" I Made You a Pair of Shorts" September 9, 2022

[jrdad]

I tumbled to the nicknames with last initials and thought the answer would be a similar form in the grid. And, lo and behold, there at 13 down was "STAND", Stan D, Stanley Drake who drew 'The Heart of Juliette Jones' cartoon. A quick swim to a desert island.

[RichA2]

I didn’t even get halfway to first base. I didn’t see the mechanism at all, and was befuddled by the odd title of the puzzle. How often is the title a complete sentence?

I tried to find some way that “I” could make “U” a pair of shorts. No luck.I spent too much time looking for some reference to Bermudas, to no avail. Did think about submitting Charles Schulz as a Hail Mary, but didn’t.

Congrats to those who got this odd one.

[Franklin.Bluth]

Also I find quite the opposite - that Matt's metas are tighter than Mike's. But shrug, a solve is a solve.

I guess I'm thinking of some of the ones earlier this year — a couple of Matt's required knowledge outside the puzzle, or some additional step of intuition, whereas I find that Mike's are more likely to literally spell out an answer.

[Fogway]

In an alternate universe...

"Hmmm. The word AND is in 38A, as ANTHONY AND ERSON. The title is I MADE YOU A PAIR OF SHORTS, so I gotta look for a pair of something.

"Wait! Maybe "YOU" means the letter U. Aha! At 58A is YUM. Connect the U there to the adjacent letters LYC and put them together to spell the name Lucy, a character in the comic strip Peanuts!

"What name would pair with Lucy? How about her younger brother, Linus? Wait! Look at 2D where there's the letters INSU. Move them around to spell INUS. The border must be blocking the letter L. Oh that tricky MG!

"Of course, the title refers to SHORTS, and here the pair of names Lucy and Linus are shortened in the grid! It's gotta be Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, so the answer's gotta be Charles Schulz!

"I'm glad I didn't stay in that Chips rabbit hole. Who ever heard of a cartoonist nicknamed Chip?"

[JJD]

I’m glad I only had an hour for the grid and contest.
KAS 5 for me.

[TMart]

I thought the meta-nism was great with nickname+last initial hidden in the clues, but the Isaac-Ike and Charles-Chip connections were a bit of a stretch. Google did confirm them though, so I went with it.

On a side note, I know a guy named Anthony whose last name begins with an "A". I'm going to start calling him "Tonya".

[boharr]

Shenanigans. Even if CHIP is a nickname for Charles (I've never heard of that), mechanism was CHIPS which is not. Further CHARLES SCHULZ never want by it and his nickname is SPARKY. Friday I did a google search on cartoonists named CHIP and there were mainly three. Chip Dunham (whose name is Robert; not Charles) who does the strip Overboard. Political cartoonist Chip Bok (whose real name is Arthur), Chip Sullivan and a few others.

The mechanism wasn't CHIPS. It was CHIP + S. Just like the other common nicknames in the clues:
IKE + A Isaac Asimov
MEG + A Margaret Atwood
TONY + A Anthony Anderson
ABE + L Abraham Lincoln
JACK + S John Spencer

Pretty clear I think that we were to change CHIP to a full name and come up with a cartoonist Charles whose last name begins with S.
CHIP + S Charles Schultz
I knew Schultz's nickname was Sparky, but Mike was dealing with generic nicknames here. I doubt, for instance, that Asimov was called IKE much.

[drbockel2]

just a hard no this week.

[hunkra]

Well, I was close with my last resort guess of Chip Sansom of Born Loser fame. Wrong shore.

I did the exact same thing. Arthur Sansom's nickname was Chip, after all. I suppose the "noted" in the meta makes Schulz a greater choice... but really... *sigh*

[Barney]

Funny thing is, if I’d thrown a wild guess on this it would have been my favorite cartoonist, Roz Chast, though Charles Schulz was more a national treasure.

Not sure this puzzle exactly nestles into the National Treasure box.

Odds of winning the coveted mug likely high.

[MajordomoTom]

I had the first part of the first part.

Ike, Tony, Abe, etc.

But not the IkeA, TonyA, etc. second part of the first part.

Did nor even send in a guess.

[TeaJenny]

I should've gone with my gut and guessed Charles Schulz. Even if I'd found the mechanism (spoilers: I didn't), I never would've made the Chip/Charles connection. The only person I know who goes by "Chip" was christened "Hugh."

[zach]

A fun fact for the day:

While most commercial US airports are named for politicians and military heroes, there are a few named for people in the arts:

- Bob Hope Airport (Burbank, CA)
- Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport
- Will Rogers World Airport (Oklahoma City, OK)
- John Wayne Airport (Santa Ana, CA)
- Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport (Santa Rosa, CA)

[Franklin.Bluth]

I had the first part of the first part.

Ike, Tony, Abe, etc.

But not the IkeA, TonyA, etc. second part of the first part.

Did nor even send in a guess.

For me, it was the clue for 69A that did it — "Jacks player's need" was such a weird clue and phrasal construction for the answer SPEED that it caught my eye right away, especially in such close proximity to the theme answer JOHN SPENCER. Next came IKEA (helpfully capitalized...you didn't have to do that, Matt) and from there it came quickly. CHIP S threw me until I googled what Chip was a nickname for.

If I hadn't immediately noticed "Jacks...." I'd probably not have solved this one.

[HunterX]

KAS 5 for me, which I translate to "I wish I hadn't spent so much time looking at this one."

