Ahoy, Fellow Cruciverbalists! Welcome to Week 20 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:
I must have done something wrong, because 95 cruciverbalists sent me an e-mail saying I should STUFF IT last week. Tough crowd!
Wait, no — they weren’t insulting me, they were sending in last week’s contest answer phrase, which was just that two-word insult. These solvers arrived there by first finding the four bailout-didn’t-help-the-market rhymes I used as theme entries: BANKING TANKING, NIKKEI DECAY, NASDAQ BACKTRACK, and BOEING GOING.
The final entry was my sentiment to a member of the one-party kleptocracy that rules us (for now) who pushed hard for the bailout, (Warren) BUFFETT — STUFF IT! Judging from the “amen” e-mails I got (about 15) to the “bite your tongue” e-mails I received (2 or 3), you folks didn’t like the bailout much.
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from among the 95 correct entries received, is Deirdre Zarrillo of Albany, N.Y. Deirdre has selected as her prize an autographed copy of Gridlock.
THREE THINGS:
1) Eric LeVasseur sends along a clever alternate theme entry to last week’s stock market puzzle:
All I can say is that I hope we’ve seen the bottom. The last thing I want to see tomorrow is my…
401(k) MORE LOW MONDAY
2) I can’t find the e-mail (if you sent it, re-send it so I can print your name here [UPDATE, 10/18, 11:45 AM — the e-mail was from Anna Gundlach–fittingly, someone with a palindromic name]), but a solver wrote to remind me that I never ran the answer to Mike Sylvia‘s alternate theme entry to Week 15’s Sarah-Palindrome puzzle. To refresh your memory, it was:
Website for all those recent-nominee’s-running-mate-crazy Douala natives?
The answer is “McCainiac.cm,” .cm being the country domain code for Douala’s nation of Cameroon. Very nice.
3) Reminder that you can subscribe to Peter Gordon’s post-Sun crossword here. This week’s prize will not be a book of mine, but rather a subscription to Peter’s puzzle service.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
The four people who serve as theme entries in this week’s puzzle all have something unusual in common, an attribute shared by fewer than 10 famous people by my count. This week’s contest answer phrase is one of the most famous musicians of the 20th century, and the most famous celebrity I was able to find who shares this attribute. E-mail this celebrity’s name to me at crosswordcontest@gmail.com by Tuesday at noon ET. Please put the contest answer phrase 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.