Wednesday August 29th 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 18:10
Average Wednesday: 17:53
Best Wednesday: 7:24

While I solved this one over another fairly quiet breakfast, I'm writing my review after a day of far too much human interaction. This one played on the difficult side for me, mostly due to a couple short answers and abbreviations that eluded me along with a theme that I found tiresome: Question mark clues leading to anagrams of cities along with the city names. Once I figured it out, the theme helped me parse HASTEN ATHENS, but most of the rest had already been rather grudgingly filled in.

I just this second figured out why the clue "Yellow belly?" yields ELS. This may be my least favorite clue type, but it's because the word "yellow" has two L's (ELS) in its middle or, if you will (I won't), belly. Ugh. The fact that it crossed NEBR for "Big Ten school: Abbr." meant that I was just running the alphabet until I dropped that E in there and got the congratulatory note. I'm pretty confident that NEBR is not an abbreviation for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

I've also never heard of KENKEN puzzles and I'm avoiding learning too much about these arithmetic and logic puzzles because this blog is taking up enough of my time already. I'm sure they're great.

Among my many crossword weaknesses, acronyms might be the ones that drive me battiest. There's no way I'm getting NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as it turns out) without every single cross. But, I can thrown down ALYSSA Milano from Charmed with no crosses whatsoever. I have no explanation.

This is one of those embarrassing days where I'm in Delhi and yet I have literally not left the hotel and I don't anticipate doing so. Networking with higher education professionals is an important part of my job, but it exhausts me. Here's hoping one of them wants to get a beer with me (and not talk about work). Or I'll just NESTLE UP with some pillows and watch another episode of The Americans. 

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