Today’s meta instructions say we are looking for a 10-letter word. The grid itself looks a little odd. There are some unusual large clusters of black squares at the top and bottom of the grid and not many long entries at all. This puzzle is also 20×21 in size and has 151 answers; I normally use 144 answers in a regularly sized 21×21 grid, so it’s a smaller grid but with significantly more answers than usual. (I would not expect you to count the number of answers or even care about that in a typical puzzle, but sometimes it can be useful information for metas — an especially high answer count is often a sign that the grid must be very constrained. There’s a handy little trick you can use to quickly count the number of answers, too, which I’ll get back to later.)
There’s only one answer in the puzzle whose clue tells you it’s relevant for the meta, at 68A: [1990 MC Hammer hit whose title is a hint to solving the meta] which is “U CAN’T TOUCH THIS.” How might that song title apply here? Every meta has some “you either see it or you don’t” quality to it, but this one really just requires a single insight to crack the whole thing.
The key is to think about the letter U. You know how I said that this grid might be really constrained? Take a look around: There are U’s everywhere. 61 of them in total, in fact, which is a very high number of U’s. Start circling or highlighting all of those U’s. Remember that the song title says “U Can’t Touch This,” so now, eliminate all the letters touching the U’s — that means any letter surrounding a U, including letters that border it diagonally. Think of this like a big game of “Minesweeper,” with the 61 U’s representing mines and the letters surrounding them as the numbers you have to uncover, with the remaining letters helping you to win the game.
When you’re done, you will be left with 10 letters in the whole grid that do not touch a U. Those 10 letters spell out INTANGIBLE, a word describing something that you can’t touch.
Speaking of “Minesweeper,” I drew inspiration for this crossword from a memorable Matt Gaffney metapuzzle back in February 2016, called “Business Is Booming.” That puzzle gave people the central hint about MINESWEEPER, and the job was basically the same — find all the M’s throughout the grid, eliminate all the letters that are orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to the M’s, and use the remaining letters to spell out the answer (which was “THANKS, I HAD A BLAST”). I had “U Can’t Touch This” as an earworm sometime a month or two ago and started thinking about whether it was even possible to come close to matching Matt’s feat in a much larger grid. Since I needed U’s in every nook and cranny of the puzzle, I can’t tell you how often I ran into the problem of finding a fill in one corner that I thought was decent, having the opposite corner be impossible, then changing out words again and again but only to realize after the fact that some stray random letter was no longer touching a U like it was supposed to, which would break the meta pattern.
Last thing: My copy editor Shay Quillen gave me an assist by suggesting the word RUNNIN’ at 94A: ["___ Down a Dream” (Tom Petty song)]. Originally it was going to be RUNG IN, but that’s tough to clue in an unambiguous way where you wouldn’t enter RANG IN instead, and if you don’t know RUFUS Wainwright at 75D: [Wainwright with the album “Folkocracy”], that’s could be a tough square to resolve. As one of my test-solvers later suggested, perhaps [Having welcomed the New Year, past midnight] would have worked for RUNG IN, but I liked RUNNIN’ better anyway.
Since I mentioned that you might want to take note of the total number of answers in metapuzzles, the constructor Byron Walden taught me a handy trick for counting them up quickly, without having to count each entry one by one. Take the highest number in the puzzle (so the clue number for the final Across answer), then add to that the total number of squares that start both an Across and a Down answer. Basically, look for squares that have an upper-left-corner starting point, with either a grid border or black squares above and to the left of them. So in this grid, the highest clue number is 134, then start counting how many squares begin both an Across and a Down entry. There’s one at the 1 square, another at 5, then 8, then 12, then 36, then 44, and so on. You will find 17 squares that start an Across and a Down answer, so 134 + 17 = 151 total answers in the puzzle.
I hope you enjoyed the puzzle whether you cracked the meta or not. What did you think?
