Good afternoon, crossword fans — welcome to Week 120 of my contest. If you’re new to the contest and would like to enter, please see the site FAQ on the left sidebar for instructions.

LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Your initial reaction to last week’s puzzle might have been to wonder where the initials were. Five famous always-use-their-middle-initial people comprised the theme, but all were missing their trademark letters. They were:

MICHAEL J. FOX
EDWARD R. MURROW
DAVID O. SELZNICK
ALFRED E. NEUMAN
PHILIP K. DICK

Guided by the parenthetical numbers following each clue, 316 solvers had no problem arranging the missing initials into JOKER, which was last week’s contest answer.

Jim Graham wonders:

I have no middle initial. Does that mean I am not eligible?

While Jan O’Sullivan relates this amusing story, which took me a moment to grok:

After seeing that the number of squares for MICHAEL J FOX was one short, and taking into account the title, I confidently entered MICHAE U FOX. This harkened back to my days in Jr High band when last-name-only, handwritten-in-felt-tip sticker for the clarinetist next to me, FLICKER, had an unfortunate conjoining of letters.

That trick didn’t work for the other entries, though.

Or the other clarinetists, presumably.

This week’s winner, whose name was chosen at random from the 316 correct entries received, is Stuart Alper of Plainview, N.Y. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, Stuart will also receive of a copy of Les Foeldessy’s entertaining new book Gryptics.

HINMAN 2.0:

Tyler Hinman‘s blog has a clean new design. And guess what new type of puzzle he likes?

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is the model of Toyota I bought last week. E-mail this model to me at crosswordcontest@gmail.com by Tuesday at noon ET. Please put the contest answer car in the subject line of your e-mail.

To print the puzzle out, click on the image below and hit “print” on your browser. To solve using Across Lite download the free software here, then join the Google Group (1,325 members now!) here.

SPECIAL PRIZE THIS WEEK:

Since everyone’s digging the new Gryptics book, let’s do it again: next week’s winner will receive an autographed copy of it, along with a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set.

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