CISRA Puzzle Competition 2011 - Solutions
4B. Double Jeopardy
The first step to completing this puzzle is to solve all of the clues and fill out the crossword. Again.
Each clue actually has two answers. For example, the clue "Superman's girlfriend (4,4)" yields the obvious answers "Lana Lang" and "Lois Lane". Since the given crossword already contains the answer "Lana Lang", the new version of the crossword must contain the alternate answer "Lois Lane". The full list of answers is here:
| Clue | Given answer | Other answer |
|---|---|---|
| War god (4) | Mars | Ares |
| Simpsons kid (4) | Bart | Lisa |
| Jabberwocky animal (4) | rath | tove |
| American country (4) | Peru | Cuba |
| Fencing sword (4) | foil | épée |
| Month name (5) | March | April |
| Disney dwarf (5) | Happy | Dopey |
| American country (5) | Haiti | Chilé |
| Speech parts (5) | nouns | verbs |
| Sailor Senshi (5) | Pluto | Venus |
| Compass direction (5) | north | south |
| Teletubbies character (3,3) | Noo Noo | Laa Laa |
| Christie's detective (6) | Poirot | Marple |
| Playing suit (6) | hearts | spades |
| Solstice season (6) | summer | winter |
| Equinox season (6) | spring | autumn |
| Water sign (6) | Pisces | Cancer |
| Solar planet (6) | Uranus | Saturn |
| Monohorned creature (7) | narwhal | unicorn |
| Hitchcock film (7) | Rebecca | Vertigo |
| Hogwarts instructs (7) | wizards | witches |
| Precious stone (7) | emerald | diamond |
| Month name (7) | January | October |
| Shakespeare play (7) | Othello | Macbeth |
| Australian state (8) | Tasmania | Victoria |
| Week day (8) | Saturday | Thursday |
| Superman's girlfriend (4,4) | Lana Lang | Lois Lane |
| Peanuts character (9) | Schroeder | Woodstock |
| Nobel laureatess (5,5) | Nelly Sachs | Marie Curie |
| Deadly plant (10) | nightshade | belladonna |
| Moon walker (5,5) | David Scott | James Irwin |
| Rock type (11) | metamorphic | sedimentary |
| Platonic solid (11) | tetrahedron | icosahedron |
| Landlocked country (11) | Afghanistan | Switzerland |
| Gallifrey's Doctor (5,7) | David Tennant | Peter Davison |
| Bond actor (6,7) | Pierce Brosnan | George Lazenby |
| American president (6,9) | Thomas Jefferson | Grover Cleveland |
The crossword given was this:
The original puzzle text said that the locations within the crossword grid are not given, and neither are you told whether each answer is to be written across or down. This is a hint telling you that it might not be valid to just directly substitute given answers for their alternates. You might need to do some rearrangement of the answers.
Therefore you must experiment a little to determine how the alternate answers of the same total length can fit into the crossword. After a little trial and error, you should be able to obtain the following newly completed crossword:
If you compare the shaded letters in both crosswords, you'll see that the letters which don't change between the two grids spell the name "Howard".
The letters which do change spell the name "Ashman" in the first grid, and "Sidney" in the second.
Howard Ashman and Sidney Howard are thus the two (6,6) answers to the mystery clue. Like every other crossword clue given, there are two answers to this mystery clue, and these two names are the answers here.
However, neither of those people's names are the answer to this puzzle. This puzzle is entitled "Double Jeopardy" for a good reason. Jeopardy! is a game show in which the contestants are given the answer to a question, and must respond by stating the question in order to score points. So this puzzle is asking you to respond by giving the question that would be answered with these two people's names.
The question is left blank, but is represented in the puzzle by a series of 10 dots followed by 5 dots. So we're looking for a two-word question having a 10-letter word and a 5-letter word. (This is also motivated by the fact all of the crossword clues have exactly two words.)
What distinctive fact is common between Sidney Howard and Howard Ashman, that would lead to them being the only two (6,6) answers to a question about that fact (at time of writing)? They both won a POSTHUMOUS OSCAR, the solution to this puzzle.