Administrivial Across Lite Solvers Alert! Did you solve the Saturday, Oct. 25 puzzle using Across Lite? The answers were locked away until the contest closed, but if you’d like to unlock them now, the code is 1356.
SPECIAL POST – One of the things I admire about a constructor like Patrick Blindauer is his ability to think ahead. It’s one thing to plan a theme for a single puzzle, but to plan a week’s worth of puzzles that are ultimately all interconnected is amazing. I wonder if he and Patrick Berry share a war room, filled with complex charts and plans for world domination.
But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to either find out the answer to the meta-challenge in the crossword contest or to confirm that your entry was correct. What follows is a brief recap and explanation of the week’s puzzles, and please feel free to discuss your solving experiences and your journey to the meta-challenge in the comments. Stay tuned for Will Shortz’s announcement on Oct. 31 of the winners of the online subscription.
Allow me: The answer to the meta-challenge is TEMPUS FUGIT, or Latin for “time flies.”
Let’s look at how that worked.
On Monday, Mr. Blindauer offered us a puzzle that had increasing increments of TIME as its theme, signaling its passage.
On Tuesday, we continued the TIME theme with three “synonymous” theme entries: MARATHONER’S STAT, PARTNER OF WARNER and WHAT PRISONERS DO.
On Wednesday, Mr. Blindauer encouraged us to perhaps put in some FACE TIME while we keep smiling and solving. Maybe this puzzle was there just to keep our spirits up, but I think the EYES in the face of the puzzle are sort of pointing at something important. Remember, PEEK-A-BOO I SEE YOU and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY were the longer entries.
On Thursday, I told you that time was just zipping by, didn’t I? And haven’t I been talking all week long about how much fun I was having (as in “time flies when you’re having fun”)? See what happens when you don’t read the blog posts? This puzzle about TIME(s) SQUARE was a nod to the crystal ball that drops every New Year’s Eve, representing the passage of TIME, as well as a neat way to depict the TIMES SQUARE district by placing TIME twice around a single black square.
On Friday, we had a normal themeless puzzle. It’s themeless in terms of the entries, yet it tied into the suite in an important way. We had to wait for the Saturday puzzle for the final hint.
Ah, Saturday. The final message for solving the meta-challenge. You still don’t see it? Look at the long Down entries, X MARKS THE SPOT and ALPHANUMERICS. What Mr. Blindauer has asked you to do was to look at all of the Xs in the puzzles from the past week, in order, and to use their ALPHANUMERIC value (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.) to decipher his coded message. If you take all of the Xs from the week’s puzzles and line them up by the number in their squares, you get this:
20 5 13 16 21 19 6 21 7 9 20
Feel free to count on your fingers as I did and you’ll see that the code translates to TEMPUS FUGIT.
Let’s check in one last time this week with the devious Mr. Blindauer:
The main inspiration for this crossword-y experiment was the paper itself. Knowing it was going to be in the Times, it made sense to start (and end) with something related to time. Brainstorming gave me my theme concepts for the week: units of time, TIME in the clues, FACE TIME and Times Square. I wanted the Friday and Saturday puzzles to be themeless, and though I did put in some time-related clues on Friday, there were the two meta-hint entries on Saturday. The letter X is used to make a multiplication sign or “times sign,” so it seemed appropriate to use that letter, using the grid numbers themselves to spell out the final answer.
Thanks again to Will for the opportunity to do this — it was a dream come true.
Pretty sneaky, eh? And didn’t this week just fly right by?
Your thoughts?