{"id":1137,"date":"2026-02-13T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T17:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/?p=1137"},"modified":"2026-02-10T21:56:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T05:56:29","slug":"puzzle-148-dancing-with-the-devil-and-contest-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/13\/puzzle-148-dancing-with-the-devil-and-contest-results\/","title":{"rendered":"Puzzle #148: Dirty Dancing With The Devil (and contest results!)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fWKA9Zi5-_Y\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">&gt;&gt;&gt; <a href=\"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/solve\/index.html?file=\/downloads\/site_puzzles\/DirtyDancingWithTheDevil.ipuz\">Solve this puzzle online<\/a> &lt;&lt;&lt;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll like it even if you don&#8217;t care about baseball, I promise!<\/p>\n<p>Hey, we <a href=\"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/23\/puzzle-147-chain-chain-chain-crossword-with-meta\/\">ran a contest a while back<\/a>, remember? Well, we have results. But first, we have spoiler space.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/i5txwFv-zYM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Six very obvious theme entries in the puzzle:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>MINUTE WALTZ = Chopin composition that actually takes at least 90 seconds to perform [start]<br \/>\nDESERT BLOOM = Explosion of wildflowers in Death Valley, say [(1), <em>The Three Musketeers<\/em>]<br \/>\nDEADWOOD = TV western set in South Dakota [(2), <em>The Fellowship of the Ring<\/em>]<br \/>\nAIRFIELD = Takeoff place [(4), <em>Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey<\/em>]<br \/>\nCORNERSTONE = Foundational piece [(5), <em>The Amazing Spider-Man<\/em>]<br \/>\nCRISPY BACON = Breakfast option that might be cooked in the oven [(6), <em>Crazy Stupid Love<\/em>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So what&#8217;s going on? Given that we have movies, and a sequence of things ending with &#8220;Bacon&#8221;, it looks like we&#8217;re constructing a &#8220;Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon&#8221; chain. And indeed, after a trip or two to IMDb, we can see that we have the following:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Christoph Waltz and Orlando Bloom appeared together in one of the many <em>The Three Musketeers<\/em> movies<br \/>\nOrlando Bloom and Elijah Wood both starred in <em>The Fellowship of the Ring<\/em><br \/>\n&#8230; uh oh, something is missing here, but we&#8217;ll come back to that &#8230;<br \/>\nSally Field and Emma Stone were in <em>The Amazing Spider-Man<\/em><br \/>\nEmma Stone and Kevin Bacon were part of the love tangle in <em>Crazy Stupid Love<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So what&#8217;s missing? We need to find someone who appeared in a movie with Elijah Wood, and was in <em>Homeward Bound<\/em> with Sally Field. Well, not a lot of big names were in <em>Homeward Bound<\/em>, just Michael J. Fox. Was he ever in a movie with Elijah Wood?<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MyA4h8X209U\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Oh, look at that! And in the grid we have FIRE (clued as \ud83d\udd25) and FOX (clued as \ud83e\udd8a), so our meta answer must be FIREFOX.<\/p>\n<p>We had 35 correct entries, and our randomly chosen winner is Dan Bowden! As his prize, Dan has chosen a one-year subscription to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/hubcrosswords\">The Hub<\/a>. Thanks to everyone for participating!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/solve\/index.html?file=\/downloads\/site_puzzles\/DirtyDancingWithTheDevil.ipuz\">Enjoy the solve!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&gt;&gt;&gt; Solve this puzzle online &lt;&lt;&lt; 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&#8217;ll like it even if you don&#8217;t care about baseball, I promise! Hey, we ran a contest a while back, remember? Well, we have results. But&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-wrap\"><a href=\"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/13\/puzzle-148-dancing-with-the-devil-and-contest-results\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;Puzzle #148: Dirty Dancing With The Devil (and contest results!)&rdquo;<\/span> &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crosswords","category-puzzles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1143,"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions\/1143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}