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Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Dude, Where’s My Car?” — Conrad’s review.
This week we’re told: The answer to this week’s contest crossword is a well-known company. There are five long theme entries, each comprised of two words:
- [17a: Grassland covered with coffee-flavored desserts?]: TIRAMISUPRAIRIE
- [26a: Tell a tall tale to get a free rental truck?]: SCAMRYDER
- [41a: Guest bed designed in the 1920s?]: ARTDECOROLLAWAY
- [51a: Manipulative person on an Italian island?]: CAPRIUSER
- [64a: Plains Indian who’s relocated to a Southeast Asian capital?]: JAKARTACOMANCHE
WSJ Contest – 09.10.21 – Solution
Each contains a car model, spanning the words:
- TIRAMI(SUPRA)IRIE
- S(CAMRY)DER
- ARTDE(COROLLA)WAY
- CA(PRIUS)ER
- JAKAR(TACOMA)NCHE
Those are all cars made by TOYOTA, our contest answer. Matt gave us a nice breezy week 1 difficulty puzzle (on the MGWCC scale). Elastica has the last word.
This one was ultimately very confusing for the other two models in the theme answers.
Oh, CAPRI and COMANCHE? I did notice the first one and just did an “I’ll pretend I didn’t see that”.
And RAM (guess there was actually three) I just tried to do a “first letter of the company name thing” and came up with nothing. TOYOTA was a first jump possibility as an answer to this but with the other three model names it’s hard to not think there was a pagenting going on.
Capri, Comanche, and Ram shouldn’t be distracting because they dont cross the word borders of the answers. Capri and Comanche are just separate words, even more reason to ignore them.
Ram at least does qualify as a hidden word, but the pattern establishes by the other answers throws that out too.
I was also wondering about the other three cars. Two have stopped being made but Ram is still available. Sortta skates close to being unfair because of the 3 cars, but I guess he was throwing us a red herring..