Five for the Price of One

Gooo Canada! I’m not usually a big watching-sports guy, even for things like the Olympics. But for some reason this year, I decided to tune into Canada’s FIFA World Cup games, and it’s been a lot of fun. I think it feels more approachable because I’m only committing to watching, like, one game a week. And as a former U-6 to U-18 community league soccer player, let’s just say I know a thing or two about the pitch. Let’s just say that I liked playing soccer but I wasn’t that competitive and didn’t like the culture around try-out teams so I spent a lot of time playing on teams where the coach’s son was also on the team and that was a whole part of the soccer experience that professional soccer is missing out on. Anyway…

I made you a crossword this week so while you’re “watching” the soccer game with friends, you have something to look up from whenever the announcer’s voice gets more excited.

Discussion (and spoilers!) below the break.

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Five for the Price of One by Brandon Cathcart

Discussion

I honestly have no idea where this will end up on the scale of “doable” or “impossible.” The first draft of this was solved almost twice as quickly as a typical puzzle, which made me think it was too easy. So I went back and made more clues tricky/fun… and then didn’t retest it. Being themeless, I leaned more into pop culture references and interesting fill, which is for better or worse, more variable based on the solver. I don’t think themeless will be something I do often (the last one was No. 015: COOL S) but I think it adds a little freshness here and there.

I snuck in several great musical references today, but here I’ll highlight one of my favourite songs from Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat. Top comment: “Dua Lipa speaking in French and Spanish is such iconic, she really is Dualingo”.

Today’s Theme

Today’s puzzle is… themeless! Rather than a unifying series of clues to tie the puzzle together, I wanted to experiment with a strange grid shape. That led to this circular, divided puzzle where five separate mini crosswords make up the grid. Hence, Five for the Price of One!

The benefit of a themeless puzzle is that you are much freer during grid construction, so the constructor gets to try putting more fun, niche words into as seed words. And hopefully you enjoyed some of the words I snuck in ;)

Behind the Clues

10A. [Drag mother Athena or "My Heart Will Go On" singer] is a double reference clue, which I sometimes use when I want to make a niche reference. I’m currently watching the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which Athena DION competes. But, since that’s not an overly accessible clue, I added in a more universal clue as a life raft for those not deep in the drag culture.

19A. [One who avoids some screwdrivers: Abbr.] is a tricky clue! In this case, they don’t have toolphobia (?). This refers to the alcoholic drink made of vodka and orange juice, and one who would avoid those could be a DD or Designated Driver.

27A. My childhood was largely spent watching Arthur. ["Arthur" character who, after getting a library card, said "Now I know what true power feels like" 😈] is one of the many DW quotes I considered for this clue. She has so many memorable ones! But I love the library so I had to use this one. Here’s one that almost made the cut.

6D/7D. I’m sorry if you feel cheated by this one! But since this is my own publication, I have to break crossword rules when I think it’s funny. I’ve had [Black gold] as OIL and [Gold gold] as GOLD written in my notes app for a long time now; I figured a themeless puzzle was a good time to unleash it onto the world.

8D. The top right corner has high potential to be tricky. [How I listened to the "World Cup Of Hockey 2004" compilation album] hopefully has enough context clues (2004, compilation album) that you guessed it was distributed via CD. So how I listened to it was ON CD. I’ll admit, I don’t love the phrase in a crossword, but it helped make some other fun clues possible.

25D. ["Why do they call it the ___ 360?" "Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away."] is a troll-ish joke from the internet (A joke from the internet? In YEGwords? Wild). It came out when the XBOX 360 was released, and the questioning of why the follow-up to the Xbox was not Xbox 2. I’m not going to say it’s a good joke, but it did make me chuckle. If you want to know more about it, here’s the Know Your Meme page, courtesy of the good internet historians over there.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle!

Until next week,

Brandon

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