MGWCC crossword 3:18
meta DNF 
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hello, and welcome to episode #907 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 puzzle called “Change in the Standings”. the instructions this week ask for a five-letter adjective describing good meta-solvers. what are the theme answers? i’ll hazard a guess that they’re the five long acrosses:
- {Informer} STOOL PIGEON.
- {Norfolk university} OLD DOMINION.
- {They may do the waltz} BALLROOM DANCERS.
- {Rulers of China for over 800 years} ZHOU DYNASTY.
- {Car engine part} INTAKE VALVE.
what to do with these? i have no idea. i don’t think it’s a matter of finding alternate clues—the ZHOU DYNASTY was the longest ruling dynasty of china (and even at that, mostly what i’m finding is that it lasted for either 789 or 790 years). there are other universities in norfolk, but not ones that would fit into a grid. (eastern virginia medical school and norfolk state. also university of east anglia if you want to look at the other norfolk.)
i don’t know if this was a deliberate hint or an unintentional one, but half an hour after sending out the puzzle, matt sent another email saying that we should “use” a different clue for 67a CATCH: {Achievement for Cooper Kupp} instead of the original clue, {Manage to get a look at}. there was no problem with the original clue in terms of the crossword, so this must be a meta-related change—either because there was an error in the meta mechanism, or maybe matt was just spooked by the low number of solves in the first minutes after the puzzle went live.
at any rate, since i have nothing else to grasp at, let’s try grasping at this. who’s cooper kupp, first of all? apparently a wide receiver for the seahawks, who was the super bowl LVI mvp while playing for the rams. okay. so, sure, that’s a fine clue for CATCH. but how might the clue serve a meta mechanism? i really don’t know. it’s probably something we can do with either cooper or kupp. the latter is presumably a homophone of “cup”, though that doesn’t seem to help much.
the fact that this clue for an apparently random answer in the fill has anything to do with the meta suggests that we are going to somehow connect five extra clues from the puzzle to the five theme answers (or their clues). if CATCH is one of them, we are probably looking for a five-letter adjective containing C. if the ordering is top-to-bottom in the grid, it might well end with C, but it could also go in order of the theme answers, and i have no idea which one connects to this revised CATCH clue, so the C could be anywhere.
what about the puzzle title? “standings” isn’t doing much for me, but “change” could indicate changing one letter or perhaps anagramming. maybe taken together, we could be looking for something like hidden anagrams of five pro teams in the same league (or even the same division)? though i still don’t know how you’d connect those to other clues in the puzzle.
hmm. BALLROOM DANCERS does end with OMDANCERS, which is an anagram of COMMANDERS minus one M. that’s interesting. neither OLD DOMINION nor INTAKE VALVE contains an S, and all NFL teams end with S, so maybe this isn’t it, but maybe it is—the S could perhaps be the missing letter from the anagram. but i am not seeing it—especially with INTAKE VALVE, which has that pesky K and two V’s that are hard to work into an anagram.
maybe there are alternate answers to this {Achievement for Cooper Kupp} clue that we should be brainstorming? other than super bowl MVP, he was named all-pro, pro bowl, and offensive player of the year. i can’t see how to connect any of those to the themers, though.
a couple of other clues caught my eye: {Like some eyes} GREEN and {Food sometimes baked} EGG both seemed a little sus. neither one is really specific enough, so perhaps they were written specifically to accommodate alternate answers. but again, i can’t connect them to the theme answers. and {“Thx” reply} PLS was … weird? wrong? i don’t know. i wouldn’t call it a reply to “thx”; it could sometimes accompany “thx”, perhaps.
okay, well, i still haven’t hit on anything that looks like it could be the right first step. this one is looking a total whiff for me, like the mariners in the 9th inning of game 7 last night against jeff hoffman. i guess i’ll find out in the comments section what i missed.
The [Like some eyes] and [Food sometimes baked] clues were definitely important. If you say the initials of the five theme answers out loud, you’ll get five words that can be tied to other clues:
S.P. –> ESPY –> [Achievement for Cooper Kupp] = CATCH
O.D. –> ODIE –> [Cartoon dog] = ASTRO
B.D. –> BEADY –> [Like some eyes] = GREEN
Z.D. –> ZITI –> [Food sometimes baked] = EGG
I.V. –> IVY –> [Prestigious college] = YALE
Take the first letters of those answers in thematic order and you get CAGEY, which sounds like K.G.
It seems Matt made the change to the CATCH clue because ESPY (as in to look at) is pronounced like “eh-spy” with a long I sound, but that doesn’t fit with the pronunciation of S.P. Changing it to the ESPY award makes it work.
This is correct and *mind blown* when someone pointed this out to me on Friday aftenoon, necessitating the clue change.
Did everyone know the verb is “ESS-pie” instead of “ESS-pee”? It has never crossed my mind as a possibility. Not sure I’ve ever used it in real life.
The title wasn’t great. I was thinking of using something like “Killer Grid” but thought that might’ve made CAGEY gettable as a guess right off the bat.
173 right anwers this week. Had some tough puzzles already and two left still in this month (including Halloween) so next week we might do a random easyish puzzle to get us back on track.
ess-PIE. Mmmm… pie.
