All Together Now

Happy Friday, and welcome to another edition of YEGwords. As you’re receiving this email, I’ll soon be headed to volunteer at YEGPIN, the pinball expo happening this weekend in Sherwood Park. I got into pinball after volunteering there last year on a whim, and now I’m pretty sure I’m a pinball guy. Just when you thought I couldn’t get any cooler.

You should pop by this weekend, it’s a vibe. And I’m just realizing that I could have tried writing a pinball-themed crossword, but I didn’t. Instead, this guy’s up to his usual bag of tricks this week - but it should be a fun reveal when you get there. Happy solving!

P.S. This crossword includes what we in the biz call a “revealer” - a clue/entry that reveals the theme and helps make the rest of the puzzle make sense. If the first part of the puzzle is feeling weird, the revealer usually helps ;)

Discussion (and spoilers!) below the break.

Play

Discussion

I was so close to making a crossword without a single music reference… Until I decided to put this in lol.

I tended to keep clues more straightforward this week since the theme made a good percentage of entries tough. It’s always a balancing act getting the right level of difficulty while making sure it’s fun!

Today’s Theme

Two tricky weeks in a row, what’s this guy up to eh? The starred clues probably felt a little weird until you got “the revealer”, 34-Across [There’s ___… nor should there be in any of the starred answers!] which solves to NO “I” IN TEAM. So, let’s take out the I’s in the starred answers to make T(I)ED LASSO, MASTER CH(I)EF, NO(I)SE BLEED, and CO(I)N MAN.

Tricky Clues

13A. Crosswords do like referencing emails and memos for short words. BCC, CCS, and the less common INRE are all good things to have in the back of your crossword brain. Here, we’re looking at the subject line (subj. shortened to indicate the answer should be too), so we use ATTN.

15A. As mentioned in the theme, the answer to this clue is MASTER CHEF, but I enjoyed that I got to put MASTER CHIEF into a puzzle (shout out to all the Red vs. Blue fans, I mean Halo fans, out there).

27A. Though I couldn’t continue it through the rest of the themed answers, I got a kick out of [Person running a ponzi scheme] kind of working for both COINMAN and CONMAN. Wait, coin man isn’t a phrase? You’ve never called a banker a coin man? “Let me go make a deposit with the coin man”? Okay, weirdo.

5D. [It's this name + noun, it seems, for Google's Page, NBA's Bird, and TV's King] was a fun realization I had while cluing this one. Did their parents just look around the room at point at things? “His name will be Larry. Larry… ummm… paaage. Yes, page.” (I know how last names work lol)

8D. Shoutout the realest news outlets out there. The Beaverton and The Onion, our faithful publications of SATIRE, make it much easier to digest the hard truths of our current world. Even their editorial cartoons are parodies.

32D. When I use Gen Z slang I feel [Very cool and with it]. This skibbidi toilet Gen Alpha slang is too much for me though. Yeet! This crossword is lit, fam! No cap!

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle!

Until next Friday,

Brandon