meta DNF
hello, and welcome to episode #863 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Wintry Mix”. this week’s asked us to find something associated with Christmas. okay. what are the theme answers? four nonsense phrases of 13 letters each:
- {Person who moves from Prague to Arkhangelsk?} WHITE SEA CZECH.
- {Gets comfy with one’s sorority-sister girlfriend?} NUZZLES A THETA.
- {Admonishment to loud Circus Maximus vehicles?} ZIP IT, CHARIOTS!
- {Point of interest to a dental school student?} INTRICATE CUSP.
other than there being kind of a lot of Z’s here, i have no idea what’s going on. “mix” in the title suggests anagrams, but the phrases aren’t anagrams of each other despite sharing many letters in common. the next thing to look for is probably hidden anagrams of things associated with christmas, like santa’s reindeer—recently the subject of last week’s delightful wapo meta—or gifts from the song “the twelve days of christmas”. however, those do not seem to be in evidence.
the thing about hidden anagrams is that it’s so easy to find things once you start looking, which means it’s very unconstrained as a meta mechanism—unless the space of things you’re looking for is quite limited (hence my initial thought to anagram things from a set associated with christmas). like NUZZLES A THETA contains an anagram of the eight-letter word ATHLETES, but that’s not particularly meaningful by itself; if you can invent any 13-letter phrase, you can certainly use all 13 of them in an anagram instead of just eight from the middle. on the other hand, if i’d found something like PERCUSSIONISTS (to suggest “twelve drummers drumming”), we’d be in business, at least briefly.
i don’t think individual words in theme answers are being anagrammed—other than CUSP/CUPS, there doesn’t seem to be much anagram fodder.
is there anything else to try? nothing about the clues jumped out to me this week as unusual, and the grid doesn’t have any especially sticky features or a high word count. so i think the long theme answers are really it as far as the meta. i just don’t know what to do with them.
i guess i’m throwing in the towel. but happy christmakkuh to all who celebrate! i probably won’t be blogging next week while i’m traveling over the holidays (i’ll try to line up a substitute), so happy new year as well and i’ll see you in 2025.
Each theme answer was an anagram of a nut and a cracker brand:
CASHEW / CHEEZ-IT
HAZELNUT / ZESTA
PISTACHIO / RITZ
PECAN / TRISCUIT
The final answer is left as an exercise to the reader.
For those still struggling, the answer is NUTCRACKER.
I got to the point above, but first getting the nuts (with a nudge) and then seeing the crackers with the leftover letters.
Now focused on the crackers, I noticed a clear cracker industry leader — KEEBLER — was missing. And we all know that Keebler employs ELVES, which I confidently submitted!
Well, it felt good when I submitted it.
Metty Christmas to all!
Very cool meta that I got exactly nowhere on.
I’m terrible with anagram solves and got nowhere with this. I figured the “Mix” in the title meant anagram and it actually dulled my resolve. There is nothing especially wintry about nuts and crackers IMO, they are on bars and coffee tables all year for sporting fans. In my weak attempts i was definitely thinking about words that exuded more of a Christmas or snowy-day feel. That said, its a really great idea and the final answer is impossibly clever. Just wish the title would have been ‘Bar Mix’ but i guess we had to have a Week 4 difficulty.
I have all the crackers in my household, haha. I even got to PISTACHIO/RITZ earlier but then HAZELNUT/ZETAS and was like…”Okay, PISTACHIO/RITZ” must be a coincidence. Finally, had an epiphany once I looked for nuts in the others, just to see.
Lots of crackers have “Z” in the brand name – I’m intrigued by that and will celebrate my intrigue by eating some Cheez-Its, nature’s perfect food.
Happy holidays to all!
I thought it was interesting that The NY Times puzzle had THE NUTCRACKER today as the main theme across the middle entry, with four different nuts cracked apart in the other theme answers. This is the second time I know of where the NYT has featured a “spoiler” for the Gaffney answer. (The other was a few years ago with GRAND CAYMAN.) Crazy coincidence!
Joon, you have an error (inconsequential, as it turns out) in the grid shown: 24A should be UAE
How many people actually solved this?
Got nowhere on this one. The best diversion I spotted was the word “surname” appearing in three separate clues, with ZAHN and ZHANG being two of the three entries.
Thanks, joon! 187 right answers this week, so right over the target (~200) for a Week 4/5.
Clearly a SAD (simple and difficult) meta. My worry was that this would be too easy for a 4/5, but the anagrams were so well hidden because half of them consist of non-dictionary words ZESTA and CHEEZ-IT, plus the Z in RITZ was another distraction.