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Solution

Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 81! This week’s puzzle might be a tricky theme for some, but I wanted to write one more summer puzzle before the season was up.

Last week, we had a meta, so let’s look at that:

The answer to the puzzle is a well-known 80s band, and there’s no obvious theme entries. There’s a 15-letter running across the middle, which is our main hint.

36A – [Problem encountered when traveling abroad] = LANGUAGE BARRIER

The idea of a language barrier plus the title “Use Your Alliteration”, the trick to this puzzle was identifying alliterations. None of the grid entries feature alliteration, so you have to go to the clues.

The trick to this puzzle is looking at an crossword trope of language answers. More often than not, a constructor will clue a foreign language word with alliteration, which has been done 9 times in this puzzle.

14A – [Girlfriend, in Granada] = NOVIA
27A – [Einstein’s ego] = ICH
28A – [Dresden donkey] = ESEL
49A – [Homer’s Hs] = ETAS
50A – [Crowned figure, to Caesar] = REX
66A – [Ingres’s income] = RENTE
7D – [Abbey title, in Assisi] = FRA
56D – [Fat, for Francois] = GRAS
60D – [Bogota bear] = OSO

After finding all nine entires, the clues all use the alliteration of a letter from A to I. When you arrange the answer words alphabetically by clue, you get the order FRA, OSO, REX, ESEL, ICH, GRAS, NOVIA, ETAS, RENTE. The first letters spell out FOREIGNER, our answer and appropriate answer for a puzzle about foreign languages. Needing a symmetric grid entry for GRAS, the clue for MICK is [Rocker Fleetwood, Jones, or Jagger], and Mick Jones was in fact the founder of Foreigner.

Tough week for meta solvers. Altogether, 11 readers submitted the correct hot blooded band. Congrats to those who got it! This week’s randomly selected winner was Tyler Hinman. He will join Jon Delfin, John L. Wilson, Jim Quinlan, Eric Maddy, Andy Keller, David Cole, Roger Barkan, Patricia Miga, Erik Agard, Charles Montpetit, Steve Blais, Mike Ruslander, Matthew Breen, David Stein, and Justin Weinbaum in a future section of the site. Congrats Tyler!

Thanks everyone, and I hope you have a great week!

Chris