"Name Dropping" September 1, 2023

[TheCatt]

I really didn't like this one. No one calls her Beatrice, etc.

[michaelm]

My AHA came when looking one last time and thought AMES in the top right was one letter away from James. That got me thinking about doing something with one letter. Then I saw Josh and nearby USA and was off to the races. But I had stared at it for almost an hour before and saw nothing.

GREG and TORY.
Had to start backwards this week.

[jhseeman]

I got stuck in the following.

If you look at the down clues for the first entry of the themeres.

Cajol - Carol - R
Bull - Bill - I
Can - Dan - D
----
Eagl - Earl - R

I bit really hard onto this, thinking...yeah name dropping, down column, one letter change all the first letter of the themer.....I couldn't convince myself I was wrong....even was ok that RIDER would be a noun instead of an adjective but I could worry about that later......GRRR....took a big old chunk of dynamite to get me out of that hole....I mean it had it all, save for the 4th letter and lord knows I was trying to somehow get a name out of TWOBIT....but that's what this hole was a TWOBIT red herring...ugh.

[Joe Ross]

ARRGH! I forgot to submit AGAIN

Ditto. One sympathizes.

Thanks for the late reminder.

So, a very terrible, mixed-up, ugly weekend without wifi beginning at 6:30 AM ET, Saturday. A very small UHaul truck pulled out of a neighbor's driveway yanking down the fiber optic cable that feeds two homes on the street, which had me debasing myself on the phone with our provider demanding repair sooner than later (if I accepted their schedule, service wouldn't be restored until Wednesday or Thursday - the correct crews are here, now, & service will be restored in a few minutes), missing the use of my Bearcats season tickets for the 1st game of the season, and talking poor, wonderful @KayW through MMM file prep over the phone.

It was very stressful for the whole family.

On Thursday I spent too much time with the 5 "dropping" (Down) proper names & trying to quilt them into an answer. Anyone else mine those depths? Bueller?

Life was busy on Friday, then Saturday happened.

Yesterday, I took to the phone, abandoned the previous rabbit hole, and better-applied @woozy's "some part of the names must drop." I duckduckgoed the TE people, then reconciled the dropped parts of their given first names with the 5 other entries.

Fair puzzle & gettable. Congrats to all solvers & double congrats & best wishes to all submitters.

EDIT: WIFI restored 1 minute after posting.

[Deb F]

Only got this one because of help from the ZooMuggle call on Friday. I couldn't make the transition to the first step as I was totally hung up on finding different folks to "drop" into the themers. i.e. seeing Max in 21D, swapping the x for a d and making Mad Max giving me Mel with Gibson. Only worked once!!! Also looked at words made out of the names--OSA from Josh, ALP from Alf, EAU boom Bea but it ended there wih no path to a five letter word. So thanks, all, for putting me out of my misery and congratulations solvers!

Have a great week!

[Kas]

Nope. Kas 5. And a good day to you...I'll be at the bar.

[mikeB]

The solving of this meta had a very odd twist for me. There came a time when I said to myself “Aha! Josh is short for Joshua. And Bea is short for Beatrice. And Alf is short for Alfred. And Walt is short for Walter. And Greg is short for Gregory.” I would guess there are other solvers who had such a string of thoughts. The theme entries almost demand such thinking at that stage of the solving, when we’re looking for something those five entries have in common. Thus, the word “short” crossed our minds at least five times – only for us to discover later that it is actually the answer to the puzzle. That link between the solution and the solving is a very interesting twist to this meta – a puzzle that maneuvers you into saying a word to yourself several times and then later reveals it as the answer to the puzzle. Imagine that. Of course, once the five letters have been harvested to form the answer, the connection of the word “short” with those entries changes roles and becomes the final click that closes the deal, even if the solver doesn’t recall thinking that word over and over. It’s a very different and interesting twist that’s built into the mechanism.

One additional treat offered by this meta is a nice SECOND final-click emanating from Entry 37D. The Entry is NOSY, which phonetically is “no Z”. If you take the well-known name Will (“short” for William) Shortz and, as instructed by 37D, drop the Z, you also get the solution to our puzzle. Being a member of the No-Coincidences Society, I presume this is a hat-tip to an icon of the larger community – a classy gesture indeed.

Hats off to Mr. Shenk for creating such a bizarrely clever – and cleverly bizarre – meta.

[kurtalert]

Ah, damn. Had the thought to lengthen their names, but missed the next step- connecting the name extensions to other clues. Oh well.

[Sleepy]

ARRGH! I forgot to submit AGAIN

Me too! I just realized that I never submitted my answer to WSJ. But more importantly, I did declare myself ashore in the muggles forum! That’s what really matters most

[Annabelle]

I got a different 5-letter adjective when I just took the missing parts of the first names: ua, trice, red, er, and ory. The first letters of these anagram into outer. Guess I'm on the wrong island?

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

There was one coincidence so attractive that I thought it must lead to the rabbit.

Name-Dropping could mean you literally have to drop names from the themers. And sure enough, four out of the five have reasonable candidates:
JOHN in JOsHgibsoN
BETH in BEaarTHur
ALAN in ALflANdon
WALLY in WALtkelLY (yes, inelegantly both forms of Walter)
and even REGAN in gREGnormAN

So, look at the letters left over, right? For Bea Arthur you get AARUR, which anagrams to ARRAU at 52D, which kept popping out to me as the strangest entry in the grid. Couldn't be a coincidence, right?