Thumbs up for the “random easyish puzzle”! Out-of-Whack-Tober has been fearsome.
+1
It’s actually ess-PIE. And I guess I’ve never heard it used in real life, but I always assumed the correct pronunciation because it’s related to the word SPY, so I just tacked the “e” sound in front.
like seth, i have “always” known how to pronounce the verb espy, but the part that is blowing my mind is that matt was able to salvage the meta by changing the clue to the other homonym of ESPY. that’s absolutely wild.
i don’t think i could have ever have solved this meta without the second email. if i had thought of ESPY when i was thinking about other cooper kupp achievements, i would have had a chance.
ZD for Ziti is a bit of a clunker. I, too, don’t get the title.
A big DNF for me. How does the title tie in?
I went off the rails with this one. I first wondered if there was an -ING theme, with HOMING pigeon, KINGS dominion, SWING dancers, MING/QING dynasty, and (O-)RING valve.
Then I fell into an even worse rabbit hole: I first noticed KING and PISTON could be NBA teams, then looked around at the other entries and realized NHL teams worked even better:
BLUE pigeon;
KINGS dominion;
SABRE dancers;
DUCK dynasty;
OIL valve.
Yes, blue pigeons are obscure, the plurals are inconsistent, and OIL is not quite close enough to OILER. Also Kings Dominion is a regional thing, but so is ODU. But in the absence of anything better, I ran with this idea and identified clues that these words fit:
BLUE > 15-A “Cartoon dog” ASTRO or 48-A “Like some eyes” GREEN;
KINGS > 20-A “Prestigious college” YALE (King’s College London);
SABRE > 57-A “Org. with a noted style manual” MLA, since I knew Matt was aware of Sabre in The Office (US) and its manual is a plot point in an episode;
DUCK > 61-A “Food sometimes baked” EGG; and
OIL > 4-D “Lotion component, often” ALOE or 62-D “Shaving option” GEL.
Now, in some order (perhaps NHL standings, I do not know), this can spell GAME-Y, which felt appropriate for such a heavy sports theme. The lack of a good order was another signal I should have heeded, along the choice to use the NHL at this point over the even-more-tense MLB, but in the absence of anything better I went with this. A really impressive diversion! And I did suss out 4 of the relevant clues in my list of 7.
I fell into the trap of assuming PISTON was an alternate answer for [Car engine part] and, as an even more painful trap, you can find PISTON spelled in the grid in a raised-letter-pattern (starting with the PI of STOOL PIGEON, rising to the ST of ASTRO, and then falling back down to the ON of STOOL PIGEON).
Oh neat. I saw PISTON/PIGEON as well, but was more worried about all the other synonyms for “informant”, e.g. RAT + ING could be added to OCTANE, crossing 17-A.
There was a big automotive theme going on (2-D, 29-A, 38-D, 44-A, 63-A, 65-D). I spent a while trying to find hints at SUV or minivan as an alternate answer to 29-A.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
There was a day when this would have played much easier for less seasoned meta solvers.
A 5-letter solution coupled with five seemingly obvious themers of two words.
What’s more immediately intuitive than looking at the first letters in each 2-word phrase? SP! IV! BD! ZT! OD!
I mean, right away, “ZT” fixes the problem with that glaringly awful clue about baked eggs.
Rather than even contemplate the simplest possible reading of the two word phrases, seemingly everyone skipped forward into anagrams, hidden words, change a letter, alternative entries, parsing the entire grid for car parts, sports cities, sports teams..
I witnessed people tying themselves in knots – and yet the actual metanism was about as straightforward as it could be.
Being “cagey”, however, I was reluctant to share this information, because I am extremely cautious and suspicious.
Or something. Ask Matt.
Yeah, somebody’s gonna have to explain to me how that title makes any sense at all. I don’t need the title to give the whole game away, of course, but in this case I think it was actively an impediment.
I wasn’t sure about it either, but another solver described it to me as “S.P. stands for STOOL PIGEON” so if you change the standings then you can go from that to “S.P. stands for ESPY.” It’s a better explanation than anything I could think of.
Any explanation is a stretch at best.
My initial thought was there was some transposition going to happen with ‘W’ and ‘L’, like wins /losses in standings. ZHOU DYNASTY killed that thought.
Let’s just chalk it up to “It’s hard to go 907 for 907 on puzzle titles” and leave it at that.
+1. DNF; title led me to the same thoughts as joon, which were in the opposite direction of progress
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
I was nowhere near solving this, but it’s a really good meta, hiding in plain sight. After reading the solution here, I thought in hindsight that it would have been cool if Matt had gone one step further and had the meta clue be “a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame” and the answer be Kevin Garnett, widely known as KG. It might have made the sports-ish title more of a hint.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
Didn’t even get as far as a rabbit hole on this one, but the explanation makes sense. Fun meta, now that I understand it. Can I suggest a couple of alternate titles: “First Call” or “Leaders Speak Out” maybe?
I just cannot express how differently my British accent renders “Zed Dee” and “Ziti”!
If it’s any consolation, Pete Muller would have done ZD as Tom Zed Dee and the Heartbreakers.