LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Tough Week 2 of 5: we were looking for a breakfast cereal, and just 296 solvers found meta answer LIFE. The four theme entries were:
17-A [Brooke Shields movie, with “The”] = BLUE LAGOON
29-A [Hipster housepet] = GREEN IGUANA
46-A [Soft drink in Europe (with the words incorrectly but commonly transposed by American travelers)] = ORANGE FANTA
60-A [Conveyer of gift money, in Chinese culture] = RED ENVELOPE
Clearly each theme entry begins with a color, but what next? Perhaps nudged by the awkwardness/obscurity of some theme entries, successful metapuzzlers added the color to the first letter of the second word in each entry, resulting in a blue L, a green I, an orange F, and a red E — which spells out the classic LIFE cereal box:
After keeping the original box from 1961 to 2012, Quaker shuffled the colors in 2012. Hence the nudge from the title to do some “Classical Boxing.”
At his Crossword Fiend review, joon pahk writes on the last theme entry:
i would have liked RED EMINENCE, the nickname of cardinal richelieu, a little better. it feels less arbitrary.
Grrr, I hate missing superior theme entries; had I come up with RED EMINENCE I certainly would have used it, especially since some of the other theme entries weren’t very strong. Although “red envelope” is certainly a thing, it’s tainted by that “blue house” or “orange shirt” feel of arbitrariness that some crossword entries have. Same with GREEN IGUANA.
I mischievously included a quote from solver Mikey in last week’s review (“Mikey likes it(?)”). How did he do? Sadly, Mikey sent in Trix this week. Oh, well. No cereal for you!
JanglerNPL asks:
What’s with IBI in that corner?
He means that lower left, where there’s certainly no need for a Latin word in that closed-off 3×4 area. Constructors often try to do something fun when they have a little area like that to fool around with, and here I chose to make all three across words palindromes. Was it worth it? I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
This one threw a lot of very good meta-solvers for a (froot) loop. Tyler Hinman says:
Well, that only took me eight hours. Hashtag idiot.
And Dan Katz says:
I came this close to guessing Froot Loops.
Mike Lewis wants the numbers:
Which will be the most popular incorrect answer? Lucky Charms or Froot Loops?
Lucky Charms (83 entries), with Froot Loops a very close second (81 entries). But both use more colors in their makeup than the four in the grid.
And finally, MGWCC webmaster Dave Sullivan found a remarkable alternate answer:
General Mills uses a “Big G” as their logo, so it was hard to avoid this serendipitous connection of the multitude of G’s in the puzzle. Ah well, that’s LIFE.
Whoa! Mind blown.
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from the 296 correct entries received, is J. Engel of Philadelphia, Penna. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, J. will also receive a one-year subscription to Peter Gordon’s new Kickstarter campaign, Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords.
BEN JAMMIN’:
Don’t miss the Tausig this week. It’s very nice.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a world capital. 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 (2,251 members now!) here. Or you can download the .puz file (you may have to right-click the link and save to your Downloads folder).
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.