LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “That’s an Order!”
Prompt:This week’s contest answer is a two-word brand of cookie.
Answer: CHIPS AHOY!, found by 301 solvers, of which 211 were solo solves.
Five theme entries in last week’s cookie hunt. Could it be Nutter Butter or Famous Amos? Mrs. Fields or Pepperidge Farm? Let’s take a look…
17-A: [It’s above the basement] = FIRST FLOOR
26-A: [Physical feature of Homer Simpson] = BEER BELLY
36-A: [Ready for a refill, as a canteen] = ALMOST EMPTY
49-A: [Website prompt, often] = ACCEPT ALL. My original clue contained the word “cookies” but then Consigliere pointed out that wasn’t the best word to be in a clue for this meta…
59-A: [Temperature at which the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales converge] = FORTY BELOW
What do these five entries have in common? With a nudge from the title, successful metapuzzlers noticed that in each of these ten theme words contains its letters in alphabetical order. So take FIRST and you see that all five of those letters appear in the word in alphabetical order, as they do for FLOOR, and then for the other eight theme words.
What famed brand of cookie works the same way? CHIPS AHOY!, whose exclamation point didn’t scare anyone off!
Nice meta…but someone had beaten me to the punch! I always Google to make sure a meta idea I have hasn’t been done before, and for this one I google my first two theme entries, FIRST FLOOR and BEER BELLY. Seeing no predecessors I went ahead and created the puzzle. When I was done and had settled on CHIPS AHOY as the answer, I thought — well, wait a second, if someone had done this before then they would have certainly found CHIPS AHOY and probably used it as their meta answer. So I searched and — lo and behold, I found this:
Peter Gordon beat me to the punch! The only reason I hadn’t found his is that he didn’t permit himself to use double-letters in his entries, so he left BEER BELLY and FIRST FLOOR on the cutting-room floor. But he did indeed use CHIPS AHOY as his meta answer.
B-to-Z Vwllss Crsswrds:
Speaking of Peter Gordon, try out his new Kickstarter for his B-t-Z Vowelless Crosswords! All consonants! I’ve tested a number of these and they’re crazy fun. Lead your brain down all sorts of wild trails. Try them here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petergordonpuzzler/b-t-z-vwllss-crsswrds
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
No instructions given here since there are no-instructions options available.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.