Beat It!

I am a noted musical enjoyer, but typically don’t love jukebox musicals. For those unfamiliar, that’s a musical where the songs are (almost) all popular songs, not originals composed for the show. Think “Mamma Mia!” and “Moulin Rouge,” for two famous examples. However, I saw MJ the Musical near the end of last year, and it was a lot of fun. Much like Mamma Mia!, it reminded me how much fantastic music he made, and unlike Mamma Mia!, I got to learn about the “Man in the Mirror” in an enjoyably engrossing way. It turns out that MJ was not just a guy who made songs for Weird Al to parody, but a great artist in his own right. Who knew?

This week’s puzzle aims to be as fun to solve as “Beat It” is to listen to!

Also, thanks to everyone who attended Crossword Construction 101! I hope to announce the date of the next session in the next few weeks.

Discussion (and spoilers!) below the break.

Play

Beat It! by Brandon Cathcart

Discussion

Okay, so there were no Michael Jackson references in the puzzle (though in hindsight, what a miss). People often ask me how long it takes to make a puzzle, and this was one that took a while. With four long theme answers, it can be hard to wrestle them into a grid that doesn’t suck, but after probably 5-6 iterations of black squares and word positions, we got there.

Speaking of musicals earlier, take a listen to a musical number by the other four-letter “Lion King” lion, Scar!

Today’s Theme

Four of the clues simply read [See title] or [With X-Across, See title]. If we see title, it says “Beat It!,” so that’s our clue for those entries. Each of the four theme answers are things you beat in different ways.

1-Across is HIGH SCORE, and you beat it by getting a higher number
16-Across is ALLEGATION, and you beat it by bringing the truth to light
22-Across is CAKE BATTER, and you beat it by mixing it to add air
34-Across is SNARE DRUM, and you beat it by hitting it with a stick

Behind the Clues

10A. A fun little word observation, [Hairstyle that, when parsed as two words, is the same hairstyle (but slangy)] is AFRO, which you can read as A FRO. It can be a fun challenge coming up with fresh clues for words that appear relatively often in crosswords, like it.

12A. [Sign of gas?] probably reads like it’s looking for “odour” or “colour" maybe, but our friend the question mark tells us to be trickier. Here it should be read as [Sign (made of)/(filled with) gas], which would be a NEON sign.

33A. [Alphabet where "alphabet" is spelled ALPHA LIMA PAPA HOTEL ALPHA BRAVO ECHO TANGO] is the NATO phonetic alphabet. I learned this once when I was communicating a lot of letters over the phone with clients, but most people I talked to seemed to prefer the less official MENS NAMES phonetic alphabet (BOB ALFRED DAVID), where the only crossover word is CHARLIE. And if you just thought “Uh, actually ROMEO would work for both,” yes, it does, but ROGER was the MENS NAMES default.

4D. Another question mark clue this puzzle was [Term of endearment that's short and sweet?]. This one is a bit easier to parse - a term of endearment that is reminiscent of sweetness is HONEY, which shortened is HON. Short and sweet!

25D. [Rulers that were at times Terrible and at other times Great] is TSARS. Specifically, this references Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. I have to assume these titles were given after their rule, though now that I think about it, “Terrible” probably meant terrorizing, not bad, which would be something a ruler might want to be. Too bad there’s no way of finding out.

27D. [Bed and bath, but not beyond] is the kind of clue where I want to cheekily reference something like Bed Bath and Beyond, but it’s not actually relevant to parsing the clue. “Beyond” is just for fun, the important things here are bed and bath, which are two ROOMS in a home.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle!

Until next week,

Brandon

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