LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Follow the Instructions”
Prompt:This week’s contest answer is an eight-letter word.
Answer: OVERFLOW, found by 371 solvers, of which 298 were solo solves

Thanks to Ben Chenoweth for pitching in a clever guest puzzle in a pinch! He’d mentioned in my Zoom talk last month that he’s got a year’s worth of finished metas ready to roll (!), so I knew which direction to aim the Bat-signal in my time of need. If you missed it, here’s Ben discussing metas with the gang in our recent talk (scroll to 1:15:00 if the link doesn’t take you there automatically).

https://xword-muggles.com/content/GaffneyQA10282023.mp4

Anyway, on to Ben’s meta…

First insight: realize that there are a lot of “letter + word” entries, like A-TEAM at 1-Across and D-DAY at 19-Across. In fact there are eight in total, and all on the Acrosses:

1-A: [Mr. T’s group] = A-TEAM
19-A: [June 6th, 1944] = D-DAY
24-A: [Higher degree typically awarded on the basis of a substantial portfolio of compositions] = D. MUS.
41-A: [Range of the multimode optical fibre spectrum that transmits with wavelength 1260 to 1360 nm] = O-BAND
45-A: [Form of radiation hypothesised by French physicist Prosper-Rene Blondlot in 1903] = N-RAYS
56-A: [Display technology found in Kindles] = E-INK
67-A: [Skier’s transport to the summit] = T-BAR
76-A: [Part that failed causing the Challenger disaster] = O-RING

Those spell ADD ONE TO. Intriguing! What to do? Well, we’ve got entries where a letter has been added to a standard word to get a new hyphenated word, so let’s see what else this could mean. Aha! There’s TE AMO at 48-Across, where we’ve removed the A from A-TEAM and added a different letter (somewhere in the word, not necessarily on the end). They are:

TE AMO = O
DAY = DAVY
MUS = MUSE
BAND = BRAND
RAYS = FRAYS
INK = LINK
BAR = BOAR
RING = WRING

Those added letters spell contest answer OVERFLOW. Intricate! Can’t have been easy to make all that work, but Ben pulled it off. Nicely done, sir! And if you’d like to check out more of Ben’s metas, go here:
https://crosshare.org/benchen71

NOTE: We had some technical issues with submitting entries due to the unusual entry window (which ends right at noon today), so a lot of solvers emailed their entries (which is the right thing to do as an insurance policy if you have reason to believe that your entry-form answer didn’t go through). So please be patient as I sort these out over the weekend, and if I’ve missed giving credit to anyone after that I’ll be sure to rectify the situation early next week (just email me if you haven’t received credit by, say, Sunday afternoon).

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

NOTE: For uninteresting reasons we’ll have no-instructions solving options on the Week 2 puzzle this month instead of this week.

This week’s contest answer is a name in the news.

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