Next Saturday is the Indie 500 Crossword Tournament at George Washington University. You can register for it here, and I will be in attendance. So come say hi if you’re planning on going. If you’re not able to make it, you can go to that link and order the set of tourney puzzles for solving at home. They also have a meta suite which I test-solved; I give it my seal of approval.
In other news: I didn’t say anything about it for obvious reasons, but two clues from last week’s puzzle snuck their way into the Post Hunt! You can read the details about it here. It’s a bit ironic how that puzzle was about Alternate Endings, and yet to solve the Post Hunt clue, you had to supply a couple of Alternate Beginnings. In fact, I was in D.C. last week to be introduced by Dave Barry and booed by a few thousand Hunt solvers at the end of the festivities. That was quite fun. My only disappointment was that I didn’t get even more boos.
As for today’s puzzle, I’m considering it a tip of the hat to indie puzzler extraordinaire Brendan Emmett Quigley. He likes to mix the rock music scene with crosswords. So let’s see what “I’m With The Band” was all about.
It was a simple idea this week that was inspired from the title, though the difficulty of the theme may vary depending on your knowledge of various band names. I’ll throw in some YouTube links to some of their songs in the bullet list below, because why not? Anyway, I inserted the letter string IM into seven rock bands’ names to create wacky phrases:
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- 23A: [Temperamentally glum computer game character?] is THE MOODY BLUE SIM, from The Moody Blues.
- 40A: [Pooped citrus fruits?] is THE BEAT LIMES, from The Beatles. The clue refers to being tired. Why, what did you think I meant?
- 56A: [Hardly reserved quiet person?] is IMMODEST MOUSE, from Modest Mouse.
- 65A: [Rulers depicted in a marble sculpture?] is QUEENS OF THE STONE IMAGE, from Queens of the Stone Age.
- 80A: [Sensible fabric for needlefish?] is SOUND GAR DENIM, from Sound Garden.
- 95A: [Music booster that’s in really great shape?] is SUPER TRIM AMP, from Supertramp.
- 117A: [Choice chicken pieces?] is THE PRIME TENDERS, from The Pretenders.
I think the original base phrases represent a decent mix of classic rock bands (Moody Blues, Beatles, Supertramp, Pretenders) and more recent alternative rock and metal bands (Modest Mouse, Queens of the Stone Age, Soundgarden). I think each of them, though, is probably old enough to drive, having been around for at least 16 years. Some answers that I left out of the puzzle include “BUFF A LIMO, SPRINGFIELD,” BARENAKED LIMA DIES, THE GRATEFUL DIME AD, and COUNT IMING CROWS. I had wanted the 11-letter answer “PIN KIM, FLOYD,” but to my surprise, it proved to be a huge challenge to come up with a decent symmetrical match for that. The best one I found was MIME NAT WORK, which perhaps could have been clued as [Act like you’re a member of a D.C. baseball team?]. It didn’t matter, though, because working with just the seven theme answers above made the grid tough enough to fill.
Other notable answers and clues:
- 14A: [Master work?] is CHESS. As in, one of the various titles you can attain by being really good at chess, but not quite as good as a Grandmaster.
- 37A: [Like some sects] is ORTHODOX. Contrary to its other meaning, I don’t find this word to be that ordinary.
- 46A: [Cellular messenger] is RNA, right? It often gets that clue. But nope, this time it’s a HORMONE.
- Crossing homophones with 73A: [Fruit named for its 66 Down appearance] (UGLI) and 66D: [Unsightly, like the fruit at 73 Across] (UGLY). I must admit it feels a bit like cheating to have both of these answers, but they helped me out of a jam, and I think it’s kinda funny how they crossed one another.
- 87A: [Rock, for example] is a GENRE. Just a small wink to the theme.
- 105A: [Sci-fi film with a Master Control Program] is TRON. I must have watched the Light Cycle sequence from this movie a thousand times when I was a kid, and I actually saw the whole thing just a few days ago. Somehow, I’d forgotten just how little sense it makes. If you’ve seen “Tron” before, I strongly recommend watching it again but with the Rifftrax commentary; it’s hilarious.
- 8D: [Sticky food?] is a KEBAB. This one was my favorite clue of the puzzle.
- 38D: [Clue specification] is a ROOM. Beware the hidden capital letter here; this is about the board game Clue.
- 57D: [’08 election winner] is a blast from the past; it’s not Barack Obama, but William Howard TAFT.
- 65D: [Common Union meeting place?] is a QUAD. I used Union College in a misdirection clue somewhat recently, so hopefully you sniffed it out again. Come to think of it, that same puzzle also had the answer AIRBNB ([33A: Modern lodging option]). I didn’t plan it that way!
- 69D: [“Sesame Street" network since January 2016] is HBO. I still think an edgy, R-rated version of the show on HBO should be called “The Street.” It’d be like “The Wire,” but with Muppets. You’d watch this.
- 85D: [Flushing team] is the New York METS. This clue refers to the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. Again I ask, what did you think I meant?
- 100D: [Leader nicknamed “The Iron Lady"] is another politics-related trap. The answer’s not Margaret Thatcher, but Golda MEIR. That was a bit of trivia I didn’t know about Meir before writing the clue.
I hope to see you at the Indie 5oo. A quick heads-up about next week’s crossword: It’s going to have a metapuzzle. Good luck cracking it!
**Special thanks to Erik Agard, Pamela Feiring, and Bruce Ryan for test-solving this puzzle, and to my copy editor Jenny Abella for her thorough fact-checking and proofreading of clues.**
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