and nine letters long, is something you might find on a beach.

well… um… hrmph. i guess the answer isn’t just PALM, but surely PALM has to be part of it. could it just be PALM TREES? it certainly could, but yikes, that would be a very unsatisfying answer compared to just having the answer be PALM and the instructions be “a kind of tree”. not only that, but PALM TREES (plural) isn’t a great fit for “something” (singular) you might find on a beach. also, if it’s just TREES, there’s also the bigger question of why would matt insist on a two-word answer where we have to guess the second word based on vibes alone. i haven’t had great success in recent months trying to get into matt’s head on these, but i’d like to think that the puzzle itself contains everything we need to extract the meta.

what about PALM BEACH? no, that’s no good—beach is in the instructions, so it shouldn’t be the thing added to the answer. the trees all occur at the starts of the theme answers, and PALM FROND is very close to PALM FRONT … is that anything? (i don’t think it’s anything.)

is it possible that we’re actually supposed to use the rest of the themer? maybe the MAP LEGENDS / MAPLE GENUS thing isn’t just a funny coincidence. but i don’t really think this is it—ALGLAND, LEYPARK, and DEAPP aren’t doing much for me, and i can understand why; there just isn’t much freedom to pick theme answers that start with a tree but aren’t related at all to the name of the tree.

eurgh. does “shady business” have a double meaning? shade could refer to color in addition to literal shadows cast by trees. i am also now noticing that the last across clue CYNDI is clued as {“True Colors” singer Lauper}, which could be a hint. the problem is now associating colors with our trees. i have no problem with LEMON being yellow, but what about the others? MAPLE leaves turn orange and red in the fall, and the canadian flag has a red maple leaf, but most of the rest of the year the leaves are just … green, like pretty much all trees, certainly including PINE trees which are evergreen. i guess ASH is gray even though ASH trees are not.

i have a very bad track record at solving metas that involve identifying colors of things—and i’m on record as saying i generally don’t care for them, because the colors we’re “supposed” to assign to various objects are often ambiguous in exactly the way i’ve demonstrated in the previous paragraph. nevertheless i can’t help feeling that perhaps the shade/color and CYNDI lauper clue are suggesting that this one is, in fact, about colors.

i guess there’s the bigger question of how we’re going to get to a 9-letter answer even if we do associate a color (and then perhaps a grid entry that is that color) with each of our four trees. that probably only gets us to 8. is there enough wiggle room in the grid for there to be 4 or 5 more entries constrained by the theme? … maybe. it’s a 76-word grid, and the themers themselves are only 12/12/10/10, so it’s possible.

looking around the fill… {Wise words} OLD SAYING is an interesting long down. it is arguably synonymous with “chestnut”, another tree. can there be more of these? hmm, actually, {Word on many beer labels} PALE is a word i associate with ASH (ashen, ashy). but i don’t see more of these. i could imagine the verb sense of PINE coming into play, and maybe the junky car sense of LEMON, but there’s not much you can do with MAPLE that’s not about the tree.

there are reachier ideas: {Brother of Gummo and Chico (OK, and Harpo and Groucho)} ZEPPO contains the GUM tree. but this kind of fine-toothed comb search would be a ludicrous mechanism for a week 1. speaking of ludicrous, {Indigo Girls “___ and a Nail”} HAMMER is a clue that seems extremely suspicious—even if you wanted to clue it using this particular song (which i’ve never heard of), why phrase it this way instead of, like {“___ and a Nail” (Indigo girls song)}? {band name “song title”}, without even so much as a comma, is just… a syntax error. i don’t even know how else to put it.

okay, well, i officially don’t know what is going on. i guess i’m going to submit PALM TREES and see what happens, but even if it’s right, this is maybe my least favorite week 1 i can remember. so i hope it’s wrong, in which case… let me know what i missed.