LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: MGWCC #892 — “When Seconds Count”
Prompt: This puzzle’s contest answer is one of the fifty people who have served as U.S. vice president.
Answer: AARON BURR, found by 440 solvers, 407 of which were solo solves

Crunchy for a Week 1, which I didn’t anticipate. Four theme entries stood out by length and randomness:

17-A: [People who shear wool all day?] = LLAMA STAFF
27-A: [Gamete formation need?] = OOGENESIS EGG
46-A: [Economic protest at a haunted house?] = EERIE BOYCOTT
61-A: [Piece of WNBA star Ogwumike’s hair?] = NNEKA TRESS

Each of those phrases consists of two words, the first of which starts with a double letter and the second of which ends with double letter. Which vice president does this point to? The third one, Mr. AARON BURR, whose first and last name exhibit the same pattern.

This played tougher than usual (read joon’s post here for why) but at least we wound up with a reasonable number of correct entries and a 99% correct entries rate. The curveball part was not using the double letters in the theme entries at all (LL FF OO GG EE TT NN SS) but rather just using their doubleness as an indicator towards AARON BURR. Not every solver dug this aspect but I’m still aiming for non-formulaic metas after all these years so cut me a little slack 🙂

lisepac got it, but took a while:

Boy do I feel dumb. He’s buried in Princeton Cemetery (my hometown), there’s an Aaron Burr Hall on campus (named for his father, who was president of the University), and I recently read Gore Vidal’s “Burr” (he’s an interesting character but not very admirable).

Meta — World Peace writes:

Neat that the OO- prefix and EGG bookend each other like that!

I was wondering if anyone would notice that! When you’ve got nonsense answers in the grid, always good to give them at least a little logic.

And finally, Matt M. writes:

Happy Independence Day! And Burr’s a good answer for a meta contest, where words often have duel meanings…

After you’re done groaning at that pun (take all the time you need), please feel free to read the instructions for this week’s meta…

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This puzzle’s contest answer is one of the ten MLB teams mentioned in the theme entries (not necessarily one of the two that’s mentioned twice).

Good luck!
–Matt