MGWCC #013 -- Friday, August 29, 2008 -- "Stroker Ace"

As Orange (of "Diary of a Crossword Fiend" fame) said about Matt Gaffney after solving his MGWCC #011 Kaiduko, "Sneaky Bastard!" I'll add to that devious. This puzzle contains a cleverly crafted riddle, and because it winds through five rows of the puzzle (65 squares worth) and is not a quote you can't know what the heck it is like a quote might be and so you have to get it through cross clues. The cross clues are mostly quite difficult.

On Matt's Weekly Crossword Contest web site he said of last week's and this week's puzzle, "Nice guy face off; evil guy face back on -- let's get to this week's contest crossword!" Because of this I am able to say after working this puzzle, what a rapscallion!

Crossing the first line of the riddle are these clues:

• 1D Officer: Lawman
• 2D Really wish one could: AcheTo
• 3D Much of Australia: Heaths
• 4D Q-U link: RST (gimme)
• 5D Braid: Plait (stock clue/answer)
• 6D Delineated: Limned
• 7D "I guess that's ___": ANo
• 8D ___-Isenburg, Germany: Neu
• 9D Language since 1964: Basic

So I got lawman after figuring out that 30A was NOSE [Narrow margin of victory] and [ 20A [Strawberry, once] was MET after texting a friend with a WTFO? on the clue (I'm not a sports trivia buf). This gave me ACES for 14A [Drives into the hole], which gave me 2D's ACHESTO [Really wish one could]. After taking a leap of faith on 1A with LAHR [Much of Australia] I had the NW corner and refocused on the middle-top.

I got PLAIT on 5D and after getting FEE on 18D [Service Money] and EIN on 21A ["Dann singe Ich ___ Lied fur Dich..." (Nena lyric)] I nailed LIMNED on 6D, and ANO for 7D, leaving me with PLAN_ and LINE_ on 5A and 15A [Backup Operations and Tax form phrase, respectively], and I had the first part of the riddle.

But what the hell is this language in 9D that showed up in 1964? I'm thinking that "backup operations" must be plans, and the letter missing in LINE_ must be a vowel, but I am drawing a blank on the language. Finally, I ignored it and did the NE corner, and cross clues around the 2nd line of the riddle, and got the second line of the riddle and realized the language ended in IC.

___IC? What is that? I took a walk. After the walk I had it: BASIC. So it is PLANB for 5A and LINEA for 15A.

The whole puzzle was like this.

Killer clue/answer pairs:

• 20A Strawberry, once: Met
• 44A Calendar abbr.: THU (I hate these kind of clues; they are so open)
• 46A "How about me?": AMI (I still don't understand this one)
• 49A 2003 Comedy co-starring Bob Newhart: ELF (I saw this stupid movie, but did not remember this immediately)
• 51A Language spoken in New Mexico: TAOS (I did not know it was a language as well as a location)
• 60A "You're a conformist": Moo (This took me a while to figure out)
• 68A Order in the court: OYES (I do not understand this one, either)
• 72A Title surname in a 1970's spinoff: Roper (never heard of this)
• Traditional wedding wear for some: Kimono (makes sense, but this was difficult for me to get)
• 13D Dude: CAT (I don't believe I've seen this association before)
• 29D "That's hot!": YEOW (this eluded me for quite a while)
• 34D Strikes up the band: HITSIT (one of my favorite clues)
• 35D Bombers in Britan, for short: IRA (this really had me going initially because I was thinking of airplanes at first. Great clue)
• 40D Dynasty that lasted nine centuries: CHOU (This is more commonly known as Zhou, and my list of Chinese dynasties at home did not have Chou, only Zhou. Ouch)
• 50D XX: FEMALE (this totally eluded me until I got cross clues for this one)

Okay, if you are still with me then let's talk about the riddle. By the time I was done with this puzzle grid my brain was pretty fried. But now I have the riddle:

WHAT FAMOUS

ATHLETE RECENTLY

ACQUIRED FOUR NEW

AU PAIRS YET HASN'T

GOT ANY KIDS

The MGWCC puzzle page says we are to come up with a two-word answer of seven and six letters, respectively. The only clue we have to this is the title of the puzzle: "Stroker Ace".

