For the second time in a month Peter Gordon unleashes an excellent meta from his perch at Fireball Crosswords. With 22 minutes to deadline as I type this Peter says that only 9 correct entries have come in (along with 14 incorrect ones). Yeouch — let’s take a look.
Instructions ask: “What capital is the answer to this puzzle?” That wording hints that we might not be necessarily looking for a national capital, but we’ll see.
Unusual rectangular grid shape, usually done (as turned out to be the case here) to accommodate theme entries of unusual length. One tough aspect of this meta was figuring out exactly what was theme and what was fill. It turned out that there were seven theme entries:
17-a ROH TAE-WOO
21-a EAT FRESH
26-a MORONIC INFERNO
45-a PINE SOL LADY
61-a U.N. PEACEKEEPERS
67-a TAIO CRUZ
77-a HIC ET NUNC
The key to the meta is realizing that the first word of each of these phrases anagrams to a Greek letter:
ROH –> RHO
EAT –> ETA
MORONIC –> OMICRON
PINE SOL –> EPSILON
UN — > NU
TAIO –> IOTA
HIC –> CHI
So what’s the answer? As nudged by the title, let’s write each of these Greek letters out in their capital (not lowercase) forms:
RHO — P
ETA — H
OMICRON — O
EPSILON — E
NU — N
IOTA — I
CHI — X
And there you have it: the meta answer is PHOENIX, capital of Arizona.
I got this one right away because I happen to have spent some time anagramming Greek letters for a theme than never panned out. But it appears to have been pretty brutal without that head start, as evinced by the single-digit number of correct entries Peter got.
Spelling the meta answer out in Greek letters is a novel trick, and winding up with a well-known figure from Greek mythology (slyly masked as a capital city) as the answer provided an amusing a-ha click.
4.60 stars.
My lucky day! Peter just e-mailed that my name was picked as the winner from among the 9 right answers.
Yeah right! I want to see his random number generator. :-)
Yeowtch. I must have spent about four hours trying to anagram those phrases. How could I have missed OMICRON, EPSILON, and IOTA? I think I got hung up on words or phrases that spanned words in the themers.
So this killed me, but it seems completely fair. One way to make it easier might have been a small nudge in the title, like “All Roads Lead to Athens” or something.
And congrats, Matt!
Awesome meta. I would imagine the pool of capitals that could be formed by capital Greek letters would be pretty limited.
I never would have suspected TAIO and EAT were themers, just cool fill. Maybe an asterisk by the seven clues would have pushed this into double digits!