Welcome to Week 26, and Happy Easter everyone!
Last week was a metapuzzle, so let’s get right onto that.
This puzzle was looking for a well-known website, and the five longest answers in this puzzle where:
16A – [Science fair taboo] = OUTSIDE HELP
23A – [Trivia night question style that involves wagering points before answering] = FINAL JEOPARDY
37A – [“My sincerest apologies”] = I’M TERRIBLY SORRY
47A – [Middle school missile] = PAPER AIRPLANE
58A – [2013 inductee into the Culinary Hall of Fame] = JAMIE OLIVER
All pretty standard cluing, and the puzzle’s name is “Mark My Words”. In what way can you “mark” the theme answers in this puzzle (and more specifically, the last words of the puzzle)?
Besides being standard words, each of these five final words are the names of something in pop culture. Help was an Beatles album, Jeopardy is a TV game show, Sorry is a board game, Airplane is a classic comedy, and Oliver is a well known musical.
However, the above paragraph is partially incorrect, as each of them are missing a silent element. Each of those brands includes a exclamation mark.
As shown on the left (and click for larger), each of these words can be succeeded by an exclamation mark, so you are literally “marking” my words.
The meta is asking for a well-known website, so the best known website that also features an exclamation mark is YAHOO!, which is our answer.
This week, 19 readers submitted the website Yahoo! (a little less than the last couple of metas, which might be one part ACPT and one part tougher meta). This week’s randomly selected winner was Andy Keller. He will join Jon Delfin, John L. Wilson, Jim Quinlan, and Eric Maddy in a future section of the site.
And enjoy this week’s puzzle. This morphed from being a potential metapuzzle, and ended up being a five-themer which I rather enjoy. Five puzzles ago was “House of Cards” puzzle, so I wouldn’t doubt the title of every fifth puzzle is now a TV show I’ve seen every episode.
And as a final note, I finally got around to watching Wordplay this week. Pretty good film. Can’t believe me it took this long to finally see it. Thank you Internet and your storage of all films.
Enjoy!
Chris Words 
