Solution to How To Install a Handle

The puzzle consists of a 32-player tournament bracket, and an accompanying list of images numbered from 1 to 32. The images are representations of the names of 32 real people who have appeared in the Name of the Year bracket since 2014. What is the Name of the Year bracket, you ask? Founded in 1983 by Stefan Fatsis and a few others, the Name of the Year's mission is "to discover, verify, nominate, elect, and disseminate great names." The names must be real names, but they can be great for any number of reasons—humor, incongruity, shock value, or just from the way the name rolls off the tongue.

NotY's internet presence is, unfortunately, a little bit spotty. It spent a few years hopping from blog to blog after nameoftheyear.com was bought out, and never really found a permanent home anywhere (at one point disappearing from view with the demise of Deadspin), and nowadays its only active presence is its Twitter account. But you can still find individual year's brackets by Google image searching for the year + "name of the year bracket":

2014 (source) 2015 (source) 2016 (source) 2017 (source) 2018 (source) 2019 (source) 2020 (source)

We definitely wanted solvers to spend time combing through the brackets and cackling at the amazing names therein — that's what we spent most of our constructing time on! But to help you out, the names are sorted by year (earliest first), and within each year, the names appear in the same order they appear on the corresponding year's bracket image (top left to bottom left, then top right to bottom right). The full list of name identifications is as follows:

* Her name is actually spelled Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant, but the 2016 NotY bracket spells it "Crossaint", so that's what we're going with. However, unlike some of the other spelling quirks (Cinderela and Snookie), the solution to the puzzle is unaffected by the spelling of the last few letters of her name.

By and large, the image identifications are quite evident once you find the right name, but for the record, the Morse code in image 5 spells out BEE, and the weapons in image 29 are from the video game Destiny. People or fictional characters with relevant names appearing in the pictures are: chef Wolfgang Puck (#2), Hank Azaria as Lancelot from Spamalot (#8), Grover from Sesame Street (#9), Jasmine from Aladdin (#11), Snooki from Jersey Shore (#13), revolutionary Che Guevara (#14), actress Jorja Fox (#15), writer Miguel de Cervantes (#16), rock star Travis Barker (#19), NBA star Zion Williamson (#20), Richard Dean Anderson as MacGyver (#23), rapper Tupac Shakur (#24), actor Denzel Washington (#25), actor Daniel Radcliffe (#27), actress/host Whoopi Goldberg (#28), Mickey Mouse (#30), and President Joe Biden (#32).

Once the names have been identified, the next step is to put them into the tournament bracket. Each "seed" number in the bracket refers to the corresponding image number, and then the list of numbers next to the seed should be used to index into the name. In each case, indexing will spell out an English word.

The next step is to "play out" the tournament using these 32 words. Each matchup is allocated to one of five made-up venues, and each venue name hints at the kind of wordplay that occurs there. All five wordplay games take two words and produce a third word, whose length is given in blanks in the bracket:

• In Alternate Venue, take two words of the same length and produce an output word of the same length by taking odd letters from the first word interspersed with even letters of the second word. For example, JOINED and SUCCOR make JUICER.
• In Midway Stadium, again the two starting words are of matching length, and the answer word is derived by taking the letter alphabetically halfway between each corresponding pair of letters in the two input words. For example, BURN and DITZ make COST because C is the midpoint of B and D, O is the midpoint of U and I, S is the midpoint of R and T, and T is the midpoint of N and Z.
• In the Mixing Bowl, combine all of the letters from both words and anagram to produce the answer. For example, DATE and MIRE combine to make DIAMETER.
• In Mutual Associate Arena, both starting words will be members of some well known, fairly limited set. The answer word will be a word which fits into both sets, thereby making it a "mutual associate" of both words. For example, MAJOR and MARCH have the mutual associate MAY, because MAJOR and MAY are both (recent) British prime ministers, and MARCH and MAY are both months.
• In PortmanPlex, construct a portmanteau of the two words by combining the first few letters of the first word with the last few letters of the second word. For example, JUICER and REDO can be combined to make JUDO. There are no first-round matchups at the PortmanPlex, but you will encounter it as you progress through the bracket.

The full bracket is given below. The puzzle answer is the tournament "champion": HALF-COURT.

Most of the wordplay is done by purely mechanical manipulations, but here's an explanation of the matchups in Mutual Associate Arena:

• MAJOR + MARCH gives MAY, as discussed above.
• EDIT + REVOLVER gives HELP, which is both a top-level window menu (like EDIT) and a Beatles album (like REVOLVER).
• MURDER + WRATH gives PRIDE, since it's both a collective noun for animals and a deadly sin.
• MAY + DISGUST gives FEAR, which is both a cape on the East Coast and an emotion from Inside Out.
• VEEP + PROST gives CHEERS, which is both a Primetime Emmy winner for Outstanding Comedy Series and a drinking toast.
• DIAMOND + STOMACH gives HEART, which is both a suit symbol in a deck of cards and an internal organ.