WANT TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY CROSSWORD CONTEST?: MGWCC is available only to subscribers at my Patreon page. A subscription costs $3/month.

LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Time Travel”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a country where I’d like to spend four months.
Answer: CHILE
Correct entries: 446 overall, of which 375 were solo solves

Just a 10×10 last week, but still quite complex. First thing solvers noticed was that seven of the clues were phrased as a “good time to visit” certain countries, and that the answers made little sense:

1-A: [Good time to visit Namibia] = EMBER
6-A: [Good time to visit Jamaica and Azerbaijan] = YUST
12-A: [Good time to visit Denmark] = EMBER
26-A: [Good time to visit Oman] = OBER
32-A: [Good time to visit Japan] = UARY
9-D: [Good time to visit Spain] = TEMBER
23-D: [Good time to visit Fiji] = RUARY

A scan of those odd answers suggests that we’re looking at truncated months of the year, especially considering the puzzle’s prompt mentioning “a country where I’d like to spend four months.” That YUST one is weird, but the other six fall quickly, and you’re aided as well by noticing that the countries in the clues share their first letter with the truncated month:

1-A: NOVEMBER
6-A: ??????
12-A: DECEMBER
26-A: OCTOBER
32-A: JANUARY
9-D: SEPTEMBER
23-D: FEBRUARY

That takes care of six months, so let’s figure out that YUST thing. For some reason we have not one but two countries mentioned in this clue, Jamaica and Azerbaijan. We’ve added the three first letters to the truncated months above, which also happen to be their common calendar abbreviations, so let’s do that again for the UST of AUGUST — and then we’re left with a J-country and just a Y, so we must be looking at JULY/AUGUST. And you can see why this one had to be different: At just four letters, a truncated July would leave just that lonely Y. We can’t have a one-letter entry in the grid, so it had to be combined with August. Which is the most logical month to combine it with, since they’re in calendar order.

Now what? We’ve got four unused months left over, which are probably the four months mentioned in the prompt. Let’s list them:

MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE

They’re in sequential order, another aspect unlikely to be a coincidence. Since three-letter abbreviations have been front and center, let’s highlight them for these four:

MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE

The leftover letters spell CHILE, where a four-month stretch would probably be a lot of fun. I have a friend there, too, so could happen someday!

I especially liked this reveal since it’s a 100% lock once you see it — the odds that those letters would randomly spell a country are tens of thousands to one at least — but you also skip over MAY since it’s just three letters, so even that unusual aspect is used. Plus you may be so focused on the three-letter month abbreviations themselves for a moment before realizing that, unexpectedly, it’s those leftover letters you just wrote down that are key, as they’ve been for the whole meta.

One of my favorite metas in recent memory, and I had a number of queries as to how I came up with it. Answer: I got the idea to do something with what’s left over when you remove the three-letter calendar abbrs. from months, and so scrawled the 12 months and isolated their abbrevs in parentheses. It looked like nothing at the one glance I intended to give it, but then juuust before crumpling up the piece of paper my brain saw CH/IL/nothing/E and the meta-klaxons went off. Lucky catch there! Second looks cost so little but can yield so much. You don’t need a third look if the second one doesn’t pan out.

Burak says:

That was devilish! I was so obsessed with the grid, trying to find clues/entries that match with the missing months I almost missed it lol.

Bird Lives says:

Brilliant idea for 6A. But no way this was a Week 2.

But it was! 446 right answers, right in the Week 2 strike zone.

patanga puzzled out 6-A:

It helped when I changed gab to yap!

It could also have been RAP. When I had the seven theme entries figured out, I realized I could put them in any grid order since the solver would need to arrange them chronologically anyway.

So how to handle that — just randomly in the grid? That would’ve been fine and no one would’ve complained. But I decided to put myself in the solver’s shoes there and present them in the order that would give the solver the most “What on earth is going on here?” moments. First they’d hit EMBER at 1-A and say, that’s weird. Then YUST, the T of which is unknowable until you figure everything else out and the Y of which could be other things (R for RAP, G for GAB maybe) so you’ve got to puzzle that out last. Then you hit another EMBER and more befuddlement! And then TEMBER?? And then finally the OBER/UARY/RUARY. So I ordered them to maximize initial bewilderment, which would intensify the later aha enlightenment.

I’m always thinking about what you’re going to be thinking about…

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is an infamous American of the 20th and 21st centuries.

NOTE: Due to the delayed post, the entry deadline this week is Noon ET on Wednesday, August 24th.

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