MGWCC crossword 3:39
meta 0:05 
[4.38 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #941 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Take a Little Off Around the Edges”. this week’s puzzle challenges us with a riddle in five grid-spanning parts: WHAT EIGHT-LETTER / SEAFOOD IS FORMED / BY USING FOUR USPS / ABBREVIATIONS OF / COASTAL U.S. STATES? not that we needed it, but there’s an extra thematic clue at 35-across, {A map of it might be helpful for today’s meta} USA.
i don’t really have any insights as to the intended or optimal solution path; i think you could either just think of 8-letter seafoods and see if they work, or play around with the abbreviations of the coastal states to see what you might be able to spell. i chose the former, and pretty much the first thing i thought of was the answer: CALAMARI. that’s california, louisiana, massachusetts (hello!), and rhode island. perhaps it came to mind because all four constituent bigrams are consonant-vowel, although of course that’s not strictly necessary when stringing together state abbreviations.
it feels like it’s been a while since we’ve had a meta of this sort, where there’s nothing to look for in the grid or theme answers, just a multi-part riddle. i have the vague memory that they were more common in the earlier days of MGWCC. this puzzle is about as clean as they come: the instructions split into five 15-letter chunks, and that’s it. yeah, there’s the extra USA in the fill, but i suspect that’s just how the grid turned out rather than matt trying to shoehorn it in there; the clue for that entry doesn’t help at all on top of what the instructions already tell you.
the other thing that was clean about the meta was there was no ambiguity or interpretation (e.g., are the great lakes states coastal?). that’s a hazard that can sometimes creep in if the wording of the meta question is constrained by lengths and symmetry, but there was no such issue here, and i’m grateful for that.
with 75 theme squares, the fill was a bit strained in places—a handful of I plurals (I’M ON, I THEE, I COME)—but really nothing too awkward. overall, this was a fine week 2 puzzle. the clue {Fish in a “Simpsons” episode} for FUGU had me thinking about a different fish, blinky, but getting the answer reminded me about the fugu episode and that was a warm, happy memory. season 2 was just {Highest level of performance} PEAK simpsons.
that’s all i’ve got this week. how’d you like this one?
Mahi-mahi accepted as well.
I stared and had nothing until I realized I left out AK HI. That immediately gave me Mahi Mahi and, noticing no mention of “unique” or “different”, I sent that in.
Calamari is definitely better though. :)
I saw that and considered it (rightly) wrong since it didn’t use 4 different state codes (implied). But what the hey — it’s only a week 2!
I thought that 49-down (ABCDE) was a hint to winnow down the possibilities – or confirm the answer -by using alphabetic order. It sure helped!
I like this kind of puzzle! Something a bit different.
Annoyingly, CALAMARI didn’t show up on the Wikipedia “list of seafood” or on the handful of other seafood lists I scanned through. Not the puzzle’s fault, of course, but after not finding anything better I submitted MAHI MAHI. After all, the prompt said “four abbreviations,” not “abbreviations of four states!”
I wrote a list of the coastal state abbrevs (Pacific and Atlantic only, not Gulf of Mexico), and eyeballed the various four-letter starting combos that were possible. Went with mahi-mahi because my list didn’t have TX, LA, MS, and AL. Whew!
Just getting to the puzzle now (came up with MAHI MAHI) because every few weeks I forget that Tuesday is the normal deadline. Wondering if we could make Wednesday the new permanent deadline, regardless of whether the puzzle is released on time? (Or always have it be Tuesday, even if the puzzle is released late. I’d just rather have consistency)
In my view, we already have a sort of consistency: the puzzles are almost always due at noon on the fourth day after posting (usually 96 hours after posting but he often robs us of an hour or two for minor delays).
It’s more of a dynamic consistency than a rigid one but it’s still consistent.
Thanks, Joon — 445 right answers this week.
I think I have to accept MAHI-MAHI — amazing that there is a second one (I spent about 30 seconds on it and decided “unlikely”) but the prompt mentions “four US postal abbreviations” and that one only uses two. Hmmm…will need to ask Panel for wisdom.