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Solution

Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 111!

Before I go into the meta answer, I hope you enjoy today’s 31×11 crossword. I’ve been sitting on this for a while, and ironing it out for a while, but I think the final result is nice, like a exhibition piece. I hope you learn something new from it!

Now to go over the answer:

I told you that brother has tessered, and now I don’t know where he is, and the puzzle’s answer is where he went.

The puzzle featured four clues labeled [Clue #1] to [Clue #4], which were SILENTCLOWN, HARDLYRACY, LOSEENERGY, and QBTEBOWETAL, while the central answer gave us the theme.

39-A [2018 Disney film whose title serves as a hint for solving this puzzle] = A WRINKLE IN TIME

While you did not have to see the film to enjoy the film, I certainly would recommend seeing it.

Hopefully looking at the different clues and noticing you needed to wrinkle time, you saw that each of the clues was referring to a word that is one letter away from the word TIME.

Silent clown = MIME
Hardly racy = TAME
Lose energy = TIRE
QB Tebow, et al. = TIMS

The four words edit each letter of the word time: Mime, tAme, tiRe, timS, and with that, you discover that brother has not tessered to a distant planet, but rather to or neighbor MARS, our answer. He reported that Mars is pretty cold, and there’s not much to do.

A few notes about the puzzle:
1) Apparently, it’s really hard to come up with a good clue for TAME that is 10 letters long and does not end with an E.
2) A few of you all submitted how odd the phrase QBTEBOWETAL looked, which make me happy. While I am perfectly happy with the phrase I picked, I also figured out I could have made the word CEOCOOKETAL, but the inclusion of Qs, Bs, and Ws was fine with me. Are there any more examples of 11-letter phrases that include a surname, a job description, and a reference to there being multiple ones? Feel free to let me know.
3) As I highlighted in the above grid, turns out the puzzle itself was on Mars, as all four corners of the planet were labeled.

Altogether, 122 readers submitted the right answer. This is, by far, the most number of correct submissions for a Chris Words puzzle, and I couldn’t be more excited that all of you submitted. If you were a first time solver, I sincerely hope you continuing solving the puzzles, it being a meta or not! Congrats to those who got it! This week’s randomly selected winner was Anna-Marie Ruoff. She 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, Justin Weinbaum, Tyler Hinman, Kathy Johnescu, Regina Cassidy, Tim Harrod, Laura Mendyke in a future section of the site. Congrats Anna-Marie!

Enjoy the puzzle everyone! Hope to have #112 soon!

Chris