MGWCC #56

kaidoku about 10 minutes

i'm not sure how to blog matt gaffney's weekly crossword contest this week. it was a kaidoku, and i did crack it, but ... once you've done these things, there's not that much to say, is there? and the meta wasn't hard at all. he gave us the letters corresponding to the answer, and the point is merely to anagram them once you figure out what letters they are. the letters were represented by 5, 7, 8, 15, 22, 23 and 24, which corresponded to O, E, K, R, W, Y, and D. the answer? KEYWORD, appropriately enough.

the solution grid is above. you can safely ignore the numbers in it; i took a screenshot of across lite. there's no actual across lite file for the puzzle, but i just created a blank grid with black squares in the appropriate places and used it to noodle around. the key for me was noticing the overlap of MILLIPEDE and CEDE, and guessing that 7 = E due to its placement at the end of so many words. once i put that in, there are very few words that fit the MILLIPEDE pattern... in fact, MILLIPEDE and CIRRIPEDE are the only ones in my dictionary. (what's a CIRRIPEDE? no clue.) then _EDE pretty much had to be CEDE, L_L_ had to be LULU, and there were so many Cs (and a few helpful Us) all over the grid that the whole thing fell in short order from there.

i thought this one was a lot easier than the previous kaidoku, in which there was a nasty trap: PIZZAZZ in a place where it seemed to be much more likely to be POSSESS (and many other Zs in the grid to perpetuate the deception). did this one have a trap that i didn't fall into? how did you all tackle it? let's hear about it in the comment box.