LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Week 2 didn’t fool too many of you: 607 solvers found GROUP B as the correct contest answer, taken from the eight World Cup Groups battling it out as we speak for passage to the knockout stage.
The four theme entries each featured a parenthetical profession in their theme clues:
17-A [More than offended (artist)] = SCANDALIZED
27-A [Common statistic (athlete)] = NATIONAL AVERAGE
42-A [Rival of Stouffer’s and Boston Market (novelist)] = MARIE CALLENDER’S
54-A [Fewer than (explorer)] = NOT AS MANY AS
Careful examination reveals a famous person from each of these professions hidden in the theme entries, as emboldened above: Salvador DALI from Spain; Rod LAVER from Australia, Isabel ALLENDE from Chile, and Abel TASMAN from the Netherlands. Those four countries comprise meta answer GROUP B of the 2014 World Cup, where fates are already settled: Chile and the Netherlands will advance to the next round, while defending champion Spain and always entertaining Australia will go home. And I’ll go ahead and pick Holland to win the whole thing — if you haven’t seen this amazing goal from their first game, check it out:
http://youtu.be/UzC6bqHdbNs
Ertchin writes:
My first thought on reading 1-Across: “That’s always ALDA. Except when it’s FARR.”
Ian Livengood says:
Soccer and crosswords. My worlds are colliding!
Jeff (and many others) momentarily stumbled over one specific part of the meta:
I got stuck on trying to figure out how Rod Laver was connected to the Netherlands because I associate Tasman with Australia… D’oh
imfromjersey says:
Re: 25D, I was a computer science major in college in the late 80’s. I took 4 semesters of Pascal, I got really good at it. How much Pascal have I used since then? Nil as they say in football.
Many solvers also pointed out a cluing error at 28-D. Mnemonica was first:
A quibble: 28D, “amiga,” isn’t a great answer for “compadre” — amiga is feminine, compadre is masculine. A female friend is a comadre.
Golem sent in a nice boast:
Got it as soon as I saw the first theme entry started with SCAN.
No MGWCC Easter egg is so hidden that someone won’t find it…
Gwinns shares:
Getting this right was my GOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLL!
Pete Mitchell just submitted “B” and noted:
Shortest entry yet.
And finally, Laura E-D writes:
Thanks for picking the first Chilean novelist alphabetically (per Wikipedia)!
Hey, I’m here to help.
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from the 607 correct entries received, is Roger Friedman of Annandale, Va. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, Roger will also receive a one-year subscription to Peter Gordon’s new Kickstarter campaign, Fireball Newsflash Crosswords.
Peter’s recent Kickstarter campaign, a subscription to which has been the MGWCC prize for the last several weeks, recently came up a bit short on getting funded. So Peter has retooled his efforts, like changing the feature’s name to the catchier “Newsflash Crosswords” instead of “Fortnightly News Crosswords.”
He also compressed the funding period from 60 days down to 10 (!) and has been rewarded with a Kickstarter Staff Pick, which means this thing will very likely get funded. Those recent prize winners of Fortnightly News Crosswords will instead receive Newsflash Crossword subscriptions.
Anyway, check out his newly packaged campaign here.
FORTNIGHTLY VULTURE META:
Speaking of fortnightly, here’s my once-every-two-weeks meta-crossword in the current New York magazine. Deadline is midnight on June 25th; enter for a chance to win a 1-year subscription to the magazine.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a foreign language. 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. NOTE: Try clearing your browser if the submissions form is not open on your screen.
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 (2,266 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.