Well it so happens that I heard a thing on the news several weeks ago about someone who had hired au pairs for each of his several houses so no matter which one he was in there was always someone there. But of course I could not remember who this was. So I decided it was time to Google.

Here is where I can call Matt a rapscallion. Do you have any idea how many hits one comes up with Googling au pairs? It is a ridiculous undertaking. By saying athlete rather than, say, tennis player, there is no way to narrow that scope down, other than saying how many au pairs. I Googled "4 au pairs" then "four au pairs". For these two Googles I got 543 and 511 hits, respectively. Effing ridiculous!

So I considered that Stroker Ace might mean the athlete is a golfer. That got me down to 8 hits, but nothing looked like what I needed. So they I tried tennis. That got me 4 useless hits. Okay, let's try swimming...no--how about swimmer!

"four au pairs" with swimmer got me 22 hits--all useless, and "4 au pairs" with swimmer got me 174 hits. Nothing. Finally, I made a leap of faith and decided that the it must be a swimmer, and the swimmer must be in the news, and that likely from the Olympics, and so I just looked to see who the swimmers were, and that gave me Michael Phelps. This, by the way, is the correct answer! But I tell you, I did not figure it out the way it was meant to be figured out, and now that I know how I was supposed to have figured it out I feel kind of dumb.

Au pairs is a play on words, sort of like when Barry Goldwater ran for office and there were these Au H20 bumper stickers and pins all over the place. The riddle is actually: What Olympic swimmer recently won 8 gold medals (four gold pairs).

Okay, so I solved the puzzle Saturday, decided late Sunday that the answer had to be Michael Phelps, then promised myself I'd email in the answer first thing Tuesday morning at the office, and promptly... forgot on Tuesday. Possibly it was the Labor Day BBQ I went to. I have a headache.

Garrett

August 29th, 2008 WSJ--Double Dealing By Myles Callum/Edited by Mike Shenk

A relatively easy puzzle for the weekly Wall Street Journal puzzle, and for author Myles Callum. I haven't seen a puzzle by him for a while, but my recollection is that the previous onces I've done by him were much harder. The theme seemed to simply be that them answers would have two words which both start with D. If there was something else there it was too subtle for me to pick out. Theme answers:

• DollarDiplomacy
• DishingDirt
• DearDiary
• DraftDodger
• Demolition Derby
• DimeDefense
• DannyDeVito

The last two of these were downward answers in 35D and 38D. The other five were across answers.

The level of difficulty of the clues varied as I moved through the puzzle. Some were easy, some medium, some hard and some just really obscure. As an example, ENDGAMES for the clue [Board finishes] in 57A, or AWLS for [Punches] in 3D. Because there were a lot of references to proper names which I did not know many of, it took me fifty minutes to complete this 21x21 grid while eating lunch.

MGWCC #012 -- Friday, August 22, 2008 -- "Another Nine-Letter Word for a Stupid Waste of Time"

Matt Gaffney's twelfth weekly crossword contest puzzle was the easiest to solve of any of them but in order to participate in the actual contest part of it one had to create a limerick. The had to make reference to an article written by Ron Rosenbaum which was published in Slate. It was called "Crossword, Sudoku Plague Threatens America! with a subtitle of "The puzzle of puzzle people." After reading it I decided the author must be a prat. He calls puzzle solving a "useless habit" and suggests that their "uselessly filling empty boxes" is a metaphor for emptyness in their lives, and tells us that we could be doing something else involving words and letters--reading. Well, I tell you what, Ron--I read all the time, and everyone I know who is good at doing crosswords does also.

