"Chain Gang" - August 2, 2019

[Eric Porter]

Of the 5 Guys, I was most familiar with Guy Fawkes because of his mask and the movie V for Vendetta. I wasn't familiar with Guy Pearce or Smiley and Guy Fieri only rings a bell if I hear his whole name. I'd heard of Guy Ritchie, but only barely.

I did a Google search for "fawkes ritchie pearce" because I knew these had to be answers and saw this result. Once I saw they were named Guy, I immediately thought of 5 Guys. It's sort of cheating, but I would have figured it out eventually.

[Joe Ross]

Here’s where one can wind up after being LAS for 3-4 days with Isaac, listening to Sam Cooke, on what began to feel like a never ending journey. Chefs never entered my mind, though the food industry sure did! It’s Monday AM now and time to wake up and smell the coffee. I’m still looking for answers, feeling oddly like I’m lost somewhere in O Brother, Where Art Thou, with someone hitting the FF and RR buttons when we’re in play mode.

Forgive me, if I sound disappointed, but the loads of M & M I chewed on all weekend is having a backfiring, or BILE effect on me. There’s an unexplained GAP here. The last ORR and ORE you threw me - well I must’ve missed the safety drill, so I was unsure how to use them. I’m having a little weekend sailing remorse and unsure how the TAGAMET, YARN, and ACA are supposed to help either. Maybe it’s time for one of those, whatchacall, ER... uh...Spirit-chiefs...to come on board and give me a morale boost. Anyone else catching my drift, or feeling my PAYNE?

Using the idea of a chain being dropped on the grid, I found fascinating, if not helpful, clues.
All letters of the name CHRISTOPHER on row 3 and PAYNE in the 25 squares of the right upper quadrant (columns 9-14). That is the name of the DOORDASH COO who is reported in the WSJ 7/15 & 16/19 to have worked out the food delivery industry-changing deal with McDonald’s. DOORDASH (rows 13 & 14) was recently valued at $13B in the booming 1 million subscribers food delivery service in Houston - with plans to go National soon if Houston is a success - to do DELIVERIES (column 13, 14, 15) of McDonalds through a $9.99 subscription service - $12 minimum order, starting July 29, a blow to UBER EATS (columns 1, 2, & 3). The McD founder RAY CROC (columns 6, 7, & 8 - note a misspelling of actual name Crok). MCDONALDS can be found in a series of North to South diagonals on the grid.

JAMES ELY, a brilliant Vanderbilt PhD/employment and property rights lawyer can be found squeezily on row 7. I bet he’d be useful with the ins and outs of all those $25/hr. taxi/delivery drivers.

WAITR, competitor to Doordash and UBER, can be found on row 12.
ARISTA, one of the largest data cloud computing companies, capable of tracking all of this, is also on row 12.

WHERE’S MY ORDER (rows 13 & 14), BURGER (rows 1, 2, & 3), FRIES (row 5), and SHAKE (row 11). STORE, DELI, CELL PHONE, EMAIL, RTE and ETA are all there. No kidding.
On row 15, you can ROGER DAT TOO!

BTW, (Row 8) SPEAR’s CELLAR is listed on Google as a restaurant on E 17th and Gramercy, next to NYU (Row 9) in Manhattan. It is no food chain.

In case you care to join me, I’ll return now to listening to the sounds of Pink Floyd/Money and The Beatles/Yellow Submarine (forward, instead of backwards this time) to drown out the sounds and the memories of working on the Chain Gang, and dream of one day solving a meta.


Sent from my iPad

WIth only the sincerest respect and admiration, this has to be some Whole-World Championship Rabbit-Holing.

[Inca]

Glad I didn't obsess over this one. Not familiar with the 5 Guys....neither in the grid nor the food chain.

[Bird Lives]

I thought the Guy names hidden were pretty diverse, to give a sporting chance to many! For fun, I thought about some other Guys...

Clue: Hebrew greeting to La Vérité’s Brigitte.

And I can never remember the name of this tennis player Guy...

Not being a Canadian, even a non-royal, I'd forgotten about him. I kept trying to work out something for de Maupassant, but in vain.

[BarbaraK]

Of the 5 Guys, I was most familiar with Guy Fawkes because of his mask and the movie V for Vendetta. I wasn't familiar with Guy Pearce or Smiley and Guy Fieri only rings a bell if I hear his whole name. I'd heard of Guy Ritchie, but only barely.

I did a Google search for "fawkes ritchie pearce" because I knew these had to be answers and saw this result. Once I saw they were named Guy, I immediately thought of 5 Guys. It's sort of cheating, but I would have figured it out eventually.

This is fabulous! Wouldn't it be great if someone were reading that book in the bathroom and found the meta answer.

The only two Guys I knew were Fawkes and Fieri. But the shared first name was enough to get my attention, and I figured that when I googled I'd find that the other three were Guys too.

[Toby]

Demonstrating the big problems with knowledge of current interest, I immediately saw Guy Fawkes and thought about the Gunpowder Plot, but other 16th century allusions couldn’t be found. Ritchie was clearly another name so I googled and found that Fawkes and Ritchie are both Harry Potter characters. To my shame, I haven’t read the Harry Potter books yet, so I googled Harry Potter characters...and there are hundreds of them, many odd. Fortunately, another solver told me I was on the wrong track, and more googling led me too the hidden names, either vaguely or not at all familiar, and the name of the burger fast food place I never paid much attention to. Too much googling for me, so not as enjoyable as puzzles where there is a possibility I could get them on my own.

