LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Saturday was the 100th anniversary of the first crossword puzzle, as you may have heard a few dozen hundred times in recent weeks. You had to use that first puzzle to solve last week’s meta — the entire grid, as it turned out!

A hundred-square grid (10×10), fitting for a centennial meta, yielded two theme entries:

11-a [100-year anniversary, like today is for the crossword puzzle] = CENTENNIAL

28-a [Living without modern technology — or where most of the letters in this puzzle have to go to reveal our meta answer] = OFF THE GRID

Contest instructions asked for a famous Brit with 10 letters in his name. The 82 white squares in the grid minus 10 for the meta suggested that we might be looking for something with 72 letters — and lo, Wynne’s original crossword contains just that many. Cross those 72 letters OFF THE GRID and you’re left with the letters in KING ARTHUR, an appropriate name to invoke when praising Mr. Wynne.

Lee-kai Wang figured it out:

We had a misprint that gave us the letters DGHIKNRRTU, and the best I could come up with was KING R THURD… Thankfully, saying that aloud led to a very obvious “d’oh” moment.

And drdans did, too:

Once I counted the letters, the answer Came-lot-s quicker.

This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from the 112 correct entries received, is Chris Coverdale of Prahran, Australia. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, Chris will also receive a copy of my new Kickstarter project, “Murder by Meta”. Speaking of which…

KICKSTARTER UPDATE:

Final week of my first-ever Kickstarter campaign, so it’s now or never! Get in on the meta-madness here.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

Note: due to various reasons (last week’s played like a Week 4, a lot of people are on vacation, I don’t want to scare away too many of our new solvers with two brutal metas in a row) this week’s puzzle will play like a Week 2.5 instead of a 4.

There’s also an intriguing reason for dialing the difficulty back that I can’t tell you about until next week. So enjoy the easier version — solve it only using the acrosses, if you want a Week 4 challenge — and we’ll be back at full power for January 2014 (which has five Fridays, I’ll warn you now).

This week’s contest answer is a Major League Baseball team that would have made an excellent theme entry in this puzzle. 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 (2,153 members now!) here.

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