MGWCC #869

 

hello, and welcome to episode #869 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Picked Off First”. the instructions this week ask for a seven-letter word. what are the theme entries? the last names of seven famous(ish) people, all men as it turns out, were clued using similar wording:

• {He wrote “Super Sad True Love Story”} SHTEYNGART. i don’t know this author, and in fact when i finished the grid, i had a blank square at the G where it crossed {Garth’s surname, in “Wayne’s World”} ALGAR, hence the * in my solve time above. turns out it’s someone named GARY SHTEYNGART.
• {He wrote the book “Hamilton” on which the musical was based} CHERNOW. i do know this author, and have read the book in question. first name RON.
• {He did tricks on a motorcycle} KNIEVEL. crossword favorite EVEL, of course, but the clue applies equally to his son ROBBIE.
• {He is known for decades of NFL commentary} MICHAELS. that’s AL, and sure, NFL commentary, but he’s arguably equally if not more famous for olympic broadcasting, including the miracle on ice in 1980.
• {He was mayor of New York City from 1974 to 1977} BEAME. ABE, another name i mostly know from crosswords.
• {He was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014} BERNANKE (BEN).
• {He has been a castmember of shows such as “Felicity,” “Alias,” and “Heroes”} GRUNBERG. another name i didn’t know at all—apparently GREG.

normally, clues worded this way would indicate that a full name goes in the grid, especially for the not-quite household names—if only the last name is wanted, the first name would normally be given in the clue. so the omission of the first names is kind of a blinking signal that we’re supposed to look at those names, which for me involves first looking up what those first names were in two out of the seven cases.

with the first names in mind, the next step wasn’t too hard to spot—in each case, all of the letters of the first name were present in the surname as well:

• SHTEYNGART = GARY + an additional SHTENT
• CHERNOW = RON + CHEW
• KNIEVEL = EVEL (in order and together, no less) + KNI
• MICHAELS = AL + MICHES
• BEAME = ABE + EM
• BERNANKE = BEN + RANKE
• GRUNBERG = GREG + UNBR

the next step was perhaps the trickiest—you had to take the leftover letters and (sometimes) anagram them into a word that could answer another clue in the puzzle, like so:

• {Fractional amounts} EIGHTHS, but also TENTHS (from the SHTENT of SHTEYNGART).
• {Use your teeth to grind food} MASTICATE, but also CHEW from the CHEW of CHERNOW. (no anagramming required this time.)
• {Members of the family} AUNTS, but also more generally KIN from the KNI of KNIEVEL. i certainly started out looking for a clue that could go with INK, but i quickly found that INKS was explicitly in the grid already, so an implicit INK as well would not have been very elegant.
• {Rings, as a bell does} TOLLS, or CHIMES from the MICHES of MICHAELS.
• {Division of GM?} GEE, or EM from the EM of BEAME. this was a slightly offbeat one, but i guess it works. going with dorothy’s auntie EM might have been tricky with AUNTS in the grid, but perhaps an EM dash or a clue that could also work for ME? anyway, this little corner down here in the southeast was the most obviously asymmetric part of the grid, with another in the central area where the theme answers didn’t quite behave as far as occupying symmetric locations. one 10 (SHTEYNGART), three 8s (MICHAELS, BERNANKE, GRUNBERG), two 7s (CHERNOW, KNIEVEL) and a 5 (BEAME) did not lend themselves to a symmetric grid anyway.
• {Actress ___ Allen} at 1-across was NANCY, an actress i’d never heard of, but KAREN (from the RANKE of BERNANKE) allen of the indiana jones franchise was a more familiar name.
• {Painful muscle sensation} ACHE, or BURN from the UNBR of GRUNBERG.

the final step was reading off the first letters of the answers to these seven clues in grid order to spell NAMETAG, the meta answer. NAMETAG is famously a semordnilap, but i don’t see anything to suggest that we were supposed to reverse it to get GATEMAN.

i thought this meta was okay, but i didn’t love it. one of my least favorite things about it was that all seven people in the theme were dudes, and there did not appear to be any reason that was necessary for the mechanism. (maybe if the final answer had indeed been GATEMAN.) given that two of the seven were guys i’d never heard of, overwhelming fame did not appear to be a prerequisite for inclusion in the meta. admittedly, i don’t have a great sense for how difficult it is to find names that fit the meta pattern and still leave a remnant that provides a useful anagram; perhaps it’s rarer than it seems. in a couple minutes of puttering around, i could only find MAGNANI = ANNA + MGI, which could be either MIG or IMG.

difficulty-wise, i thought the meta mechanism was lengthy, but not necessarily tricky. there were more steps than usual, perhaps, but it seemed fairly straightforward at each step. i suppose it’s probably just fine for a week 4, but none of the steps gave me a really satisfying aha. instead it was more along the lines of “okay, it looks like i’m supposed to do this next, and it’s working.” when combined with the handful of awkward aspects mentioned above, this one left me a little cold. it all works, but it just didn’t excite me.

that’s all for me this week. how’d you all like this one?