LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Not quite your standard Week 4, as 533 solvers found the PITTSBURGH PIRATES as our meta answer. I promised an interesting story about this meta (and its difficulty level), and we’ll get to that after an explanation of the meta itself.

Straightforward rebus theme: each of the five theme entries contains two squares with not an English letter, but instead with the Greek letter pi:

O(PI)NION (PI)ECE crossing PA(PI) and (PI)ER
CA(PI)TALIST (PI)G crossing S(PI)TE and MO(PI)NG
OLYM(PI)C S(PI)RIT crossing TI(PI) and ON (PI)ANO
SLEE(PI)NG (PI)LL crossing MR. (PI)BB and (PI)NT
(PI)(PI)NG HOT crossing (PI)STON and S(PI)LT

Which Major League Baseball team fits the pattern? Those aforementioned PITTSBURGH PIRATES, of course.

mrdrawerguy says:

Only took me about 3.14159 minutes

FrotzNPL found something interesting:

Pretty cool that not only do the Pirates work doubly well, but also that none of the other MLB teams would work at all!

i.e., none of the other 29 teams has even a single PI. And, in the other direction, rvkal notes:

If you’re going from pi to phi next week, I think I already know the answer.

And that team would be a triple-shot of PHI!

Ertchin asks:

Who put all these circles in my squares?

And finally, Rincon says:

gonna go munch on something from Little Caesars

He means their slogan PIZZA! PIZZA!, which would’ve been a nice theme entry as well.

This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from the 533 correct entries received, is John Corliss of Athens, O. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, John will also receive a copy of my Kickstarter project, “Murder by Meta”. Speaking of which…

FINAL KICKSTARTER UPDATE — SIX HOURS LEFT!:

My “Murder by Meta” Kickstarter campaign ends at 6:43 PM ET tonight. Huge thanks to the nearly 500 backers who’ve chipped in over $8,000 — get in on the meta-madness here.

OK, NOW THE STORY:

Last week’s meta began life as a brutal thing I was going to run as the last puzzle of the year. But after writing the grid and beginning to clue, I realized that my original idea wasn’t going to work: the grid was the PI one I ran last week, but the clues all began with the letters corresponding to the numbers of pi. So pi begins 3.14, and the clue for OPTICS at 1-across was [Tangentially ocular field], whose initials are the same as three-one-four. The next numbers in pi are 15, so the clue for the next across, WAR, was [Ongoing fighting], the initials of which are the same as one-five. Eventually you’d have to come up with the meta answer phrase OUT OF ORDER, since the clues would end with the first string of three same digits in pi, which is a 1-1-1.

But I’d severely underestimated how hard it is to clue some entries with specific letters (especially since some of them are Z’s for zero), so I had to punt with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

MONTHLY WINNERS:

93 solvers submitted the correct contest answer to all four of December’s challenges (COLORADO, BEN FRANKLIN, KING ARTHUR, PITTSBURGH PIRATES). The following ten lucky and skillful winners, chosen randomly from that group, will receive a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set:

Michael Areinoff — Tucson, Ariz.

Scott Weiss — Walkersville, Md.

Congratulations to our ten winners, and to everyone who went 4-for-4 in December.

SPECIAL PRIZE THIS WEEK AND NEXT:

In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, winners this week and next will a 20-puzzle subscription to Peter
Gordon’s Fireball Newsweekly Crosswords.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is described in the four long theme entries. 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 (2,162 members now!) here.

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