Sunday September 23rd 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 40:09
Average Sunday: 50:35
Best Sunday: 21:55

Wow, there is an impressive amount of theme crammed into this puzzle. And since I spent the entire puzzle telling myself that I have no idea what the TREACHERY OF IMAGES is, my aha moment was particularly poignant. As the pipe filled itself in on the NY Times app, I thought that of course I know "This is not pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) by MAGRITTE from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics! I will say that I may never have bothered connecting the dots and creating the PIPE LINE, so the fact that the app took care of it did ELICIT a bravo from me. Good job, NY Times!

I'm just reading a book about crossword construction at the moment, so I'm becoming aware of the difficulty of creating a theme-dense puzzle. I will say that the fact that the painting is stored in LOS ANGELES would qualify as a bit trivial, but I'm not going to complain much about that. I was busy hacking away with no idea how I would finish the puzzle without knowing anything about the painting, artist, or quote, but the constructor gave me just enough to find purchase and ultimately have one of my rare cleanly completed Sundays (as in, I didn't have to hunt for that one mistake or typo before getting the happy puzzle music). OK, the I found the MANNHEIM cluing incredibly obtuse ("German city with a Pennsylvania namesake"), but I don't know of any other ways to clue it. Also, for future crosswords, I need to remember REATA as a synonym for a lasso.

Anyway, this puzzle hit me just right, especially with Q BRANCH just sitting there and LODI getting the Credence song stuck in my head.

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