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A double-revealer puzzle that’s rich in dietary fibre
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 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 , to SIDE TRIP at 13D, clued as , to WORSE at 105D, with the clever clue . It also wouldn’t be a Will Nediger puzzle if it didn’t include some sneaky misdirect clues, including these: At 72A, 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, 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 , or you need a whole lot of crosses to figure out what it is , 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: P RESS F TO PAY RESPECTS 43A: LET’S PUT A PIN I N IT 54A: B RADSH AW 66A: U NAPPEA LING 83A: P ARROT ED 91A: LUM ON IN DUSTRIES The bottom of the puzzle brings it all together with a double whammy. The initial revealer is at 109A with the clue .
The answer VEGETABLE SHORTENING explains why those circled strings looked vaguely familiar: they’re all names of vegetables, but shortened by a letter: RESS, APINI, RADSH, NAP PEA, ARROT, and ONIN. “Ah, cute,” you think. But then wham, revealer #2 comes in just below at 116A, . 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 , 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: 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.
Putting aside their combined funny little story , 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. 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: provides . What’s hiding in those first two words is FORESTRY, which is punnily defined as “growing concern? ” So you can see that the ellipsis did not affect the cryptic solve. It was just a bit of writerly fun.
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