Anyway, back to Matt's puzzle. (Okay, one more snipe. Read what Matt wrote on his blog here.) There was an interesting part in Rosenbaum's article where he pokes fun at a solver who has not filled in the answer to the clue [Mauna ___] by saying, "Whoa, tough one, dude." Of course the answer could be either LOA or KEA and one does not write either in until one has a verifying cross clue. In this weeks puzzle, Matt had KEA in the answer grid twice (that's unusual) and LOA once. All three had the same clue [Mauna ___]. I thought that was hilarious.

The puzzle taught me that I had not read the article carefully. 8A had the clue [Hillbilly ___ (crossword-solving, according to 22-across--] for the answer HEROIN. 22A is, of course, RONROSENBAUM.

One clue which had me stumped for a while was 49A: [The real crime of 22-across's piece] ITWASNTFUNNY. But I only needed a few letters to figure it out after I corrected my mistake on 35D [Heart tube] which I had filled in as aorta but which turned out to be STENT.

There were a few typical misdirecting or vague MG-typical clues just to spice things up a bit:

• 19A One of four: SEASONS ("one of four what?" was my first response)
• 38A Kay follower: ELL
• 42A Compass dir.: ENE
• 1D Sent down: KOD
• 4D Rhyming word in a soft drink brand: Yello (I think this is Mello Yello--a caffeinated, citrus-flavored soft drink from Coca Cola.)
• 6D Brunch's less well-known cousin: LINNER
• 8D Laughter syllables: HOS (really?) Here's another possibility: employees, to a pimp.
• 50D X: TIMES

Oy, that last one killed me. But the one which had me going the most was "brunch's less well-known cousin". I thought LINNER right away, but I then thought, "no, that can't be it!" because I thought my sister and I had made that up years ago and know one would know it (I've never heard of it being used until this puzzle). That's going in my clues file.

So now, the puzzle done, I ended up writing several limericks but will only show the two I liked best here. This is one:

The author who comes from Bay Shore
Disdained puzzlers with words we abhor

He penned with his nib
Tripe that sounded so glib

That we likely will read him no more

I found out he is from Bay Shore, Long Island in his online bio. Kind of hard to fit Rosenbaum in a limerick with the correct meter. I also found out he is an older guy, so that is used in the next limerick:

There once was a man of late years
Who wrote of the "Starbucks of Tears"

With prose he distorts
As he disses Will Shortz

With his head firmly stuck up his rear

Unfortunately, neither of these won. But I did have fun writing them--and learning about them. My first try looked good to me, but when I shared it with a friend who writes limericks he said, "the meter is wrong," and I had to toss this one. Here it is:

A columnist who regards crosswords with fear
Wrote in Slate of the "Starbucks of Tears"

Rosenbaum dissed Will Shortz
And puzzle solvers--of course!

Causing cruciverbalists to jeer ala Lear.

By the way, this "Starbucks of Tears" thing is a Rosenbaum-coined term. Apparently where he was observing people doing these crosswords and sudoku puzzles there were a lot of sad-looking people in there. His presumption--probably correct--is that they were out from visiting a nearby hospital and were depressed. What was he doing in there?

Friday, August 8, 2008 NYS Weekend Warrior

This puzzle was created by Barry C. Silk and edited by Peter Gordon. Themeless. There were a number of difficult clues sprinkled about which slowed solving down, but nothing that would bring you to a grinding stop. One thing which I had no idea of but has a commonplace answer is the clue [Repeated action in a mathematician's random walk] in 23A, and the answer is COINTOSS.

In order to complete the fill CLI needed to be in 23D [One-twentieth of MMMXX] and my friend John wondered if in the old Roman days they had a system for doing math in Roman Numerals. Anybody know? I just convert to cardinal numbers, do the math and convert back again. How did they do it then?

There were two things in this puzzle I thought were really difficult: 8D [Another name for the sugar apple] with the answer SWEETSOP and 55D [Place in a Robert Redford movie] with the answer ETTA.

