Ahoy, Fellow Cruciverbalists! Welcome to Week 14 of my crossword contest. If you’re new to the contest and would like to enter, please see the site FAQ on the left sidebar for instructions.
LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
A MGWCC record 56 solvers decoded last week’s riddle, hidden among the five longest entries in the grid: WHAT FAMOUS / ATHLETE RECENTLY / ACQUIRED FOUR NEW / AU PAIRS YET HASN’T / GOT ANY KIDS?. Heads were scratched, but eventually everyone (literally — I received zero incorrect answers) came up with pool hero MICHAEL PHELPS, which was last week’s contest answer word. AU = gold, and PAIRS = sets of two, so Phelps’s eight gold medals in Beijing might be labeled by a suitably cryptic mind as “four au pairs.”
Last week’s winner, whose name was randomly chosen from among the 56 correct entries, is Doug Peterson of Pasadena, Calif. Doug has selected as his prize an autographed copy of my book TV Crosswords. Which leads me to a rant/story.
If you click through the above link, you’ll see that my TV Crosswords book has a mediocre Amazon rating of 2 1/2 stars out of five. This rating is based on two reviewers, one of whom gave the book four stars and the other of whom awarded it the lowest rating of one star.
That one-star review, entitled “Very Disappointed,” begins with the sentence “This book is to (sic) hard for me.” I clicked through to the other two books that reader had reviewed, both of which received the maximum five stars from her. One of them was the autobiography of Tori Spelling, which the reviewer described thusly: “Could not put the book down. This is the first book I actually made time to read in 10 years.”
Rant officially over — so let’s move on to this week’s contest crossword.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is the entry in the puzzle grid that explains this week’s theme. E-mail it to me (the actual entry in the grid, not the clue number) at crosswordcontest@gmail.com by Tuesday at noon ET. Please put the contest answer word in the subject line of your e-mail.
To print the puzzle out, click on the image below and hit “print” on your browser. To solve using Across Lite, join the Google Group here:
http://groups.google.com/group/mgwcc
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.