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Pitchers and catchers report! To celebrate, I have here a baseball-heavy crossword that has a theme that has nothing to do with baseball. You’ll like it even if you don’t care about baseball, I promise!
Hey, we ran a contest a while back, remember? Well, we have results. But first, we have spoiler space.
Six very obvious theme entries in the puzzle:
MINUTE WALTZ = Chopin composition that actually takes at least 90 seconds to perform [start]
DESERT BLOOM = Explosion of wildflowers in Death Valley, say [(1), The Three Musketeers]
DEADWOOD = TV western set in South Dakota [(2), The Fellowship of the Ring]
AIRFIELD = Takeoff place [(4), Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey]
CORNERSTONE = Foundational piece [(5), The Amazing Spider-Man]
CRISPY BACON = Breakfast option that might be cooked in the oven [(6), Crazy Stupid Love]
So what’s going on? Given that we have movies, and a sequence of things ending with “Bacon”, it looks like we’re constructing a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” chain. And indeed, after a trip or two to IMDb, we can see that we have the following:
Christoph Waltz and Orlando Bloom appeared together in one of the many The Three Musketeers movies
Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood both starred in The Fellowship of the Ring
… uh oh, something is missing here, but we’ll come back to that …
Sally Field and Emma Stone were in The Amazing Spider-Man
Emma Stone and Kevin Bacon were part of the love tangle in Crazy Stupid Love
So what’s missing? We need to find someone who appeared in a movie with Elijah Wood, and was in Homeward Bound with Sally Field. Well, not a lot of big names were in Homeward Bound, just Michael J. Fox. Was he ever in a movie with Elijah Wood?
Oh, look at that! And in the grid we have FIRE (clued as 🔥) and FOX (clued as 🦊), so our meta answer must be FIREFOX.
We had 35 correct entries, and our randomly chosen winner is Dan Bowden! As his prize, Dan has chosen a one-year subscription to The Hub. Thanks to everyone for participating!