LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Compare and Contrast”
Prompt: This puzzle’s contest answer, which is two words and nine letters long, is something you might find on a beach.
Answer: PALM TREES, found by 420 solvers, 393 of which were solo solves

Slightly problematic for Week 1! 93% of solvers got my intended answer (PALM TREES), but a non-trivial number found this a little ambiguous (including joon, which isn’t good), so I widened the tent and let most of the rest in since this was indeed a bit unfair.

Our four theme entries were:

17-A: [Melatonin secreter] = PINEAL GLAND
28-A: [“Emily in Paris” actress] = ASHLEY PARK
44-A: [Download it for news in French] = LE MONDE APP
57-A: [They include a scale] = MAP LEGENDS

So we have four initial words spelling PALM (Pineal, Ashley, Le, Map) and then also serving as the basis for a TREE made up of the first few letters of each entry:

PINE
ASH
LEMON
MAPLE

This was meant to lead to PALM TREES as our final meta answer, as the first few letters of each entry spelled a tree’s name. But there was some confusion over the possible entry PALM FROND, since that’s one thing (FROND singular) instead of the plural TREES, which on that linguistic point could be seen as pointing more strongly to PALM FROND. So in the Week 1 spirit I counted those 17 solvers as correct.

Matt M. writes:

Great summer puzzle!

Thanks! We keep it going with this week’s.

DIS sticks with the tree theme:

Yew rock

Eye no aye dew!

And finally, Golem says:

Best PALM reading I’ve ever done

Cool! And now, looking into my crystal ball…I see a Week 2 meta in your very near future…it’s very, very near…

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

Today’s puzzle is Week 2 of 4 in June. Instructions:

Read the instructions herein to solve this puzzle’s meta.

Good luck!

–Matt