LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “Just Putting It Out There”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a famous athlete whose name is 12 letters long.
Answer: ARNOLD PALMER
Correct entries: 223 overall, of which 115 were solo solves
Tough one made easier by my poor choice of title/prompt. I should’ve either left the “12 letters long” stipulation out or retitled it without the word “Putting” in the title, which didn’t fool everyone by a long shot. As a result, ARNOLD PALMER was a little too guessable, though we did still wind up with a Week 4-level of correct answers and there were lots of Hail Marys of JACK NICKLAUS (18) and a few for JORDAN SPIETH, SERGIO GARCIA, and then a bunch of WAYNE GRETZKY’s as well (because his son-in-law is Dustin Johnson, I think is why).
Anyway, Step 1: Notice that in our six theme entries you can find a famous person whose first and last name span the first word, and for whom the second word is an apt descriptor. Like so:
19-A: [Sciencey type who’s running behind? (11)] = LATE PHYSICIST. LATE is hidden in NIKOLA TESLA, and he was a noted physicist. And the parenthetical number is of course the total number of letters in his name.
27-A: [Composer who’s only inspired by scenic overlooks? (12)] = VIEW SONGWRITER. STEVIE WONDER>
41-A: [Jokester who just sits around all day? (14)] = IDLE COMEDIAN. DAVID LETTERMAN.
52-A: [Artist who likes to depict hellscapes? (11)] = DEMON PAINTER. CLAUDE MONET. The seed entry, and from way back: just found one of my old theme/construction notebooks. Occasionally I thumb through these to see if there’s some germ of a meta idea I jotted down years ago but then forgot about. This has never actually happened…until this time! There on the page was the words DEMON PAINTER with CLAUDE MONET next to it. Google confirmed I had never written this one and off we went. I’m typing this from my office but I’ll post a pic of it later at home if I can find it again.
63-A: [Politician whose office sink barely works? (12)] = TRICKLE SENATOR. PATRICK LEAHY.
75-A: [Novelist who moonlights as a crossword constructor? (15)] = THEMING AUTHOR. ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
Now what? Step 2 turned out to be the trickiest of the trio. What do we extract from the first mechanism? A famous person’s name. So I thought it might be natural to distill those names down to their initials. And perhaps you noticed that there are only six two-word clues in the puzzle, and they correspond to these famous people’s inits. Like so, in order of how the famous people appear in the grid:
5-Across: [Not traditional] = OLD (N.T., Nikola Tesla)
68-Across: [Shore wall] = LEVEE (S.W., Stevie Wonder)
52-Down [Drably lifeless] = DULL (D.L., David Letterman)
47-Down: [Celebratory meeting] = PARTY (C.M., Claude Monet)
38-Down: [Panamanian “Later!”] = ADIOS (P.L., Patrick Leahy)
48-Across: [Encumbrances, homewise] = LIENS (E.H., Ernest Hemingway). I didn’t mind the awkwardness of this clue since I hoped it would nudge solvers to the meta idea.
The first letters of those six entries spell OLD PAL; can we think of a 12-letter athlete whose first and last names ensconce that phrase? ARNOLD PALMER it is.
Peter Gordon’s A to Z Mini-Crosswords:
2 days to go on the Kickstarter for Peter Gordon‘s A-to-Z “Petite Pangram” puzzles. Highly recommended and extremely fun to solve.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
No instructions provided here because there’s a no-instructions solving option.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.