55D - Place in a Robert Redford movie

It turns out that the role Katharine Ross played in
"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" was... Etta Place

About the Sweetsop apple--clued as [Another
name for the sugar apple]: It is a semi-evergreen shrub
which grows six to eight meters tall. It bears edible fruit:

The fruit is usually round, slightly pine cone-like,
6-10 cm diameter and weighing 100-230 g, with a
scaly or lumpy skin. There are variations in shape
and size. The fruit flesh is sweet, white to light
yellow, and resembles and tastes like custard. The
edible portion coats the seeds generously; a bit
like the gooey portion of a tomato seed. Sugar-apple
has a very distinct, sweet-smelling fragrance. The
texture of the flesh that coats the seeds is a bit
like the center of a very ripe guava (excluding the
seeds). It is slightly grainy, a bit slippery, very
sweet and very soft. The seeds are scattered through
the fruit flesh; the seed coats are blackish-brown,
12-18 mm long, and hard and shiny.

It is grown in the tropics and warmer subtropics. I've never heard of it before. The picture at the top of this post is of the fruit of this plant.

Thursday, August 7, 2008 NYS--"Gevalt!"

This Thursday puzzle by Patrick Blindauer and Tony Orbach had as theme answers common phrases or titles which had been altered by inserting an OY in them: CLOYINGWRAP (Cling Wrap); ANNOYINGLANDERS (Ann Landers); TOMBOYRAIDER ("Tomb Raider"); and BUOYSDRIVER (Bus Driver). The theme clues were clever enough that you could not guess much about the answer without getting some part of it done through cross clues but not so obscure that you couldn't begin to guess as the answers began to flesh-out, which made it fun. The one exception is the clue at 61A [Lifts actress Minnie's spirits?], which made me expect to put DRIVER in there somewhere.

There were a number of clues which were pretty tough and as usual I can't tell whether they got there through the efforts of the authors or were peppered-in by the editor, Peter Gordon. Also, there were some things I just did not know.

Did not know: LENTEN [spare]; GIA [1998 Angelina Jolie TV movie]; DUNDER [___ Mifflin (company in "The Office")]--which could have been clued ___ head!; KIX [Band with the 1988 album "Blow My Fuse"]; and UAE [Fed. whose 18-letter full name alternates vowels and consonants]. Actually, I know what UAE is but the clue left me clueless, though I won't forget it now.

Tough clues:

• 24A Painting place: atelier
• 50A Fanta rival: Sunkist
• 54A Binding: final
• 1D Big supplier to Boeing: Alcoa (lots of big suppliers to Boeing)
• 5D Ice cream mix-in: raisins (this could be so many things)
• 7A Cheek by ___: jowl (I had an "aha" moment when this became apparent)
• 35D Playmates?: team
• 40D Noted: OnRecord
• 52D Mount with vigor: steed

My favorite theme clue was 45A [Peppermint Patty's panty thief?] with TOMBOYRAIDER

Good puzzle for a Thursday.

Friday, July 18th, 2008 NYT syndicate crossword (Friday, Jun 06, 2008; Puzzle No. 0606)

Author: Ashish Vengsarkar / Will Shortz

I found this to be a difficult Friday puzzle. It was themeless, with five horizontal 15-wides and two vertical 15-deep answers (most impressive, by the way). Working with only what knowledge is in my head I don't believe I would have completed it had I not had some luck guessing at the long answers. In fact, I was unable to actually complete the puzzle because there was one letter I did not write down because I did not know it. I guessed it to be 'P' and that turned out to be correct, but I did not write it down. This was at the intersection of 25D and 34A.

