MGWCC crossword 2:39
meta DNF 3 days 
[3.30 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #946 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 puzzle called… well, what was it called? the version i solved was called “+3” but there was an earlier version sent out called “They Shall Return”. in any event, what were the instructions? uh, okay, that also changed, but the one i solved asked for a five-letter word describing some successful MGWCC solves. what are those theme entries? i’m guessing here—there are four long answers and a handful of 7s and a stray 8, but i suspect we’ll have 5 themers (because of the instructions) that’ll be the four long acrosses and the central 7:
- {“Firework” and “Dark Horse” singer} KATY PERRY.
- {Show off at the racetrack, maybe} REV THE ENGINE.
- {Vine also called “devil’s bones”} WILD YAM.
- {Like some monetary conversions} DOLLAR-TO-EURO.
- {Sporty little car} MINI COOPER.
WILD YAM, in addition to its central location in the grid, looks a lot more like a theme answer than the other 7s (CAMBRIA, LOBSTER, and ISOTOPE) or the 8 (MOMENTUM). but what is the theme? that’s trickier. the title makes me want to take one of the short words in each themer (KATY, REV, YAM, EURO, MINI) and add a trigram to it, either on the front or the back (or perhaps interspersed, who knows). but i can’t see a way to add the same trigram to all five.
the other angle is to find the clues that look the most sus in the rest of the puzzle. in this one, it was {Music genre of Spotify} OPERA and {Creature that makes a distinctive sound} SHEEP. riffing off of those, we can get EUROPOP for a music genre and KATYDID for a noisy creature. so perhaps we’re just adding a different three-letter palindrome, not necessarily the same one, to every stub. the palindromic aspect also fits with the original puzzle title—i don’t know if that’s “cheating” but it is information that matt did give us.
okay yeah, we can do all five:
- {Creature that makes a distinctive sound} SHEEP or KATYDID.
- {Show great interest in, in a way} OGLE or REVERE. the OGLE part of this was quite distasteful, i must say.
- {Famed guitar maker} LEVIN or YAMAHA. i have a YAMAHA piano but neither of my guitars is a YAMAHA. that said, i don’t believe i am familiar with LEVIN guitars, either.
- {Music genre on Spotify} OPERA or EUROPOP.
- {Barely sufficient} SCANT or MINIMUM.
taking the first letters of those alternate answers gives SOLOS, which is indeed a word describing some MGWCC solves. whew! just under the wire again.
it’s now noon and i haven’t looked at the original version of the puzzle, so i don’t know how tricky it was. but this one was pretty good. i’m a little surprised it had to be asymmetric—KATY PERRY and MINI COOPER are different lengths, true, but it doesn’t seem like it would have been that tough to find a matching pair. but the asymmetry was only a mild inelegance.
how’d you all like this one?
Having the puzzle released multiple times with different titles and different hints just turned me off this week.
Total respect for what Matt does every week, but this one prevented me from trying very hard.
+1
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3 stars
Same. Had figured “return” in the original title could refer to backward spellings, either in the themers or elsewhere in the grid to add to them somehow, but nothing clicked, then the revised version arrived, so I started looking for reversed 3-letter groups that could fit in, but figured that was a stretch. That palindromes are reverse spellings, sure, but like someone below said, not being in the grid or even the clues…eh.
I got it right, though I never grokked how Katy Perry, etc. worked. But I could see it had to do with palindromes. I had POP, not EUROPOP mapping to OPERA, and I thought I had MAAM mapping to SIR. I noted GIG for MCJOB, ERE for AGO, and SEES for LOCATES (in the original version before it changed to LOBSTER) but they weren’t working. With Matt’s hint that the last letter was S, and a strong suspicion the answer would be a palindrome, itself, I was able to backsolve SOLOS. I’d love to hear why the original was flawed. Does it have to do with SIS being a palindrome?
I think the original version didn’t have an S answer in the grid that mapped to MINI(MUM), as far as I could tell. So you could get SOLO but not SOLOS without the tip about it being a five-letter word ending in S.
Can someone explain what was wrong with the original? I see the original doesn’t have SCANT, so did MINI extend to something else?
Oh is it that MUM after MINI pointed to SIS, giving the S, but that’s not how the other themers worked?
And why the “ending with S” clarification? Seems like that wasn’t necessary with the new puzzle. Or maybe that came before the new version of the puzzle was released.
Minimum (mini-mum) could map to sis, but sorta weak.That’s how I solved the original.
So we were expected to pull 3-letter palindromes out of thin air to make new words that fit other clues?
Silly me — I was looking in the grid and in the clues for things to pair with the themers.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
A couple other red herrings I ran into:
1) 9A MCJOB [Position without upward potential] could be an alternate clue for MINIMUM, but that would give SOLOM for the answer which isn’t a word and doesn’t fit the answer prompt
2) 26D TALL [Like people you look up to] is *almost* an alternate clue for REVERE, but the tense doesn’t quite agree, so fortunately that clued me in to keep looking before I found [Show great interest in, in a way]
I struggled with this one despite getting a few nudges from my dentist (who solves these weekly).
I never got a foothold on this one, though it is an interesting mechanism. I was diverted by the “Distinctive animal sound” entry right underneath KATY PERRY, and so I was pretty sure “Roar” and LION would play a part somehow.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3.5 stars
An issue with re-titling is that it de-emphasizes palindromes. So one could have footholds of TO+TAL (dollar “to” euro) mapping to ADD and more damningly THE+TAS (rev “the” engine) to ETAS, one of the new grid entries. Even MINI+MAL fits the clue slightly better than MINIMUM, and at that point one could feel the palindromes are not important at all. Perhaps even REVIEW instead of REVERE, since reviewing something is a way of showing it great interest.
But it is nice that the 5 palindromes involve each of the vowels separately.