LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Time to Get Up”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is something people can’t stand having.
Answer: LAPS
Correct entries: 444 overall, of which 378 were solo solves

Four theme entries and a suggestive omega-Across, in classic meta style. They were:

18-A: [New York Mets owner (who shares his name with a Tennessee congressman)] = STEVE COHEN

33-A: [Court figure] = LITIGATOR

45-A: [Kudos from the boss] = GREAT WORK

60-A: [Organic dairy brand] = STONYFIELD

And then at the omega-A aka 71-A:

[“All ___” (legal drama you don’t need to have seen to solve this meta)] = RISE

What now? “All Rise” is our big hint, and a scan of the grid reveals four instances of the letters ALL, each one suspiciously beneath one of the four long theme entries. Unlikely to be a coincidence! And if we make each ALL “rise” a row in the grid, we find that we have four new entries. For example, boost the ALL in DALLAS up a level and you’ve turned STEVE COHEN into STEVE ALLEN. And look here — Steve Allen was a host of the Tonight Show from 1954-57, and there’s (Jay) LENO at 17-A clued as [Former host of “The Tonight Show”] which also works for our new STEVE ALLEN entry.

The others work the same way:

LITIGATOR at 33-A becomes ALLIGATOR (with the lift from ALLy), satisfying the clue for APE at 2-D [Creature on the first page of a children’s book about animals, maybe]

GREAT WORK at 45-A becomes GREAT WALL (with the lift from mayALL), satisfying the clue for PANDA at 67-A [Symbol of China]

STONYFIELD at 60-A becomes SALLY FIELD (with the lift from hALL), satisfying the clue for SWANK at 20-A [Winner of two Best Actress Oscars]

So we’ve extracted LENO, APE, PANDA, and SALLY FIELD, whose first letters spell contest answer LAPS, which is indeed something people can’t stand having (get it?). Serious props to Gridmaster T for the sparkly solution grid above.

Mikey G says:

I lapped this one up!

Myelbow writes:

Cute meta prompt!

Thanks (it was Consigliere’s, though). But was it too suggestive? Some solvers (like joon) mentioned guessing LAPS from the prompt, which isn’t ideal. Not strongly enough to submit without solving, but it’s a bit of a downer to have a logical Hail Mary in mind if you need it and then solve the meta properly only to find out that your Hail Mary was right.

I try to avoid that, but in this case the meta concept was so tight that there weren’t many possible logical answers (with only four theme entries I thought they had to be in order in the grid as opposed to using numbers to order them, so I was lucky to even get LAPS).

A curious oddity on this one: 29 solvers submitted CLOT as their answer. This was derived from the first letters of the trigrams nudged upward by the mobile ALLs:

COH (from STEVECOHEN)
LIT (from LITIGATOR)
ORK (from GREATWORK)
TON (from STONYFIELD)

Now this is not a great answer, but a CLOT is something that could make one unable to stand. The threshhold that needs to be crossed here for these answers to be counted as correct is not “Is this answer equal to or better than the intended answer”? (which this one is not) but rather “Could a solver reasonably have stopped here, thinking they had the correct answer?” Yes they could have, which is why I marked these 29 as correct. A highly curious case.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is something that solving too many contest crosswords might lead to.

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