Looking to get started I went for anything that looked like a gimme:

• 51D End of ___: AnEra
• 29A Fortune 500 company whose toll-free number ends with 23522: AFLAC
• 33D Chlorure de sodium: SEL
• 42A Wall St. Deal: LBO (either IPO or LBO and SEL gave me the 'L')
• 40D Duty for a docent: TOUR
• 60D Field divs.: YDS
• 47A Considered groovy: DUG (with the 'U' from TOUR)
• 56A Nitwit: ASS
• 8A Zeroes: RESETS (could have been "losers" but for 8D)
• 8D Split: RanOff (which confirmed my guess for 16A)
• 16A Saint whose name means "good": AGATHA (with 8A this gave me 13D)
• 13D Flip: SASSY
• 5D Wall Street Deal: IPO (LBO already in use in 42A; this gave me 5A)
• 5A Return addressee?: IRS (this confirmed my guess at 7D)
• 7D Psalm ender: SELAH
• 9D Graded item: EGG (obvious from having 8A and 16A)
• 10D Posed: SAT (obvious from having 8A and 16A)

Let me explain why 29A was a gimme. I looked at the letters on the phone for the numbers given and AFLAC was so obvious I wrote it down without even thinking about it.

So now I looked at 17A [Mean crossword clue writer's challenge to solvers?] and here is what I had: _____O_L_NGTH_S. With the 'NG' I tossed in an 'I', which looked like the end of a word, so I tossed in another 'I' to make _____O_LING THIS. I was thinking TRY SOLVING THIS but had one too many blanks. Decided 6D must be RIGHTARM [Very desirous person's sacrifice] and with that 'G' I completed 17A with TRY GOOGLING THIS (blanks added for clarity). Show time!

Next correctly guessed 11D with only 'ETH' as ETHNIC CLEANSING [Heinous war crime]. After getting NARD in 24D [Olden ointment] and MOTIF/FAA for 15D [Interior designer's creation] and 28A [Flight data recorder?] (lame) I was able to guess RUNS IN THE FAMILY for 22A [Gets passed down, perhaps]. I then polished-off the top of the puzzle with some delay after writing in "stat" for 1A's clue [R.B.I. or E.R.A] but recovered with ABBR after getting BRR for 2D's [Cold Evidence?] (nice one).

But though I shortly guessed YOU HAD ME AT HELLO for the third 15-wide at 37A [Movie line spoken by Renee Zellweger after "Just shut up" I was greatly slowed down in the middle-east area with (to me) unfathomable clues like:

• 25D Fictional River of verse
• 26D Three-time skiing world champion
• 35D ___ acid (no, not boric and not malic but yes it ends with a 'C')
• 36D Best Actor nominee of 1991
• 34A Molly of early stage and screen
• 43A What you might wind up with (crank, handle, key... nothing else came to me)
• 49A Land in the Thames (this one felt familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it)

So this area is basically kaput for me. I saved it for later.

Okay, another flyer--this time at 3D where I got BEYOND SUSPICION for [Unimpeachable] and then again on the last 15-wide at 57 A with only _EI______Y__I__ I guessed BEIJING OLYMPICS for [Event starting on 08/08/08 at 08:08:08 p.m.].

After that I slogged around the bottom of the puzzle and cleaned it up a bit at a time, then the middle-west. I found that I once again forgot that dang mayor's name in 52D (CUOMO) and discovered yet another new and obscure geography name with ESPOO in 53D for [Neighbor of Helsinki]. Dig this: Wikipedia says of it: "Espoo shares its eastern border with Helsinki and Vantaa, while enclosing Kauniainen". What do you know about that?

I have a beef with the clue for 22D (REDDYE) because it is worded [Turn red, maybe]. Well, that would be "dye", wouldn't it? I think the clue should have been worded, "Turned red again, maybe". By the way, while I was looking at that clue I was thinking that a good answer to it as clued would be "Lear At".

I also personally think it a stretch to use the clue [Inspire] for AROUSE (as seen in 63A).

Okay, now to deadman's gulch in the mid-east area.

I finally decided with _O__E that 36D must be NOLTE [Best actor nominee in...]; as above.

Then that 43A must be REEL [What you might wind up with].

Finally my brain yielded OLEIC for 35D [___ acid].

So now I had AIT for [Land in the Thames] on 49A. I later googled this... check it out:

The Ait (island) is one of London Wildlife Trust's reserves and it is rarely visited by the public.