Saw the AND (it's short) in Anthony Anderson, and HAM in Abraham Lincoln. IS in Isaac Asimov, AT in Margaret Atwood, and OH in John Spencer. Dead end.

Saw the ANT in Anthony Anderson, which matched up with 34D. And SAAC in Isaac kinda matches with 47A SAC... But that didn't go any further.

Hey... Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address. GA. That matches with 4D GOA, giving me an O. And Margaret Atwood wrote the Handmaid's Tale which (ignoring the "The") is HT, which matches with 42A HIT, giving me an I. Now we're getting someplace! Which is nowhere, since how would this work for the actors? And Asimov wrote so much it'd be hard NOT to find multiple matches. Okay...

Wait... Pairs of shorts... So EMO and POP are a pair of (short) music genres. And REV (ignoring the clue's intention) and NUN are religious figures. AER and SKY make a pair. HIT and SAC match for batting terms! This could be... nothing.

How 'bout my good old, tried and true, check the pairs of letters? My kids groaned and rolled their eyes. There are 2 pairs of AA, 2 pairs of MM (in the same grid answer), 2 pairs of OO (intersecting), 2 EE's (intersecting), but only 1 TT, CC, and SS. So the double letter metanism fails again.

At the start, my kids and I decided to throw out names of cartoonists we knew. My random first guess was Charles Schultz. My kids didn't know who he was. I figured, given the average age group doing the WSJ puzzle, that was most likely the answer, though a number of others could fit the bill. But I never submit hail mary's anyway.

So the very short streak of 3 (less than 1/12th my best streak) ends. Again.

[Flying_Burrito]

Shenanigans. Even if CHIP is a nickname for Charles (I've never heard of that), mechanism was CHIPS which is not. Further CHARLES SCHULZ never want by it and his nickname is SPARKY. Friday I did a google search on cartoonists named CHIP and there were mainly three. Chip Dunham (whose name is Robert; not Charles) who does the strip Overboard. Political cartoonist Chip Bok (whose real name is Arthur), Chip Sullivan and a few others.

The mechanism wasn't CHIPS. It was CHIP + S. Just like the other common nicknames in the clues:
IKE + A Isaac Asimov
MEG + A Margaret Atwood
TONY + A Anthony Anderson
ABE + L Abraham Lincoln
JACK + S John Spencer

Pretty clear I think that we were to change CHIP to a full name and come up with a cartoonist Charles whose last name begins with S.
CHIP + S Charles Schultz
I knew Schultz's nickname was Sparky, but Mike was dealing with generic nicknames here. I doubt, for instance, that Asimov was called IKE much.

you are correct Boharr as Asimov's nickname was The Human typewriter due to his literary proficiency. I doubted from the get go that MG thought we would also know John Spencer or Anthony Anderson's nickname. The meta solution was under my nose the entire time as I got Tony A and Jack S right away. I should have used Mr G for Isaac and Margaret short names as I thought they would have been Izzy and MaineMarge ( )...Live and learn, ready for the next one

[kawaja]

Well bummer. I got some assistance to confirm I needed to go further with the names and submitted Matt Groenig, since each of those names is a character on the Simpsons and I was reminded that Bart said "Eat my SHORTS!" Unfortunately, I messed up on the names and went with
ZACK/MARGE/TONY/ABE/JACK. Sigh/

Plus, Bart also wears shorts; and I 'm lazy and could torture 'Simpson' out of A38+44 without looking for the mechanism.
Glad I spent so little time after the grid, was beyond my ability but learning!

[woozy]

This one had no "now we do this and we are done" moment. I got the mechanism to take the clues with the nicknames and got CHIPS. But that's a hardly a *stopping* point. There are dozens of cartoonists named Charles (including Chuck Jones of course [and as the titles was "a pair of shorts" animation could be strongly implied]) There was simply no way I could consider that done simply because it had a letter S artificially stuck to it.. And as CHAIR can be replaced with STAND, and POP with EMO, and in the other direction SAC with POP. And REV with SPEED it seemed absolutely certain we were not done and had more work to do. Although neither of those nor the ATA with GOA and AER LINGUS with ANI LINGUS etc whereever able to complete.

This just wasn't complete.

[DebbieC]

Shenanigans. Even if CHIP is a nickname for Charles (I've never heard of that), mechanism was CHIPS which is not. Further CHARLES SCHULZ never want by it and his nickname is SPARKY. Friday I did a google search on cartoonists named CHIP and there were mainly three. Chip Dunham (whose name is Robert; not Charles) who does the strip Overboard. Political cartoonist Chip Bok (whose real name is Arthur), Chip Sullivan and a few others.

I understand your reasoning, but would suggest that Isaac Asimov didn't go by IKE, Margaret Atwood didn't go by MEG, Anthony Anderson didn't go by TONY, John Spencer didn't go by JACK, that we know. The mechanism was SHORTS so a short form of the first name (nickname) and the last name (first initial) which took us to the clues and eventually a nickname/first initial that took us back to a real name - Charles Schultz.

[boharr]

This one had no "now we do this and we are done" moment. I got the mechanism to take the clues with the nicknames and got CHIPS. But that's a hardly a *stopping* point. There are dozens of cartoonists named Charles (including Chuck Jones of course [and as the titles was "a pair of shorts" animation could be strongly implied]) There was simply no way I could consider that done simply because it had a letter S artificially stuck to it.
This just wasn't complete.

Wow. So you thought that all the letters following the nicknames were "artificial stuck" on. And not indicative of the first letters of the last names in the grid.

IkeA
MegA
TonyA
AbeL
JackS