The Globe and Mail crosswords: Breaking down the Weekender’s ‘Record Sleeves,’ cryptic clues and more | Canada Voices

Puzzle Pieces is my weekly column for discussing the Globe’s Saturday Weekender and Weekender Cryptic crossword puzzles. I show clues in [square brackets] and grid entries in CAPITAL LETTERS. And remember, if you plan to solve today’s crosswords, you’ll want to do that before reading this spoiler-filled piece.

Today’s Weekender, Record Sleeves, comes to us from Toronto crossword constructor Ada Nicolle. Ada is also a comedian, and you can find her jokes and music on Instagram and TikTok under @adanicklmao (do yourself a favour and go watch her viral song about the font on bags of Arctic Glacier Ice).

Favourite moments in today’s crossword

28A contains one of the funniest clues I’ve seen in a while: [Practice that stretches out sweaters?] As a weekly-or-so practitioner of HOT YOGA, the very thought of woolly sweaters juxtaposed with the dripping-wet reality of those classes gives me heat exhaustion.

I like it when a fairly short, standard word is given a particularly evocative clue. At 57D, [“Get into positions!” at a surprise party] is a neat way to clue HIDE, a little bonus to add to your solving pleasure. 81D’s [Commit a Christmas faux pas] is a similarly perfect description of PEEK.

And did you spot the mini sequence in 17D and 18D, with two unrelated fictional best friends mentioned in a row? It takes a special kind of mind to think of connecting FROG and ERNIE because they’re [Toad’s best friend] and [Bert’s best friend].

Breaking down today’s theme

One reason I wanted to start a column about our crossword themes is that they’re new to many Globe readers. Themes are far more common in North American crosswords than in the U.K., and until we launched our new Games program in February we ran syndicated, unthemed British puzzles.

One question I hear often from readers is: “What am I supposed to do with the circles in the grid?” Today’s puzzle is a good example.

When you see squares that contain circles, they’re pointing you toward the theme. The theme may be so simple that it’s easy to miss entirely, and the circles are there to highlight what’s going on. Here, the key entry is at 115A: BREAK-UP ALBUMS, clued as [Recordings made after failed relationships … or, read another way, what the theme entries in this puzzle do?]

Each of the theme answers has circles at its beginning and end, highlighting how it BREAKs UP an ALBUM title. Without the circles, that would be a lot harder to spot. Do you need to notice it to solve the puzzle? Technically no. But since each theme clue also gives the album’s artist in parentheses, spotting the gimmick means you can use that extra hint to help you solve those long entries.

Together, the theme entries make a pretty cool list of popular albums that span generations and genres:

• 20A: WALK-IN FREEZER – breaking up any one of Weezer’s seven self-titled albums
• 31A: DAILY COLUMN – Kendrick Lamar’s Damn
• 38A: RUM SOURS – Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours
• 55A: BRANCHES OUT – Charli XCX’s Brat
• 65A: SUGAR WE’RE GOIN DOWN – Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown
• 74A: PURPLE PROSE – Justin Bieber’s Purpose
• 93A: HERE GOES – David Bowie’s Heroes
• 101A: BLANK CHEQUE – Joni Mitchell’s Blue

A note from today’s constructor, Ada Nicolle

So excited to be back in The Globe and Mail! This puzzle was inspired by pop icon Olivia Rodrigo’s most recent quasi-breakup album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, which is ironic, since it’s the one album of hers whose name wouldn’t work for a theme like this. I’d like to thank Jess for pushing me to include more Canadian artists! In an industry centred mostly around Americana, it’s refreshing to be able to include so much local stuff. Thanks for having me!

Some scrapped theme entries:

• DIGESTIVE COOKIE (Green Day’s Dookie)
• Disney’s BLIZZARD BEACH (Nirvana’s Bleach)
• The Left at London song REVOLUTION LOVER (The Beatles’s Revolver)
• JACQUIZZ Rodgers (Queen’s Jazz)
• COLLEGE MAJORS (Beck’s Colors, though we’d prefer if he’d spelled it with a U)

Cryptic clue of the week

From today’s Weekender Cryptic, let’s look at a clue that sent me down the entirely wrong path: 23A [Committee’s head left unfinished hot drink (4)].

My first thought was that “committee’s head” referred to the first letter of committee, giving C. That’s such a common device in cryptics that I barely questioned it. “Left” is often L, and I wondered if “unfinished hot” could be HO. CLHO, however, is not a drink.

Back to the drawing board. Maybe “left unfinished” meant LEF, giving CLEF. A word! But not a hot drink.

Next, I tried using “committee’s head” as the definition and “left unfinished hot drink” as the wordplay. “Hot drink” could become SAK or CHA (sake or chai without their endings), but LSAK and LCHA didn’t seem like committee heads in any way I could see.

Then it clicked. A committee’s head is a chair, and “left unfinished” turns chair into CHAI – a hot drink!

It was a simple deletion clue disguised as something trickier, and I just followed it on down the garden path. Did you fall for it?

As always, if you’re new to cryptics, check out Fraser Simpson’s article: How to solve The Globe’s cryptic crossword.