Positively Glowing

Go Canada Go! It seems this time round at the Olympics, there’s just as much drama to keep up with as there is sports. As we enter the last weekend of Milano Cortina, all I can ask is that our athletes give us more things to cheer about, and our men’s curling team resists the urge to boop their stones (not an innuendo).

After a few tougher puzzles to tickle your brain, this week’s crossword should be a fun little theme and a smooth solve overall (don’t think you got away without any wordplay, though!).

Discussion (and spoilers!) below the break.

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Positively Glowing by Brandon Cathcart

Discussion

This theme was sitting in my notes app for a while with two theme entries, but it needed a third to make it ready to publish. Enter MINOR/SEMINORMAL. If anyone is wondering how I find interesting word patterns and hidden words inside other words, I use this fantastic and intimidating tool called Qat. It perfectly suits my programmer’s brain, but if you’re willing to read a little documentation and play around with it, it’s a word-lover’s dream.

I got to sneak in more than a few music references into this puzzle, but I was happy to pull Hey There Deliliah out of my brain. This video is cool because the captions are essentially a behind the scenes/commentary on the song.

Today’s Theme

Three starred clues and a revealer make up today’s theme. The revealer is 31-Across, [Pregnant... or a description of the answers to the starred clues]. Solving this reveals WITH CHILD, which helps us explain the circled letters in the starred clues - each set contains a synonym for child. The three other theme answers are then

SE(MINOR)MAL

FARM (TO T)ABLE

S(KI D)OWN

The clues have varying levels of trickery, with the trickiest being [* Go for a run, say] as the clue for SKI DOWN. I’m sorry I’m sometimes misleading ;)

Behind the Clues

15A. I’ve always thought that the rules for The Price is Right were dubious. If you [Mess up on "The Price Is Right"] you OVERBID, as per the “closest without going over” ruling for success. If I were on the show and lost because I bid $500 on a $499 item and the guy who bid $350 got it, let’s just say Drew Carrey would be tagged in more than a few Instagram stories.

28A. This is a trickier bit of trivia, I’d say. [Potential nickname for author Rooney or actress Hawkins] is SAL, short for Sally Rooney or Sally Hawkins. If you haven’t read Sally Rooney’s Normal People, it’s a fantastic but hard-to-read book at times. Too real, Sally, too real…

36A. The few years that Brockhampton rose to success feel like a bit of a fever dream now. Did that even happen? [West African country home to Merlyn Wood, formerly of the boy band Brockhampton] is GHANA, as he sang about in a handful of songs. Like this one, titled QUEER.

4D. You caught me - I love Turning Red. Mostly, I think, I’m a sucker for boy bands like the fictional 4*Town. But I also loved that ["Turning Red" protagonist and lover of 4*Town] MEI lived in Toronto! You don’t get to see Canada in animated movies pretty well ever. Very cool.

6D. A little wordplay for fun with this clue. [Stop over in France?] is meant to be read at a glance as “Stopover in France” but should be read as “Stop, over in France.” Of course, stop signs there say ARRÊT.

25D. Here’s a good spot to remind you of a rule of crossword clues. In these write-ups, I use square brackets to enclose clues. However, inside a clue, square brackets usually denote a sound of some sort. In this case, the sound of [Hey parent! I could use some milk... or maybe a nap!] is likely coming from a baby… So what you would hear is WAH.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle!

Until next week,

Brandon