But it was. From Walt Kelly, you have KTEL remaining, which is not rare as crossword fill. The others are just nonsense (although FL DON from Alf Landon must surely refer to Don Johnson, right )

The other thing I tried was dropping a single letter from the themers to find another word within the remaining letters. There are only three good candidates here:
Drop an A in Bea Arthur: bEARTHur -> EARTH
Drop an L in Alf Landon: ALFAndon -> ALFA
drop a T in Walt Kelly: WALKelly -> WALK

And ALFA fulfills 46D as another letter before Foxtrot. But from there... well, Earth is a (33A) spot for an ibex, right?

Those rabbit holes, as well some of the others mentioned above, kept me busy until I found the real rabbit.

[gojira]

I got a different 5-letter adjective when I just took the missing parts of the first names: ua, trice, red, er, and ory. The first letters of these anagram into outer. Guess I'm on the wrong island?

This was exactly what I did. Last week's simpler wade ashore had me forgetful of how to think about these puzzles, lol

Isaac is laughing at me, in the water, from the rail high above....

[Bonnibel]

I really didn't like this one. No one calls her Beatrice, etc.

It was actually BEAtrice that turned the light on in my head. The grid entry THRICE seemed a bit archaic to me and voila! There it was.

Yes I'm sure no one called her Beatrice, just as the others were probably not called by longer given names. I myself rarely use my longer given name. However the point was that in each instance the SHORTened version of a longer name appears in themed entries.

I thought it was great fun, acknowledging though that it always seems fun when you find the solution. Other times I am not so lucky.

Happy Labor Day to all! It's a beautiful day here in So. Calif.

[woozy]

wasn't Lisa Simpson's crush name Landon?

I believe you’re thinking of Langdon Alger. He’s very quiet and enjoys puzzles.

Sounds like someone who’d be into crossword contests.

Hee hee. Yeah. I know. Bit I couldn't actually admit I knew because then I'd have to admit it's LanGdon and not Landon.

The last name are first names was a real tempting rabbit hole. I had to force myself to say "look, he's no amateur. If he wanted that to be the mechanism he could surely do a better job"

Still. In hindsight it's odd the names he picked. Always glad to see a shout out to Walt Kelly but no names from anyone still alive? Or born after 1930?

[Wendy Walker]

I was VERY lucky this week: I guessed what the metanism would be as soon as I filled out BEA ARTHUR and hence didn't even have to Google for THRICE -- I knew what it had to be! Imagine my surprise when I still made page 1 even after starting 20 minutes late.

[woozy]

I got a different 5-letter adjective when I just took the missing parts of the first names: ua, trice, red, er, and ory. The first letters of these anagram into outer. Guess I'm on the wrong island?

NEVER rely on an anagram without without a justification. And never trust an answer that is an word unrelated to any other aspect of the puzzle (unless it's a lead pipe cinch-- i cant say they never happen).

[Al Laubenstein]

I was VERY lucky this week: I guessed what the metanism would be as soon as I filled out BEA ARTHUR and hence didn't even have to Google for THRICE -- I knew what it had to be! Imagine my surprise when I still made page 1 even after starting 20 minutes late.

Dr G says her name is actually Bernice. Not that I let that fool me.

[boharr]

I was VERY lucky this week: I guessed what the metanism would be as soon as I filled out BEA ARTHUR and hence didn't even have to Google for THRICE -- I knew what it had to be! Imagine my surprise when I still made page 1 even after starting 20 minutes late.

Dr G says her name is actually Bernice. Not that I let that fool me.

From Conrad's write up on Fiend:
A solving pal mentioned that Bea Arthur was born Bernice Frankel but went by Bea and later added the “trice:”
Familiarly known as Bea, Ms. Arthur was billed in the theater and on television as Beatrice, but the name was one she made up. She was born Bernice Frankel in New York City on May 13, 1922, according to Mr. Watt. But she preferred to be called B — “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it,”’ she said — and later expanded it to Beatrice because, she said, she imagined it would look lovely on a theater marquee. The name Arthur is a modified version of the name of her first husband, the screenwriter and producer Robert Alan Aurthur.

[DrTom]

The WSJ - VERY funny story. I went to Crossword Fiend and downloaded what I thought was the puz file. Turns out it was the puz file for THURSDAY (since I did this Thursday afternoon). It's title was "Drop the Subject" but it did not have the prompt. So I went to WSJ for Friday and did a confirmation error in that I saw Drop and went no further. The prompt was a 5 letter adjective. The Thursday puzzle had long entries that were a "rebus" of sorts in that they omitted a word, for example one entry was something like "That bratty Mitchell kid" and there was room for DENNISNAMCE which omitted THEME. There were 4 more like that and then a reference to type of a puzzle that this one wasn't, i.e. THEME. In that respect THEME is an adjective, so 5 letter adjective. DUH.

I was right of course, just for the wrong puzzle. That beats last week when I was just completely wrong because in my hurry to solve I ignored so many signs.

T

[whimsy]

I was VERY lucky this week: I guessed what the metanism would be as soon as I filled out BEA ARTHUR and hence didn't even have to Google for THRICE -- I knew what it had to be! Imagine my surprise when I still made page 1 even after starting 20 minutes late.

Dr G says her name is actually Bernice. Not that I let that fool me.

And what's a nickname for Bernice? Why, it's Bunny!

More rabbit holes --

...
what is the significance of ESPANOL in the center?
...

Yes, and with OLE and ANO dropping down from the J in JOSHGIBSON and the first R in BEAARTHUR respectively ....

...

The other thing I tried was dropping a single letter from the themers to find another word within the remaining letters. There are only three good candidates here:
Drop an A in Bea Arthur: bEARTHur -> EARTH

....

I also tried extracting BEAR for that one and attempting to match it up with 53A OSA. Again with the Espanol!

Finally, I saw LAM dropping down from the G in JOSHGIBSON, and Oh so wanted to pair that with the nearby 14D HIE; then poor little HIE could actually play a part, instead of just being bridesmaid filler all the time it's used!