Tuesday August 28th 2018, NY Times

Time:8:49

Average Tuesday: 13:58

Best Tuesday: 6:10

I’m generally uninspired by themes involving circled letters that, when you take the moment to inspect, end up being, ya know, something. Even once I’ve recognized the theme, it’s quite rare that it has any effect on the solve. In this case, the theme revealer was BACK CHANNEL (“Covert means of communication”) and, look at that, the circled letters spell out famous TV channels, but backwards. Once again, I didn’t think about it while solving, but I’ll give some praise to the constructor for managing to keep tricky sets of letters in order. It can’t have been that easy to find NNC, OBH, XOF, CBA, and SBC in sequence, so kudos for keeping them all together. 

I’ve never seen SEERESS before. I suppose it’s plausible for a female seer, but that’s a negative in terms of actual usage. 

Even though I just recently watched “Battle of the Sexes,” I couldn’t recall BOBBY RIGGS’ name; I needed almost all of the crosses. I actually have a terrible memory for names, which occasionally hurts me in crossword land. 

I always wonder if TCBY ever considered calling themselves The World’s Best Yoghurt. Maybe they knew that there was no way the US could make that claim. The world’s best yoghurt is obviously from Bulgaria. 

RED AS A BEET is probably the most exciting phrase in the grid, albeit with the most boring clueing (“really sunburnt”). 

I’ve been eating my share of NAAN here in India, but I’m coming to appreciate the variety of bread types here in India. Why don't ROTI and CHAPATI make it into crosswords more often? Would that be unfair? You could clue ROTI as "Indian bread, but not naan." I’ve also been told that naan is rarely served in Indian homes, but restaurants (especially buffets) prefer to serve naan because it’s so filling.  But I’ll accept corrections on that.