LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

“The butler did it!” last week at MGWCC. That standard result in English mysteries arose because the butler was always present yet never noticed, simultaneously indispensible and invisible, the last person you’d suspect.

The butlers of crossword puzzles are those little tags we use at the end of clues: “Abbr.” for abbreviation, “e.g.” for for example, etc. (hey, there’s another one!). They’re so inconspicuous that I thought it’d be devious to base a meta on them, and that’s what we had here. The five theme entries were:

17-a [The house’s money, in portfolio manager jargon] = VALUE AT RISK. Though Pete Muller of Muller Monthly Music Meta fame writes to tell me that this clue is not accurate. Full explanation of the concept here (which after reading I still don’t fully comprehend). But yeah, if you’re not doing his music meta give it a shot — it was one of the cruciverbal highlights of 2012, and 2013 is off to a grand start.

26-a [Standard movie madman] = EVIL GENIUS.

39-a [What crabs from the Chesapeake are traditionally steamed with] = OLD BAY SEASONING. Off-topic: I had a puzzle rejected by the NYT in the mid-1990s because Will Shortz hadn’t heard of my 6-letter entry OLD BAY. Semi-ironic since I first met him in 1988 at a crossword tournament in Baltimore, which is Old Bay country indeed. OK, maybe not even semi-ironic. Let’s move on.

50-a [Performs some act frequently] = DOES IT A LOT. Rather on the contrived side.

62-a [Phrase in kitchen gadget infomercials] = EASY TO CLEAN.

Looks like a disparate set, but check out the initials: VAR, EG, OBS, DIAL and ETC. Those are all crossword tags, and each appears in exactly one clue in the grid:

57-a [Wrote song lyrics, perhaps: var.]

11-a [Dr. Dolittle, e.g.]

19-a [Steal: obs.]

34-a [In favor of: dial.]

13-a [“War and Peace,” “Foucault’s Pendulum,” etc.]

So what’s the meta answer? Instructions asked for a well-known newspaper, and lookie here: there’s a sixth tag in the clues, at 9-d, where RES is clued as [Thing: Lat.]. That unaccounted-for Lat. tag leads us to meta answer the LOS ANGELES TIMES, found by 252 solvers from a total of 313 entries.

Two sneaky things that made this one tougher:

1) I originally had this puzzle slated to run last month, but test solvers felt the “obs.” “var.” and “dial.” tags stuck out a bit much. So I pushed it off until this month and seeded the intervening puzzles with fill requiring those tags (like TRIBORO last week, which took a “var.,” and YON with its “obs.” tag in the SW corner of the knights puzzle). That way the tags wouldn’t be so noteworthy when they showed up en masse in this puzzle.

2) I placed VALUE AT RISK and EVIL GENIUS first in the grid since VAR and EG look much more like jibberish than DIAL and ETC do, so anyone following that line of thought — the correct line, it turned out — would hopefully be dissuaded from it after seeing the unpromising VAR and EG.

It worked (for a while) on Wobbith:

Killer! Wrote VAR EG OBS DIAL ETC in the margin immediately after (finally!) solving the grid. Then spent an hour seeing nada before I saw the trick.

Simon McA saw through it eventually, too:

Nice one. I kept scanning the clues, since a lot of the theme answers had a word used in a different clue, but I couldn’t find a match for a couple of them. And as I kept scanning the clues, I said to myself “boy, there are a lot more awkward Obsoletes and Variants than you usually get in a Matt Gaffney puzzle….oh!”

DIS got the L.A. Times, but also suggested:

Or the fictional L.A. Tribune, from Lou Grant.

Stabby says:

Tried anagramming RIMED VET NIM FER TOMES for the longest time…

Ember had the same idea:

Wasted far too much time trying to get the Vetmed Times-Informer to turn itself into a real thing.

And finally, DebbieK thought the puzzle was:

A Bracing Brilliant Romp!

It pained me to not find anything for ABBR in the grid, but my DIAL solution was enough of a stretch as it was.

This week’s winner, whose name was chosen at random from the 252 correct entries received, is Nick Weprich of Minneapolis, Minn. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, Nick will also receive a copy of Patrick Berry‘s new Kickstarter campaign, The Crypt.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is one of the currencies replaced by the euro. Submit your answer in the form on the left sidebar by Tuesday at noon ET. Note: the submissions form disappears from the site promptly at noon on Tuesday.

To print the puzzle out, click on the image below and hit “print” on your browser. To solve using Across Lite either solve on the applet below or download the free software here, then join the Google Group (1,985 members now!) here.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.