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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
263 right answers for a Week 5! Wow. Just wait until July 29th, folks.
We were looking for a famous American athlete who would have made a good sixth theme entry in this puzzle, and our first five were:
17-A [She’ll turn 100 on February 6th, 2017] = ZSA ZSA GABOR
27-A [“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise” speaker] = GEORGE GERSHWIN
34-A [Actress with three Oscar nominations by the age of 25] = NATALIE WOOD
43-A [“The Usual Suspects” actor] = STEPHEN BALDWIN. What an overrated movie that is.
58-A [Guitarist on “Magic Man,” “Crazy on You,” and “These Dreams”] = NANCY WILSON
First thing to notice is that each of these five has a famous sibling who’s a frequent guest in crossword puzzles: EVA Gabor, IRA Gershwin, LANA Wood, ALEC Baldwin, and ANN Wilson.
Second thing to notice: each of those is hidden backwards in the middle of a fill entry: RAVEN, PARIS, CANALI, ACELAS, and ANNAL (see color-coded solution grid). So we need a famous athlete with a crossword-friendly sibling hidden backwards in the middle of a piece of fill. That would be some old man called PEYTON MANNING, whose brother ELI hides backwards in TILER along the bottom row.
Magoo says:
Always back your brother
lhj writes:
I was sure it was Joe DiMaggio, but I couldn’t find MOD.
And Garrett writes:
Good thing Svetlana changed her name to Lana!
The Wood sisters were born in Russia, in case you didn’t know. And I learned while researching this that Warren and Ned Beatty are not related! Who knew?
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from the 263 correct entries received, is Brian Kulman of Los Gatos, Calif. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, Brian will also receive a 1-year subscription to Matt Gaffney’s Daily Crossword (MGDX).
MONTHLY WINNERS:
The following 10 winners were chosen randomly from among the 87 solvers who sent in the correct contest answer to each of April’s five puzzles (any band name comprised of two entries, MANTA RAY, DAVY JONES’ LOCKER, KAMIKAZE, PEYTON MANNING).
Evan Birnholz — Philadelphia, Penna.
Jeffrey Harris — Nashville, Tenn.
Ben Jones — Stamford, Conn.
Andy Kravis — Brooklyn, N.Y.
Jeff Louis — Cambridge, Mass.
Alexander Miller — Grand Rapids, Mich.
Mark Navarrete — Quezon City, the Philippines
Erich Peterson — Kentwood, Mich.
David Stein — Silver Spring, Md.
Stephen Williams — Holbrook, Mass.
Congratulations to our ten winners, and to everyone who went 5-for-5 in April.
THE CROSSWORD THAT WROTE ITSELF:
MGWCC #413 just sort of spilled out onto the page, so I thought I’d share. I start all my metas in a spiral graph paper notebook, and do most or all of the grid in the notebook about 25% of the time. The other 75% I transfer over to Crossword Compiler once the main parts are settled and finish it there.
This one almost wrote itself, with theme and grid both done in about 2 hours total (over half of which was spent on the theme). I normally set aside 5 hours for those two things to happen, which often turns out be an optimistic projection. Certainly my quickest by-hand grid in recent memory.
The theme entries worked out great lengthwise, and then the fill words just felt like fitting. If you zoom in you’ll see that there aren’t many erasure marks. I did wind up changing a few sections later on; I’d missed the LAZING and LAZY dupe in the NW, and also had the much inferior IN A SPOON and NEP which later became the much superior IN A SWOON and NEW. And the stray IRA in SARI had to be excised. But other than that, this is the crossword that wrote itself.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a seven-letter word that ends in a double letter.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.