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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Minty Fresh”
Prompt: This week’s 16-letter contest answer is what you must do to get the meta.
Answer: CHANGE YOUR ANSWER
Correct entries: 132 overall, of which 54 were solo

Tough one again, with a nasty (unintentional) red herring that sent many astray. I’ll add the description to the post at around 12:30 this afternoon (running a little late today), but you can also hear me explain what happened by downloading the video below. It’s a 2-hour conversation I held with meta-solvers over at the Muggles Forum on Tuesday night. We had a great time discussing all things meta, and there were cameos by crossword luminaries Mike Shenk, Evan Birnholz, and Paolo Pasco.

Discussion of MGWCC #682 starts around minute 33. NOTE: be sure to *download* the video by clicking the little downward-facing arrow in the upper right; the video shown on-screen is only the first 15 minutes, which won’t get you to the MGWCC #682 stuff.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1t6swn0lagyqdhu/zoom_0.mp4?dl=0

OK, so in a nutshell: first insight was that that clue at 41-Across is weird. [Total value of four certain coins] for CENTS? You need a number for a “total value,” so how about taking the clue number? And indeed, the value of the four main American coins are indeed 41 cents (penny, nickel, dime, quarter).

Now what? That other center-square-crossing entry has a weird clue as well. 27-D reads: [You should mind these (and more)] for P’S AND Q’s. OK, well if I’m already thinking those four coins, then maybe P = pennies and Q = quarters. Well, what about nickels and dimes? They’re in there, too! The letters PSANDQS in fact contains all four coins, in ascending order of value: P = pennies, N = nickels, D = dimes, and Q = quarters.

What’s next? There’s a third suggestive clue, up in the northeast: 13-D reads [Coin ___ (it’s used with a template)] = PRESS. OK, how are we supposed to use a template of coins? Well, we have four coins at 27-D fitting into a 7-letter entry at its 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th squares. And lo and behold — there are only four other seven-letter entries in the grid, all downs like 27-D. This is suggestive since the instructions asked, a bit weirdly, for a “16-letter” answer. We’ve got four coins and four downs to press them on, so this could be the answer!

And it is: overlay PSANDQS onto those four (COWHAND, GAVE YOU, US GRANT, and SPEWERS) and you get contest answer CHANGE YOUR ANSWER.

I was psyched about this puzzle, but it received a lukewarm (or worse) reception at Fiend on Tuesday. The main reason was due to a truly nasty (though unintended and unnoticed by me) red herring that tossed many solvers down a deep, steep-walled rabbit hole.

Their thought was: as we used the clue number at 41-A, might we also need to use the 27 of 27-D? And as (bad) luck would have it, if you count up the number of P’s, N’s, D’s, and Q’s in the grid, they total…27. Can’t make this stuff up!

Egad. Gadzooks. Heavens to mergatroid. This sent scores of solvers on wild goose chases of circling those 27 letters and overlaying them on the previous week’s puzzle, at a 90-degree angle to this week’s puzzle, and who knows what else. Scary and again, completely unintentional.

Tough rabbit hole to remove oneself from, but I ran an experiment, counting up the number of PNDQ in ten random 15x15s I’d written. Turns out 27 is not an unusual number of times for those letters to appear in a grid: I got a range of 22 to 30, including two actual 27s. So not very unusual at all, but — easy for me to say after the fact. I don’t usually excise red herrings that show up organically, but this one is so vicious that I would’ve removed it (by changing VAPOR/APE to VALOR/ALE, say) had I seen it.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

Today’s puzzle is Week 1 of 5 in July. Instructions:

This week’s contest answer is a country.

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