IMPORTANT NOTE: As of January 2015 MGWCC is a subscribers-only crossword. The cost is $26 per year, and you can subscribe (or get a free trial month first) here:
LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
April Fools on four MGWCC solvers last week! Or so I hoped. Using a great idea suggested in February by solver Brent Holman, the goal was to have four strong solvers scratching their heads over what should be the easiest of all MGWCC puzzles — a week 1 of 5.
Everyone got the same puzzle, but with two differences for our four prankees’s version. This unlucky quartet had asterisks on six clues, and their instructions stated that we were looking for “a 9-letter world capital that would’ve made a good seventh theme entry.”
But there was no rhyme or reason to the theme entries, or to anything in the grid; it’s just a themeless with random fill! Fittingly, considering that the cliched way for a band to name itself is to flip open the dictionary and pick a word, the instructions for everyone else just asked for any two entries that would make a good band name.
The four prankees had mixed results: Tyler Hinman was busy doing escape rooms in Manhattan and didn’t get to look at the puzzle at all before the midnight reveal (I thought it’d be obnoxious to let any of these guys stress all weekend over it, especially since the ACPT was running, so notified them a little before midnight on Friday).
Dan Feyer relates his experience:
You totally got me. I had a little time on the train from NYC to Stamford and solved today’s two metas, since I don’t care about speed-solving those on paper (as I do with all the other puzzles this week). Definitely thought it was too hard for a week 1, but I only looked at it for a few minutes – I never spend more than 5 minutes or so on a meta if I’m stumped. The friends I was with at dinner definitely brought it up, which I now see was for my benefit.
Vraal got punk’d a little:
I got through the grid quickly, and saw people racking up the meta fairly quickly, but I didn’t see it. I had in mind that it was April Fools Day, so I kept an open mind. My buddy Jeff Chen teased me about it a little, and I ignored it intending to go back to it (I hadn’t), and then your trick played itself out. In all, I didn’t poor huge amounts of time into it, but the prank did get me for the day.
But the most bizarre experience was surely that of JanglerNPL. I thought I had prepared for any contingency, but 38 minutes after noon on Friday something I had not planned for at all happened: JanglerNPL submitted an answer! Which was REYKJAVIK. What the…?
Since there’s absolutely no intentional pattern to the six theme entries, how did he decide on that capital? And so quickly? But I couldn’t ask him until after midnight, since the game was still on for other pranking victims.
In his own words:
I thought that the joke was that the six starred entries were random (as per the title), and thus any 9-letter world capital would be a good 7th because it’s unrelated to all the other six. I wish I had a more interesting rationale, but that’s what it was.
Amazing — he figured out that the pattern was that there is no pattern. I can’t even stump this guy when the meta is that there’s no meta.
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from the 235 correct entries received, is Shane Corcoran of Kuwait City, Kuwait. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, Shane will also receive a subscription to Peter Gordon’s 2016-2017 Fireball Newsflash Crosswords, which has two days left to fund!
I’m also going to pick three winners of a stationery set for the best band names, but I’m going to let Brendan Quigley decide those; I’ll announce those next week.
What were the most popular submissions? IRATE NAVELS and ALL-PURPOSE MORON tied with 9 each. SATYR NAVELS had 7, and then 6 each for ETHNIC NAVELS, RUBY NAVELS, WITTY MORON, and YOGA MAT SPLAT. All better than some band names I’ve heard! Haircut One Hundred, I’m looking at you.
Thanks to everyone for playing along, especially all of those who Facebooked and Tweeted about how easy the puzzle was in order to create a nice atmosphere of social media paranoia for our victims.
PUZZLE-POWERED HOWARD:
Congratulations to the amiable Howard Barkin, who won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament last week. Howard also snapped the 6-year winning streak of powerhouse solver Dan Feyer. Congratulations also to David Plotkin on his first ACPT finals appearance.
Here’s a great Vine (from Ben Zimmer) of Howard’s winning moment:
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
What sea creature would make a good sixth theme entry for this puzzle?
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.