They're Right Behind You 😱

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of taking in some PWHL action at Rogers Place during the PWHL Takeover event. While the Vancouver Goldeneyes (second last place) were woefully outplayed by the Boston Fleet (second place), it was still a great time! Exciting hockey, and the energy in there was electric - between the PWHL and WNBA, it’s a great time to get into women’s professional sports.

This week’s puzzle has nothing to do with women’s sports, sadly, but I like to think that between YEGwords puzzles and all the other puzzle outlets out there, it’s also a great time to get into solving independent crossword puzzles.

Discussion (and spoilers!) below the break.

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They're Right Behind You 😱 by Brandon Cathcart

Discussion

This puzzle got an interesting comment from my faithful test solver / partner - that, rather than the “revealer” helping solve the theme answers, she got the theme answers first and then had to figure out the revealer. While I do like to get tricky and make puzzles need that key phrase to solve them, I also enjoy this “Tribond” kind of theme - here are three seemingly unrelated things, now what clever phrase ties them all together?

Musically, we have appearances by the Baha Men, Justin Timberlake, and other icons. But the one I want to highlight here is one of my favourite tracks from A Tribe Called Quest: Steve Biko (Stir It Up) from Midnight Marauders.

Today’s Theme

As mentioned above, this is what I call a “Tribond” theme (named after the board game I couldn’t stand as a child). Our three theme answers are not too difficult to get:

HEADBUTT, MOCKTAIL, RAP ALBUM

The question is: What do these three things have in common? That’s what 35-Across hints at:

["Cakes" ... and a description of 13-, 19-, and 25-Across]

“Cakes” is slang for buttocks, or REAR ENDS, which is a punny way of describing the theme answers - each has a synonym for “REAR” as the end of the word/phrase!

Behind the Clues

16A. Learning key words and phrases in ASL, like [Touch your fingers to your chin, then move your hand forward and down to say "thank you" in this lang.], is a great thing to have in your pocket. Especially if you want to communicate secret things with someone in a noisy place, like ME YOU LEAVE NOW.

29A. Everyone calls online personal messages DMs (direct messages) these days, so how do you clue IMs? You go back to when they were called that. [AOL chats] existed before the phrase DMs took off - Instant Messages were all the rage.

34A. Each [F1 race] is known as a Grand Prix, or GP. Sure, I could probably have referenced everyone’s favourite sport SailGP, but I decided against it. It is strangely addictive though.

8D. In one of the greatest examples of “things I wish I had thought of first,” ["What ___?" (book by xkcd creator Randall Munroe)] is What IF, the fantastic web and book series. I love trying to answer absurd hypotheticals with real science and Munroe is the absolute king of it.

21D. I shouldn’t need to elaborate on [Either brother who "made the first airplane" (we all know airplanes are a hoax, though)] but I will. Sure, they say the WRIGHT brothers “invented” the airplane. I’m just supposed to believe that those things in the sky are human flying machines? Not the more obvious answer, elaborate projections set up by a deep-state government initiative? Yeah, ok.

31D. For people who weren’t on the internet in 2011, ["I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the___..."] is KNEE, an infamously memed bit of NPC dialogue from the video game Skyrim. Here is a tidy article on it so you can catch up.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle!

Until next week,

Brandon