IMPORTANT NOTE: As of February 2020 MGWCC is available only to subscribers at my Patreon site. A subscription costs $3/month.
LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “See You Next Year!”
Instructions: This week’s contest answer is a six-letter word.
Answer: VISION
We’ve got six long historical events presenting as theme, so let’s look at those first:
23-A: [Movie with the line “Since when, Kip? You have the worst reflexes of all time”] = NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
34-A: [Noted victory for the Tang Dynasty] = BATTLE OF AKSU.
53-A: [Novel first published anonymously as having been written only “By a Lady”] = SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
68-A: [Its founding is noted on Virginia’s state quarter] = JAMESTOWN SETTLEMENT
85-A: [It proclaimed tolerance for Christianity within the Roman Empire] = EDICT OF MILAN
101-A: [Pamphlet sent to the Archbishop of Mainz] = Martin Luther’s NINETY-FIVE THESES
We’ve got “year” in the title, so let’s look at the most relevant year of each these:
“Napoleon Dynamite” released in 2004
Battle of Aksu fought in 717
Sense and Sensibility published in 1811
Jamestown Settlement founded in 1607
Edict of Milan proclaimed in 313
Ninety-Five Theses posted in 1517
Now what? There were two related oddities to notice here:
1) This is a 20×20 grid, which is a very unusual size, and the “Next Year” mentioned in the title is 2020, so that’s probably not a coincidence.
2) The last two numbers of each year, which indicated the year numbers within the century, are all 20 or lower. That’s unlikely to be a coincidence, either.
So what now? Answer: you use the number pair (century + years) in each date as grid coordinates to identify certain letters in the grid.
I’ll let commenter Paul Manaster at Crossword Fiend explain:
What convinced me that the dates must refer to grid coordinates was the observation that all of the dates occurred in the first 2 decades of their respective centuries- the only way they COULD work as coordinates on a 20X20 grid, with a less than 1/3000 chance of being a random occurrence.
So go:
20 squares over and 4 down to get a V
7 squares over and 17 down to get an O
18 squares over and 11 down to get an S
16 squares over and 7 down to get an I
3 squares over and 13 down to get an I
15 squares over and 15 down to get an N
VOSIIN? What’s that? Nothing, but if you read the letters in grid order (highlighted in grid above) you get contest answer VISION. And who doesn’t want 20/20 vision?
PATREON SWITCHOVER UPDATE:
OK, here’s the weekly January update on the Patreon switchover:
1) 243 solvers made the switch over to Patreon in our first week! Thanks very much to those “early adopters.” There’s no rush to switch (January is free and the puzzles will be available for download directly on this page for the entire month), but I appreciate those who’ve given the new site an early boost.
2) Reminder that, unless something unexpected happens, today’s puzzle will be the last one you receive via the old subscription service e-mail. We may do it for one more week if we hit technical issues, but hoping that today’s will be the last.
Also a reminder that the plan is to start sending the puzzle out next week via Patreon (plus also published on xwordcontest.com), and then the same for the last three weeks in January, and then beginning with the February 7th puzzle, MGWCC will only be available via a Patreon subscription.
3) Starting today, MGWCC is going on a 2-month weekly and monthly prize hiatus. As I mentioned last week, Patreon does not mind me sending out yearly prizes since those are based only on skill, but doesn’t dig the weekly or monthly prizes, since they are in part chance-based. So I’m going to take January and February to figure out how prizes will look moving forward.
For now, though, yearly prizes for 2020 are scheduled as usual. As with last year, January will be a no-penalty month since I need to take a look at how our Solo Solve/Group Solve plan from 2019 worked out, and if we need to make adjustments to it. So for MGWCC Yearly Prizes in 2020, everyone will get full solo-solve credit for January’s five puzzles, even those who don’t enter or get one or more metas wrong.
January will be a busy prize month for me as well as I get out the remaining daily and weekly prizes from 2019 (I’m a bit behind, apologies for that, but getting fully caught up this weekend). But I’ll return at the end of the month with rules for yearly prizes in 2020, and at the end of February with a fully-formed idea of if and how weekly and monthly prizes can continue without funning afoul of Patreon’s terms of service.
4) Let me know if you run into any trouble downloading the PDF, JPZ, or Across Lite files from the site today. They might not be up until after noon, but you’ll of course be receiving the puzzle by mail as usual so it shouldn’t hold anyone up. Old-timers here will remember that this is how the puzzle was originally distributed, but I’m probably going to relearn it since it’s been a while and the process/technology may have changed on me as well. UPDATE, 12:15 PM: The PDF was easy (see below under “This Week’s Instructions”) but the Across Lite and JPZ file look like they might take some time. But I’ll certainly (?!) have them all ready to roll next week.
5) I’m also working on the most efficient way to let all MGWCC subscribers know how many months/years they have left in their subscriptions. I’ll be in touch about that in the coming weeks.
That’s all for now on the Switchover front — let’s take a look at the first puzzle of the new year!
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a Spike Lee movie that should be in this grid, but isn’t.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.