Hello solvers! Puzzle Pieces is our weekly discussion of The Globe and Mail’s Weekender crossword and Weekender Cryptic crossword. It’s full of spoilers, so be sure to solve the puzzles before reading further.
As always, I use CAPS for entries in the crossword grid and [square brackets] for clues.
Favourite moments in the Oct. 3 Weekender
In Cut Down on Your Intake, constructor Will Nediger treats us to a wide variety of topics through his grid and clues.
We get a bit of the political realm, from the 1926 King-BYNG constitutional crisis at 6A, to prison reform advocate AGNES Macphail at 55D, to Toronto Mayor Olivia CHOW at 18A.
We get a bit of music, from Kesha’s TiK ToK lyrics at 14A to Phil OCHS at 84D.
And we get a whole lot of straight-up vocabulary, from FATE at 40A, clued as [Unchangeable future], to SIDE TRIP at 13D, clued as [Digression during a vacation], to WORSE at 105D, with the clever clue [One response during an optometrist’s exam].
It also wouldn’t be a Will Nediger puzzle if it didn’t include some sneaky misdirect clues, including these:
- At 72A, [Jobs in tech?] is not about AI roles posted to Indeed. Read it the right way and you realize you’re looking for a person named Jobs from the tech world: STEVE.
- At 79D, [Drive-thru features where cash is accepted?] makes you think of places that take cash as payment. Instead, it’s looking for places where the driver accepts cash: ATMS.
Breaking down the theme
The theme of this week’s puzzle kind of sneaks up on you. Opening the blank grid, you can clearly see which entries are involved in the theme, because they all contain strings of circles. But as you start to fill in those entries, it’s not immediately clear what the letters in the circles could mean.
Whether you automatically know the answer to 27A’s clue [Meme originating from the funeral scene in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare], or you need a whole lot of crosses to figure out what it is (like I did), you end up with PRESS F TO PAY RESPECTS and the circles falling around the letters R-E-S-S. Hmmm.
Solving for the full list of theme entries yields similarly baffling circled strings, though at some point they start to seem vaguely like something, even if you can’t quite see what:
- 27A: PRESS F TO PAY RESPECTS
- 43A: LET’S PUT A PIN IN IT
- 54A: BRADSHAW
- 66A: UNAPPEALING
- 83A: PARROTED
- 91A: LUMON INDUSTRIES
The bottom of the puzzle brings it all together with a double whammy. The initial revealer is at 109A with the clue [Ingredient in crumbly pastries … and what happens six times in this puzzle?]. The answer VEGETABLE SHORTENING explains why those circled strings looked vaguely familiar: they’re all names of vegetables, but shortened by a letter: (c)RESS, (r)APINI, RAD(i)SH, (s)NAP PEA, (c)ARROT, and ONI(o)N. “Ah, cute,” you think.
But then wham, revealer #2 comes in just below at 116A, [Brand of 109-Across spelled out by the letters missing from the circled words]. And indeed, looking back on the missing letters, we can now clearly see that they spell out a brand of VEGETABLE SHORTENING: CRISCO. Now that’s one cool, crisp theme.
A note from constructor Will Nediger
I’m not much of a baker (aside from cookies and muffins), so I can’t even remember the last time I used vegetable shortening. But I love a quiche and a savoury pie, so maybe I need to get into making shortcrust pastry …
Cryptic clue of the week
Fraser Simpson’s Oct. 3 Weekender Cryptic features a clueing style I haven’t written about yet in this column, and it’s worth addressing lest new solvers feel any unnecessary confusion.
In this puzzle, 7D’s clue ends with an ellipsis (…), and 8D’s clue begins with another one. The pair is:
- [Bury short hospital trainee… (5)]
- […before strychnine provides growing concern? (8)]
But don’t be daunted. This is almost always just a fun way to link two clues into one long surface meaning, with the two clues still to be solved separately. (I say almost always because sometimes there’s more going on, but that’s more likely to be seen in harder cryptics.)
Putting aside their combined funny little story (which does make me giggle), let’s solve these clues separately:
7D is a simple deletion clue: A hospital trainee is an intern. In cryptics, “short” can mean cut the word off before its final letter, so “short hospital intern” leaves INTER, a five-letter word that matches what we now know is the definition part of the clue: bury. (Remember that every cryptic clue has two halves, the wordplay and the definition; for more on the basics, check out Simpson’s article How to solve The Globe’s cryptic crossword.)
8D is one of those hidden-word clues that I so often miss: “Provides” is the key word here, and we need to look at the clue as: [this set of words] provides [this definition]. What’s hiding in those first two words (before strychnine) is FORESTRY, which is punnily defined as “growing concern?” (The question mark here functions as it does in regular crossword clues, signalling some kind of pun or joke.)
So you can see that the ellipsis did not affect the cryptic solve. It was just a bit of writerly fun.