MGWCC #867

 

hello, and welcome to episode #867 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Make Womb”. the instructions this week ask for a five-letter word. what are the theme entries?

• {It has many synonyms} ROGET’S THESAURUS.
• {Surveys} TAKES A POLL OF. tricky one here with the clue not looking especially like a verb.
• {It stands beside a pyramid} THE LOUVRE MUSEUM. not sure if “beside” is quite right here—the vastness of the museum totally surrounds (and includes) the pyramid, as well as extending beneath it.
• {Tepidity} LUKEWARMNESS.
• {TV or radio ad buys} BROADCAST ORDERS. that’s two words together that i don’t think i’ve seen used as a phrase. i suppose it’s a thing? very few of us, i imagine, have ever purchased a TV or radio ad.

okay, so the first part of the theme was pretty much week 2 difficulty: each of these themers contains a hidden twin: biblical ESAU, mythological APOLLO, mythological REMUS, cinematic LUKE, and mythological CASTOR. this is hinted at by the title, which punnily suggests the idea of a shared womb being cramped quarters. so right away, the five-letter word TWINS suggested itself to me.

but there is definitely a disappointing lack of “click” if that’s all there is, because usually we can expect more from matt. the natural thing would be to look for the twin sibling of each of these famous twins: JACOB, ARTEMIS, ROMULUS, LEIA, and POLLUX. i was expecting to find them in the grid in some altered form—perhaps anagrammed, perhaps with one letter changed, etc.

but no, this time they’re hidden (quite well hidden, imo) in the clues:

• {Muntjac observer, often} THAI. “what’s a muntjac?”, i hear some of you asking. it’s a small deer native to southeast asia. i’m familiar with muntjacs because there’s one in boston’s franklin park zoo, where it shares a habitat with the red panda (my children’s favorite). that said, this is not a way you would normally see THAI clued in a crossword puzzle.
• {Bonaparte mission, often} WAR. this was another clue that sounded weird to my ear—why “mission”? well, now you know why.
• {It may get its shape from ulus} IGLOO. man, this is a throwback—the useful palindrome ULU was once a regular denizen of crossword grids, back in the 2000s (and perhaps before then, though i can’t attest to that personally), almost always clued as {Eskimo knife}. i was more than a little amused to see this old-school crosswordese repurposed as a clue in a hidden-word meta.
• {You might spot one when observing the Pleiades} NOVA. i suppose you might, but the overspecificity of the clue is a big hint that something weird is going on.
• {Santa Barbara or Sebastopol luxury} SPA. another overspecific clue; perhaps santa barbara is known as a spa town, but it was news to me. sebastopol is most famous to me as being a strategically important black sea port in crimea.

so what’s the meta answer? i can’t tell if this is infuriating or hilarious, but it’s just TWINS, which you can spell by taking the first letters of these five answers. i guess it is amusing if you get it, but i have to imagine that there are solvers who submitted the correct answer without getting the second-level click and consequently feeling a little underwhelmed by the whole meta. but i enjoyed it—it was like taking a journey whose destination unexpectedly turns out to be home.

that’s all for me this week. for those of you who will be participating in mystery hunt, happy hunting!