Canadian Wordsearch (#030)

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This puzzle offered some nice long entries - GOOD CHOICE, COLD-CALLED - but at the cost of numerous three-letter entries. I tried to keep them interesting, but will try and steer future puzzles away from these extremes!

Canadian Wordsearch (#026)

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Honestly, my favourite clue here is 29A. I feel like I got introduced to the Internet during the 'golden age' of memes, with rage-comic stick figures and goofy templates multiplying innocently - including one picture of a MORAY eel that looked like it was grinning. That picture then got set to the tune of Dean Martin's classic *That's Amore*. We'll treat this clue as an homage to those early days of ebullient humour, then (before memes began tearing at our social fabric).

Canadian Wordsearch (#023)

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Tragically, I have not yet had the good fortune of visiting the city tucked into today's crossword, despite the charming alignment with my own name! One day, one day - when my wife and I can scrounge up the time (and the money) to make a trip that's not dedicated to visiting family!

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #020)

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One highlight for me in making this puzzle was noticing that 17D (Picasso) and 20D (Neruda) were both artists with the first name Pablo. Another, looking now closer to home, was placing 25D (Pines) in the puzzle, because I immediately knew I wanted to make it a reference to Louise Penny's Armand Gamache series. As someone from Quebec, I do love her books - there's something about recognizing the homeland in the way she writes of Quebec. (There is a nine-episode TV series that was made of it, but I can't say it captured the same feeling... of course, the magic of writing is that it allows the reader to imagine into the abstract, to dream between the lines, while video has to get all of the details right on its own.)

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #018)

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One of the defining moments of my 'courtship' of my wife was when I convinced myself that it was time that I give blood - but that, a bit reticent to have a needle jabbed up my elbow, figured I wanted to get reassurance from someone who had gone through it. Of all my friends, she was the one I was most confident had given blood. My confidence was well grounded: her visit count was already into double-digits. It's become something of a date... albeit one that I'll attend with more than a bit of reluctance, and one that she'll anticipate, chirping that 'It's in you to give!'.

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #015)

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One clue that unfortunately didn't make it through was for 23-Across, ORC, where I'd hoped to have something along the lines of 'Horde member, perhaps, in World of Warcraft': for the uninitiated, players in World of Warcraft are divided between the Alliance, led by humans, and the Horde, led by orcs. An ORC, therefore, would be a member of the Horde. As much as it would have amused me to pay tribute to my teenage years, I didn't think it would be fair to both pin the answer to a video game (as popular as WoW has been) while also hiding the capital letter of H by making Horde the first word.

That said, the Lord of the Rings - even if I only saw the movies well into my twenties - are another very solid franchise, and so I don't regret the final clue.

This puzzle is also the base of the Centre's guide for making a crossword puzzle - if you've ever been curious about trying your hand at constructing crosswords, you now have a step-by-step guide! (Of course, we recommend completing this puzzle first - the guide is nothing but spoilers!)

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #013)

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #011)

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #007)

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #005)

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #003)

Canadian Wordsearch (Puzzle #001)