"It Starts With One Thing..."

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

If I had a penny for every time I gave a turn signal and changed my mind one second later, thinking "To devil with the flummoxed cars behind me," I won't be a millionaire but my presence on streets would DEFINITELY be questionable

Check out the puzzle here

Okay, okay. Linkin Park diehards like me would already be singing the whole song just by looking at my post title. The whole song is playing inside my head while I write this blog and more than twice, I had to go back and correct something that my brain overlooked. So if you happen to find more errors than usual, you know who to blame.

Given how far Linkin Park have got me on days I was on the verge of breaking apart, it is no wonder that they hold a particularly special place in my heart. Right from when I was a child, What I've Done, New Divide and Numb have been a few constants I could always turn to, in good and bad times. Ergo, it was only a matter of time before I made a crossword around the tragically famous rock band.

Tricky Clues

There aren't many "tricky" clues, per se, in this puzzle. I took a break from devising devilish phrasing for my clues to focus on imbuing a favorite song in the grid. I'll just go over some phrases that might come off a little harder for someone not familiar with the entries featuring foreign languages.

For one thing, Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun, is called NIHON, or 日本, in Japanese. The kanji spelling features the Japanese character for sun "日" that is definitely a nod to the island country's sobriquet.

I had initially clued 8A as "Swedish exchange," but a quick Google search confirmed that the Swedish currency is called krona while the Norwegian counterpart is KRONE.

Something my friend S and I always joke about when we're on a drive is how we nearly always mess up our turns. A typical conversation goes something like, "Okay, now go left. No! Your OTHER left!" Thankfully, it's a sufficiently well-known trope to feature in a crossword while preserving a nice little personal story to go along.

The Theme

It's a fairly simple theme with layers and layers of emotion buried within. The shaded boxes spell out the title of a Linkin Park fan-favorite, IN THE END.

I had been trying to fit it into a grid since the past few weeks but didn't really find a satisfying fill. Just today I open Crosshare on my phone and started meddling around, and voila! I had this puzzle before me.

What's your Linkin Park favorite?

--Priya