MGWCC #825

 

hello, and welcome to episode #825 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, “Take a Little Off the Sides”. for this week 4 of 5 puzzle, the instructions asked for a Top 10 hit of the early 1990s. what were the theme answers? well, that’s the first thing i don’t know. it’s an oversized grid (17×15) with no long answers. a couple 8s, a handful of 7s, and a whole bunch of shorter stuff.

the fact that the grid is wider than usual is suggestive given the title. i would like the mechanism to involve removing the first and last columns—but if it does, i can’t see what that’s really doing for us.

what did catch my eye was that a whole bunch of the clues look like they’ve been worded ambiguously specifically to allow for the possibility of other correct answers. among them:

• {High point} APEX. okay, this one isn’t unusual—just the usual ambiguity about APEX vs ACME or maybe PEAK, but if we don’t need it to be four letters, it could be CREST or TOP or SUMMIT.
• {Summertime cooler} ICE. or ICEE, or ADE.
• {Letter adjacent to xi} OMICRON. “adjacent to” really got my attention. why not just “after”, unless matt specifically wanted to allow this clue to also work for NU?
• {Wise type} GURU. maybe SAGE.
• {Nation of northern Afr.} ALG. perhaps MOR or LIB.
• {Mindy Kaling played one on “The Mindy Project”} OB/GYN. could be just MD, DR, or DOCTOR.
• {Put off until a later time} DEFER. TABLE.
• {Possessive in the ice cream section} EDY’S. or DREYER’S/BREYER’S.
• {Wilson of Heart} ANN. or NANCY.
• {Manhattan sch.} NYU. or CCNY, or even KSU (the other manhattan).
• {Airport guesses, briefly} ETAS. ETDS.
• {Pt. of Manhattan} UES. many possibilities, but even just the upper/lower east/west side options allow for LES, LWS, and UWS.
• {Letters ending some North American college URLs} EDU. this clue intrigued me, because it looks like it’s being deliberately ambiguous (“some”?), but i actually can’t think of a different answer.
• {Body scan type} X-RAY. MRI, CT, maybe some other not-quite-scans-that-are-often-clued-as-scans like EEG/ECG/EKG.
• {Phone feature} CAM. so many things.
• {Famed baseball player Jackson} REGGIE. (shoeless) JOE and BO, among others.
• {Lawnmower brand} TORO. DEERE.
• {Plumber’s jobs, often} CLOGS. LEAKS, DRIPS.
• {Baseball team in the American League} TWINS. not going to list them all, but obviously any other AL team would work here.
• {Highlight of a trip out west to Cali, for many} EL CAP. this could be even more things, really almost anything.
• {Half a dance} CHA. CAN or NAE.
• {Measure of braininess} SMARTS. looks like this wants to be IQ, as SMARTS is synonymous with braininess but not really a “measure” by any sense.

so that’s a lot of clue that set off my spidey sense, but none of the alternate answers are to be found elsewhere in the grid (at the sides or otherwise). i don’t think this is a dead end, but it must involve a step i haven’t thought of yet.

one thing that is to be found at the sides of the grid is the bonkers entry MOSQ, clued as {Stinging insect, for short}. this is not a standard shortening of mosquito (i guess SKEETER is, we could add that to the list), but it is notably the first four letters of MOSQUE… or MOSQUES, if we added the entry UES to it. is that something? i don’t know, but this must be an important entry. otherwise it would’ve just been MOSH (crossing SHAH instead of SHAQ), or some other slightly larger change that would have resulted in an actual word here (e.g. MOST/SPAT/LEAP instead of MOSQ/SHAQ/LEAH).

anyway, if MOSQUES happened to be a legitimate answer for any of the other clues in the puzzle, i feel like we’d be in business. but i don’t see one that works.

back to NU, which surely must be the best lead from the list of ambiguous clues. is there anything we can do with the fact that you can get NU from NYU by taking a little off the sides?

wait, no, that’s not it. i actually just figured it out. it’s the letters in the first and last column of each row:

• row 1’s extreme letters are AC, which satisfies {Summertime cooler} ICE.
• row 2 gives NO, {“That’s totally out of the question!”} GET REAL.
• row 3 is the NU i was looking for to pair with {Letter adjacent to xi} OMICRON.
• row 4 gives AP, for {Xinhua rival} TASS.
• row 5 doesn’t have white squares at the beginning and end, so we move on to row 6, which gives us the DR for {Mindy Kaling played one on “The Mindy Project”} OB/GYN.
• row 7 gives us CA, which is a real head-slap moment for me, because of course it works for {Letters ending some North American college URLs} EDU. hence north american, aargh.
• row 8 is the CT i wanted for {Body scan type} X-RAY.
• row 9 is A’S for {Baseball team in the American League} TWINS.
• row 10 is BO for {Famed baseball player Jackson} REGGIE.
• row 12 gives us HS, which i suppose goes with {Educ. type} ELEM.
• row 13 is OH, which i think fits {“Misunderstood you, sorry”} MY BAD.
• row 14 is LA for {Highlight of a trip out west to Cali, for many} EL CAP.
• row 15 is the IQ for {Measure of braininess} SMARTS.

taking the first letters of these entries in order gives the billy joel song I GO TO EXTREMES, which is the meta answer. i was literally seconds too late to submit it, but at least i did figure it out.

i’m not sure why it took me so long—i pretty much immediately cottoned onto the two most important elements of the meta mechanism (the first/last columns and the ambiguous clues). i just didn’t put them together correctly. oh well.

very cool meta, though. how’d you like this one?