Annotated 32-9
As longtime readers know, my two great loves in my creative career have been comics and crosswords, so when Flo proposed I do a crossword in this newspaper segment, I leapt at the opportunity.
Crosswords and war have a curious history together. When the New York Times finally caved to peer pressure and started publishing grids, World War II was given as the reason. A little harmless fun, it was felt, might leaven the sometimes grim news from the front and quell panic. And yet the very first clue in the first puzzle it published was for a “Famous one-eyed general,” WAVELL, who would have figured into war-related headlines of the time. One year later, in the United Kingdom, certain crossword clues were investigated for being conspicuously close to military code words. The explanation was more accident than espionage, but it showed how the times could infect even the seemingly neutral ground of word games.
These days, grids are more likely to reflect antiwar sentiment, thanks to a loosening of editorial oversight and the bookish subculture of crossword creators. But that doesn’t mean winds of conflict have stopped blowing, and there’s been an increasing struggle in recent years over whose pop culture is worthier to appear in a grid.
For this Gastonian grid, I used a “word square,” a forerunner to the crossword whose answers are the same across and down. I was able to get four pretty topical words in there, with nods to the Cultists and the aren’t-they-cute racism from the last page… but I had to acknowledge that we’d never used “lede” before, using a long, rambling clue to make it gettable. Still, if I imagine that Bedard created this puzzle, the fact that the solver has to read some pro-military propaganda to finish filling it in is probably more of a feature than a bug. The overall message is probably clear: Bedard and the public now consider the Cult a joke, almost as harmless as those flower-kissing wood elves, whereas the Savage threat is far more urgent. Sign up to fight the latter, if you want your existence to have any meaning!
CULT
USER
LEDE
TREE
So is this segment of the newspaper the bottom of a previous page or a new one?
I can’t see the date, so I suppose the bottom, but if it was suppose to be the top it would show how the adventurer’s heroic news are even less “important” to the media than the previous page where they dropped from main story to second. Now they’d be common knowledge enough to be used in a crossword but not “important” or interesting enough to be news.
I can honestly say that either interpretation strikes me as fine… if you made me choose, I’d say top of an interior page. This is in no way headline material, but the Heads would want some priority given to the recruitment advertorial.
I just presumed that we were getting papers from successive days showing where each day had placed the “cultist” story. First, headline; then front page; finally, close to punch line.
Wait, I’m not sure I read the original question as intended. Yes, your presumption is right: these three newspaper sections represent different days.
Does Private Lede even exist? I see no tag. I wouldn’t put it past Bedard to create an everyday human hero that knows his place.
What a weird coincidence…I was just reading about Sator Squares…