LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “I Guess That Counts”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a person often seen on the news whose name is enumerated (4, 6).
Answer: NATE SILVER, found by 212 solvers, of which 96 were solo solves
“Nate who?” asked a bunch of solvers, who weren’t too familiar with the pollster/political pundit. An unfortunate overestimation of Silver’s fame on my part; woulda been nice if there’d been one truly mega-famous NATE out there to use, but it was not to be. Or if there had at least been some way to signal that Mr. Silver was the correct Nate besides just having NATE ?????? and knowing that he’s often seen on the news. This led to the unfortunate circumstance of having a 97% correct entry rate (before final-hour wild guesses) which would normally be great but here it wasn’t so great since many of theme weren’t certain when submitting and had spent a lot of time looking for a secondary click that wasn’t there. Not great.
Solvers were faced with seven horizontal theme entries, the middle three of which, at eight letters apiece, were not immediately obvious as theme. They were:
19-A: [Hit with the line “Now it’s much too late for me to take a second look”] = I WANT YOU BACK
21-A: [Older than old] = LONG IN THE TOOTH
34-A: [Lagoon encircler] = SAND REEF
40-A: [“Carmina Burana” composer] = CARL ORFF
46-A: [Noted singer of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”] = BURL IVES
57-A: [Historical Cozumel site whose penultimate word is also a Roman numeral] = TEMPLE OF IX CHEL. We know the spacing of those last six letters from the “Roman numeral” specification, and that’s an eyebrow-raising clue that’s very likely to be meta-related (Announcer: “It was.”)
63-A: [Baseball star who becomes a noted TV actress when you remove the last letter of his first name] = EVAN LONGORIA. Eva Longoria, of course.
So now what? Zeroing in on that strange clue, we see that the constructor clearly needed that IX and CHEL to be separate. Wiki tells us that the Mayan jaguar goddess can be either solid or two words, so there’s got to be some reason for it being split here.
That reason turned out to be: Take one word from each of these seven entries, say them aloud in order — and crikey, you’ve just counted to seven! Like so:
WANT
TOOTH
REEF
ORFF
IVES
IX
EVAN
Quite hidden, since most of them spill over to the next entry. So we need a famous (4,6) person with either ATE or NATE as their first name, leading to the aforementioned NATE SILVER, whose name anagrams to this novel’s title. Not meta-related!
Some solvers saw verification of “NATE SILVER” with the unfamiliar-to-most-of-us name AGNETA at 69-A. Gridmaster T even put it in her solution grid above, it looked so confirming! Reason being: Ag is the chemical symbol for silver and NETA anagrams to NATE. Total coincidence; a semi-helpful question to ask yourself in a case like this is: was there an obviously better fill the constructor could’ve used around the sus entry? If so, then it’s probably important. If not, as here (fairly wide-open corner with two stacked theme entries running through it) then probably not.
genefaba writes:
Tough. Had the insight for this days ago but kept looking for something else
Ack. Shouldn’t happen.
Burak says:
I’m only like 80% sure, but if I’m wrong I’ll have found a hell of a red herring so I’ll still be happy 🙂 Basically, there are seven entries that sound like they are forming a sound link (WANT-TOOTH-REEF-ORFF-IVES-IX-EVAN) so logically NATE should follow this. There is an unusual entry at the very bottom: AGNETA which anagrams to NATE AG = NATE SILVER? I’m probably missing something but nonetheless, this was a fun aha-ish moment.
More ack.
And Maggie W. writes:
Hi Matt, Fun! Hope the people at the bar where I was counting out loud didn’t think I was too crazy. Had a lovely time at Lollapuzzoola this weekend! Good to see many fellow solvers and solve cool puzzles.
Love Lollapuzzoola and hope to make it back soon. Envious of all who went!
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a six-letter adjective you might apply to some contest crosswords.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.