The 25D [Fictional river of verse] is AL_H. This is where the 'P' goes that I didn't write down until I looked it up (hey, with an Island like AIT that missing letter in the fictional river could have been any number of letters).

26D is MA_ER (the skier clue) and because 34A is __CON and they cross at 34A's second letter I decided that it must be MAIER (which proved to be correct).

Okay, now done and later on I went off to google. Do you know what? If you type in the 34A clue exactly as it is shown [Molly of early stage and screen] you get back PICON as the very first hit.

Now, about that mythical river of verse... it is the river in In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan". This also could have been clued as a river in Antarctica.

This was a great though hard Friday NYT but I must say that the middle-east area was going nowhere if you did not already know these things or have access to google while working it.

Thursday, July 17th, 2008 NYT syndicate crossword (Thursday, Jun 05, 2008; Puzzle No. 0605)

This puzzle was created by James Sajdak. It was a trickless Thursday with what was to me an initially inscrutable theme identified by 57A: [Where things are freely bought and sold... and what the starts of 17, 23, 36 and 46 Across do?]. So the answer to this was OPENMARKET, and what I finally realized is that this is shorthand for "the first word of {these 4 answers} create a phrase when paired with the word MARKET".

The four theme answers are: FLEACIRCUS; FARMERSALMANAC; SUPERBOWLSUNDAY; and BULLMOOSEPARTY, respectively. So we have "Flea Market," "Farmer's Market," Super Market," and "Bull Market."

While some of the clues gave me some trouble (more on that) I pretty much steadily worked my way through the puzzle until the NE corner, which I decided to save till last. When I finally got there I was faced with these across clues:

• 10 Casa ___, Toronto castle
• 16 Rapper with the gold-record album "O.G. Original Gangster"
• 19 Juggling nine balls, e.g.
• 22 Cyberball maker

Well, this is trouble for me. I know not the castle; nor do I know the rap album (I don't listen to rap because it is ___); I have no idea what the ball juggling thing is about; and I've never heard of Cyberball. (10, 16, 19 across are all four letters, and 22A is five, by the way.) So, the down clues in this area are:

• 10 Do anything to help
• 11 Place to use an echograph
• 12 Half a popular comedy team
• 13 Ancient Greek

10D is eleven letters, and 11, 12 and 13 down are five each. I don't yet have the cross on 22A (22 down [I'd like to see a ___]) nor the one next to it and down a row (26D [Projector part]), I'm missing the end of FARMERSALAMANAC, and I'm missing bits of middle-east. It looks pretty grim, because I don't know 10, 11, or 12 down, but I'm thinking I've got 13 down.

So I wrote in "ascetic" for 13D, and tried to make it work. I figured out that 22D was AMENU and 26D was LENS, threw in ATARI for 22A, put in REEF for 28A [Shorten, as a sail] and in a Doh! moment realized 23A was FARMERSMARKET.

Then, in an eclat I realized what was being looked for in 10D was LIFTAFINGER.

But now nothing is looking right in this corner but because I was though I was sure of LIFTAFINGER and of ATARI I decided ACETIC going into the ending 'I' in ATARI and the ending 'C' in ALMANAC could not be right at all. I took a flyer and guessed that 11D was OCEAN. With 'FO' on 10A I guessed Loma (which also works with "acetic"--damn!). After some pondering, I wrote in ICET for 16A and FEAT for 19A with a sniff of disdain for the clue. The half a comedy pair clue by cross-clues turns out to be MEARA. I've seen this before but it just did not stick with me.

Now I finished the few things in the middle-east section and the puzzle was done. But here was the real puzzler: How could an [Ancient Greek] in 13D be ATTIC? WTFO!?

Well, I looked it up on the Web later and guess what? It turns out that the various forms of the Greek language eventually wound up in a dialect know as--you guessed it--Attic Greek. And Attic Greek eventually evolved into the common Greek known as Koine Greek, which was used in the writing of the New Testament. How about that, sports fans? Would it not be a better clue to have written "Ancient Greek language"? That sort of thing seems better placed in a Saturday puzzle to me. JMHO. Oh, by the way, "ascetic" would be an appropriate answer for the clue.