[hcbirker]

I love reading the post mortems! I got this one rather quickly, but others I dig through so many rabbit holes, stubbornly thinking that THIS is the one, like a dog barking at a cat up a tree, eventually memorizing the grid, and getting nowhere. (Heidi)

[Joe Ross]

Apologies! Posted to the wrong thread.

[Richard]

I thought WII and MII were unusual answers but got no where with that. Saw Cairo and thought Ramis might be an Egyptian king but he is not.

Actually totally refreshed my thinking. Thought "gang" referred to a group of people, saw Fawkes then found Fieri and was basically done.

Am familiar with Five Guys.

Richard

[MarkL]

Though our efforts wound up as 3 down—“failed”—we want to assure Matt that we faithfully fed the many rabbit colonies he started throughout the grid, learning much about food chains in the process. We thought Pearce was John Ed Pearce who wrote the biography of Colonel Sanders and that Ritchie was either the bassist Brian Ritchie who was involved in the Wendy’s commercial controversy or the food writer Tori Ritchie. Smiley we took to be Pulitzer Prize Winning author Jane Smiley who has written about the corporatization of food. And while we saw Guy Fawkes we thought the name Kesha was so unusual in 53 across that it led us to author Kesha Ratliff. We also explored homophones because of the “hoo” in 55 down, the “aah” in 7 down and the two “says” in 18 down and 52 down, leading us to the chain gang lyrics “say hooh aah.” You left us with much food for thought and fingers well exercised from Google searches but no meta solve. Bon Appetit!

Another ear bug to battle!

[Deb F]

I constantly marvel at the cleverness of this group and the pains taken in attempting to identify the meta. What a group! Somewhat like Joe Ross, I saw GUFFAWKES and thought there was a substitution of Y for F that would then translate to a substitution solution. Nothing worked though. Knew Guy Fieri but the Ritchie and Pearce took a while to tie in. Once I did, though, had to work at Smiley as I was not familiar. Finally resorted to Mr. G. Overall a fun puzzle. Nice work, Muggles, whether you got it or not, your efforts are terrific. And thanks for the Arlo memories!!!

[31 Down]

Personally, don't consider Five Guys "fast food" since I believe they cook your burger after ordering rather than simply assembling it. Nor is it "fast food" since it's food you want to eat as opposed to the oxymoron.

[ZenoWeevil]

Thought of a three other possible entries and two other impossibly long ones that could have been used:
APLOMBARDOR [Self confident zeal]
CAROLFEVER [Christmas song for a flu epidemic]
LUMBARKERMIT [A well-known frog's pain area]
WILLIAMSBURGESSENCE [A Colonial Era perfume]
COMSTOCKWELLESLEY [Lode found at a famous college]
I'm sure that Matt could have come up with several others.

[Hector]

Had never to my recollection heard of Five Guys, but found them with Google, and, contrary to my guess that it was a geographical thing, it turns out there are locations a stone's throw from places I go frequently. I like these metas where you don't necessarily infer the answer linearly from previously getting the pieces, but have to put two and two together about the meta to get the pieces ("I wonder if there's a Guy Pearce? A Guy Smiley? Sure enough.")

[KayW]

Because of the food connection, I first thought that the hidden names would be famous chefs, and indeed they are: Graeme Ritchie, Guy Fieri, Andrew Pearce, Kevin Fawkes and Chef Smiley (aka Lamont Moses). I spent some time in that rabbit hole, which of course led nowhere. Since there are no coincidences in these puzzles, I credit Matt Gaffney with a clever bit of misdirection there.

Eventually, clued in by Guy Fawkes, the only other name that rang a bell with me (yeah, I'm old and I don't watch much TV), I figured out the real connection.

This is exactly the trap I fell into. The first name I saw was Fieri, and I knew he was a chef so I latched onto that aspect as a mechanism. I hadn't heard of any other chefs with last names in the long answers, so I googled and found the others that SteveB listed. After way too long trying to find any connection among them or to any fast food chaines, I finally started thinking hmmm there's a Guy Fawkes and a Guy Pearce.... Soon the solution fell in place.

As requested, one eight by ten color glossy in the FAQ channel. A most appropriate ear-worm for an eatery-themed week!!

[KayW]

In 8x10 color glossy pictures, we hope!

With circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one

Kids today – they won’t get this reference. Too busy with their damn Instagram, Cardi B, and Fortnite. Ya got trouble my friends.

Right here in River City! With a capital T and that rhymes with G and that stands for Guys. Five Guys.

[Joe Ross]

You may disagree:

15A can be CAIRO or CHIRO

7D can be AAH or AHH

[Bob cruise director]

For the benefit of someone who has barely heard of the chain Five Guys, much less been there, who are Richie, Fieri, Pearce, Fawkes and Smiley? I saw Guy Fawkes but had no idea what he had to do with a fast food chain. At least a 5 on the Kas scale.

None of those names by themselves have anything to do with any fast food chain. It is just that those are five "famous" people with first name Guy.

Famous like Margaret Cho???

[HowardHuddleston]

As for Guy Pearce, I have rewatched "LA Confidential" several times just to see the face he makes when James Cromwell says the name "Rollo Temazzi"

[MikeMillerwsj]

Happy August to the large crowd that successfully completed this contest: 91% of 1,366 entries in total. As you might expect, incorrect submissions included lots of other big fast-food chains, led by Arby's (!7, any idea why that was so popular?) and Burger King (13, ditto?), along with Wendy's (4), McDonald's (3), Sonic (3), and many many others. Honorable mention to the four solvers who submitted "Chicken Guy," a restaurant I hadn't heard of (there seem to be just two outlets so calling it a "chain" might be a stretch).

And congrats to this week's winner: Troy Stephens of Pittsboro, N.C.