IMPORTANT NOTE: As of February 2020 MGWCC is available only to subscribers at my Patreon page. A subscription costs $3/month.

LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Run the Numbers”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is something you might say after getting the meta.
Answer: “TOUGHIE!”

No joke: when I first came up with this idea, my first thought was “You’re going to hell for this.” Maybe that’s too harsh, but I could see St. Peter and Satan huddling if I’m considered a borderline case and then telling me: “We’ve just reviewed a copy of MGWCC #622 and I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news…”

What’s so evil about it? A significant number of solvers got it quickly, after all. But if you don’t get it quickly then it might’ve taken a very long time to circle back around and find the idea. Imagine playing hide and go seek in a huge mansion, and the seeker counts to 10 on the front porch. As he opens the front door to start looking, you’re hiding right behind that door he’s opened! If he sees you right away the game’s over before it began…but if he misses you, he’s going to be wandering that mansion for a looong time.

OK, enough metaphors. Seven theme entries were indicated by both parenthetically enumerated numbers *and* asterisks. Weird! Why both? They were:

19-A: [*In great detail (6,11)] = EXTENSIVELY
30-A: [Become too big for* (2,4)] = GROW OUT OF
38-A: [Douse* (6,8)] = EXTINGUISH
51-A: [Square cookie* (2,9)] = FIG NEWTON. The most disgusting cookie on the planet.
61-A: [*Pick up on something (8,10)] = GET THE HINT
69-A: [*Diva’s asset (1,5)] = FINE VOICE. A little arbitrary for a crossword entry.
84-A: [British technology magazine since 1856* (3,9)] = THE ENGINEER

99+% of the time, parenthetical numbers are there so you can index them into the theme entry…but this puzzle is that less-than-1-percent case. Indexing these gives you:

SY
RW
GI
IN
IT
FV
EE

Which may look promising, but it’s just a big dead end. Sneaky solvers noticed here that you can find each of these numbers in their entry, with two letters left over. The main nudge there was that the only two entries with an X in them also had 6 as one of their enumerated numbers.

So:

remove SIX and ELEVEN from EXTENSIVELY and you’re left with TY
remove TWO and FOUR from GROW OUT OF and you’re left with GO
remove SIX and EIGHT from EXTINGUISH and you’re left with NU
remove TWO and NINE from FIG NEWTON and you’re left with FG
remove EIGHT and TEN from GET THE HINT and you’re left with HT
remove ONE and FIVE from FINE VOICE and you’re left with IC
remove THREE and NINE from THE ENGINEER and you’re left with GE

Now what? The one oddity yet to be explained is those asterisks on the seven theme clues. Since their identities are clearly marked by their enumerations, why star them as well? And then — wait a second! In three of these, the star comes at the start of the clue, and in four of them the star comes after the clue.

What madness is this? Well, there’s method behind it: take the left of these remaining pairs if the asterisk starts the clue, and the right one if the asterisk ends it. That yields contest answer TOUGHIE, which is fitting both since the puzzle was tough, and because, echoing the theme idea, removing two letters from it yields the number EIGHT.

There was a slight ambiguity at the end here: in the case of GET THE HINT and THE ENGINEER, you needed to cross the E’s out from left-to-right, otherwise the final two letters could be in the wrong order. Nobody submitted TOUGTIE, TOUGTIG, or TOUGHIG, though, so a quick backsolve did the job if necessary. Still, a very minor artistic blot.

A note of thanks to my Consigliere for his great help on this puzzle. He refused a co-author credit but certainly earned it.

PATREON UPDATE:

Reminder that all refunds for January, February, March, and April are now done. If you have months left on your subscription and haven’t received a refund for any of those months, please e-mail me at crosswordcontest@gmail.com.

PETER GORDON KICKSTARTER UPDATE:

56 hours to go at Peter Gordon‘s Petite Pangram Puzzles Kickstarter! 233 backers have already pledged, but he’s still $505 short. Three months’ worth of daily 9×11 puzzles that use every letter of the alphabet. If that sounds like fun, push this project over the top!

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is three letters long.

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