Here's a link on Attic Greek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attic_Greek

Speaking of clues that gave me trouble, here are a few more:

• 15A. "A Dog of Flanders" novelist: OUIDA
• 27A. ___ Bridge, first to span the Mississippi at St. Louis: EADS
• 32A. City nicknamed Gateway to the West: Winnipeg
• 42A. Make: EARN
• 56A. Win: REAP
• 6D. Shamans: CURERS
• 31D. ___ tree: UPA

I actually knew 15A, but could not pull it up at first. 27A I had no clue about. 32A... uhhhhh... maybe I knew that... Sounds vaguely familiar. First time I've ever seen MAKE for [earn]. I can't in my stretchiest mind justify the clue [Win] for REAP. All I can do is shake my head. And is it just me or does it seem a stretch to call a shaman a CURER? 31D is a fine clue; it is just that I was trying to think of trees which have three letters and was just misled by the clue. I could not even get it when I had U_A. It was only when I jumped on SUPERBOWLSUNDAY that I _finally_ got it. It was a V8 moment, for sure. Worse thing is--I've seen it before, I'm sure!

I believe I like the [___ tree] clue the best of them all.

Friday, July 11th, 2008 -- MGWCC #006 -- "Can You Dig It?"

This is the sixth Matt Gaffney puzzle I have done since Matt started his weekly crossword contest, and I hope nobody posts a comment like the one from last week where someone said that MGWCC #005 was "too easy". As Matt commented, that "will not be a problem this week". This was a really tough puzzle. I can usually work through a Saturday NYT without touching google but for this puzzle I had to rely upon it for clues like: "Amy Goodwin's network"; "Late San Francisco poet Jack"; "___+ (French TV channel)"; "Penninsular nation"; and "French department Seine-et-___".

This puzzle was published--like all of them--on Friday, but the contest answer has to be in by Noon EDT, Tuesday. If you are still working on this puzzle as you read this, here is a spoiler warning.

DISPEL in 1A was the answer for [Brush aside], which I was thinking might be "offput'. Nope.

MAGICK was the answer for 19A [Occult activity]. All I could think of here in six letters was seance, but since then I have come up with this list: magic (5); magick, voodoo (6); sorcery (7); Idolatry (8); cartomancy, numerology, channeling, witchcraft (10); Soothsaying (11); fortunetelling (14).

29A bit me with "Who ___?" for five letters. I'm thinking of everything but the correct answer (CARES). Obvious when I got it.

Some very obvious answers for some questions really bit me. COURTS in 34A [With "the," system of justice]. ELECT in 5D [Put in, as in Putin] had me thinking, "I wonder what the Russian word is for that?". I also got bit by 41D [Treating impartially] by writing in 'fairly' when the expected response was FAIRTO. I finally deciphered this one by deciding that 57A [A kind gesture from] had to be NICEOF. It was the last word I wrote in this grid.

The best clue in the puzzle had me vexed almost the most: [Em preceder] in 48A. All I could think of at first as the em-dash. But the six letter answer turned out to be from the story of Dorothy: AUNTIE.

Of course as with all of the MGWCC puzzles one has to figure out an "answer" from solving the grid. This week the instruction was to find the missing letter. But after completing the grid I found no letters missing (It was pangrammatic). After going off entirely in the wrong direction I finally connected the title of the puzzle--"Can You Dig It?" with an answer in the grid: CANAL in 33A for [___+ (French TV channel)]. To the left of this was a black grid block and to the left of that was PANAM in 32A [It revolutionized 20th-century global transportation] and I saw in my mind's eye PANAM_CANAL. Aha! The letter missing is A. I don't know if it is intended as part of the mini-theme, but crossing the same black square downwards are the words SHIPS and CROSS, which with the 'A' would yield ShipsAcross. This makes sense because that is what the canal enables, in a way, as a shortcut.