The Globe and Mail crosswords: Breaking down the Weekender’s ‘Twisting by the Pool,’ cryptic clues and more

Welcome to our weekly look at the Globe and Mail’s Weekender crossword and Weekender Cryptic. By convention, I use ALL CAPS for letters in the grid and [square brackets] for clues.

As always, spoiler alert for our weekend puzzles; be sure to solve them before reading any further.

Favourite moments in the Oct. 31 Weekender

Twisting by the Pool is another delightful puzzle from Will Nediger of London, Ont. As I write this, Will is in the lead in the Stormy division of the Boswords crossword tournament’s fall league, which runs for nine weeks (it’s currently in week 4).

The tournament offers three difficulty levels so we mere mortals can compete too, and each week’s puzzle constructor is interviewed on Twitch on the Monday night. I encourage you to join in when it comes back around in the spring.

Coming back to Will’s latest Weekender puzzle, let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

• 15A: [___ the Gopher (Roughriders mascot whose name anagrams to “Regina”)]. I love a bit of Cancon! The Saskatchewan Roughriders deliberately named their mascot GAINER because of this anagram.
• 25A: [Firm cheese?] Did this one stump you? It took me a second. The grid slot only has space for four letters, so it can’t be cheddar or parmesan… and that question mark suggests something sneaky is afoot. Turns out that neither word in this clue is to be taken at face value. “Firm” = company and “cheese” = big cheese, in the sense of a leader or executive, leading us to the answer: BOSS.
• 30D’s clue, [Not so fast?], is rather perfect, too. The expression “not so fast” tends to mean “stop it right there.” But the question mark tells us we should rethink its usual meaning and take it much more literally: The answer is simply SLOWER.
• 103D: [Some animals in Baa Baa Land, an eight-hour film for insomniacs]. Just when you thought there were no new ways to clue EWES, Will comes along and unearths this gem of a film – a 2017 “slow cinema” production whose footage consists entirely of sheep in a field.

Breaking down the theme

This is one of those puzzles that can technically be solved without spotting the theme. But a) once you see what’s going on, it can help you fill in some of those circled letters, and b) it’s just really neat to put it all together after the fact. Also, c) it’s not easy to construct a grid with so many constraints in so many places!

The theme hinges on the revealer, which spans two slots beginning at 102A: [With 110-Across, useless university course, idiomatically … and a hint to this puzzle’s circled letters]. An idiom for a useless course is UNDERWATER BASKET-WEAVING. As Will notes below, this is usually a rather ungenerous term, but it makes a fun idea for a crossword theme.

While the circled letters at first seem to be all over the place, they come into focus over time. The horizontal rows of circles each spell a word for a body of water, hidden within a longer entry: CORNFLAKEGIRL, DESPONDENT, COVERTOPERATION and RICKSPRINGFIELD.

And under each of those bodies of water is a string of circles that could be said to be weaving from side to side, and guess what? They each spell a kind of basket: BREAD, WASTE, PICNIC and HAND. And that’s the theme, in all its glory – types of baskets, weaving under types of water.

A note from constructor Will Nediger

I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “underwater basket weaving,” which is so often weaponized to attack the humanities and social sciences. But I have to admit, it makes great crossword theme fodder! This one was really tough to wrangle – any time words are hidden diagonally, or otherwise not just across and down, filling the grid becomes exponentially harder.

Cryptic clue of the week

I’m a sucker for a cryptic clue with a really clear, plausible surface meaning. In the Oct. 31 Weekender Cryptic, 21A is just such a clue: [Couple of porters coming with list suitable for drinkers (7)].

In working to parse this clue, right off the bat I decide that “couple of porters” doesn’t seem like a thing, so I eliminate that from my candidates for the answer’s definition. But “couple,” or at the other end, “drinkers,” “suitable for drinkers” or “list suitable for drinkers” all seem like viable options.

I do know from cryptic experience that “couple of” can often mean “first couple of letters from” – so “couple of porters” might be PO.

“Coming” might be a stand-in for a synonym such as “arriving,” “next” or “on my way,” but “coming with” could also work as a unit to simply connect one part of the wordplay to the next. At first, tricked by the clue’s surface context, I think “list” must mean something like “menu.” But POMENU or PONEXTMENU are definitely not words, let alone seven-letter ones.

What else could be a “list”? How about a TABLE? Sure enough, “PO coming with TABLE” is exactly what we need, because POTABLE = “suitable for drinkers.”

Check out Fraser Simpson’s How to solve The Globe’s cryptic crossword for lots more cryptic tips and tricks.