Remember last week’s AV Club contest puzzle?
Byron Walden’s American Values Club contest crossword, “Pile Up”
Triple Play
Another week, another AV Club contest puzzle I forgot to time myself on. Solving the meta on this one took only a few minutes after my solve.
It was pretty easy to figure out what was going on with the theme answers based on the title “Triple Play”, though it may have had you seeing triple:
- 18A: Doing the reverse cowgirl while dressed for the part? — BUCKING IN GINGHAM
- 24A: Nasty-looking hitman? — UGLY-ASS ASSASSIN
- 52A: Trumpet flourish greeting the arrival of someone who’d rather hear “Hey, Soul Sister”? — TRAIN FAN FANFARE
- 60A: Mobile eatery where rock musician Courtney servs up lamb fries and Rocky Mountain Oysters? — LOVE’S TESTES TRUCK
Reducing the theme answers down to just one occurrence of the repeating trigram, you get the (relatively) standard words/phrases BUCKINGHAM, UGLY AS SIN, TRAIN FARE, and LOVESTRUCK. According to the instructions, there’s one additional entry in the grid that can have a trigram triplicated to form the way a prissy pirate might call someone a butthead. Did you find it?
Yep, if you take the answer to 43D‘s “Late in the fourth quarter”, YEAREND, and expand it out, you get YE ARE A REAR END, the answer to the contest.
Other notes from the puzzle:
- 44A: “SNL” alum Ana — GASTEYER (a nice reversal of the usual way this sort of clue goes)
- 57A: [“More worm, please”] — CHIRP
- 59A: Attribute your plagiarism to an imaginary team of 60 crossword construcors, for example — LIE (I think at this point, with USA Today laying down the official smackdown and Universal apparently not caring, we can consider Timoty Parker burnt, ya’ll.)
- 12D: “Well ain’t you fancy?” — LAH DI DAH
- 38D: Minnesota city named for the local waterway — ELK RIVER (it’s weird seeing a city near the one you grew up in show up in a puzzle)
- 55D: Confectioner who produced Double Bubble the first successful bubblegum — FLEER
(Fleer, as it turns out, has one of those names that you assume has an error somewhere when you enter it into a crossword grid)
A nice grid and a fun reveal on the final answer.
3.5/5 stars
avclub one of the only outlets where I seriously consider an F when I see _UCKING
Me too, Austin. Me too.
Especially considering the clue- not gonna lie, I had that filled in for quite a while.
yup, same here, though i fixed it relatively easily. wish i could say the same about the last theme entry–i kept parsing it as testes struck, which is just painful on multiple levels.