Sunday September 30th 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 48:53
Average Sunday: 50:33
Best Sunday: 21:55

I've spent probably 18 of the last 24 hours drifting in and out of sleep, with the rest of the time eating breakfast, enjoying the hotel gym, and working on this crossword. When I put it like, I think I can do more than ROLL WITH IT. It's quite appropriate that the theme of this puzzle would be disturbed sleep, even if there's not a word about a jet lag in here. Initially as I was working through this puzzle, I thought that this is another puzzle with an awful lot of theme. MATTRESS, PRINCESS, and PEA? Of course, the four rebus squares with "pea" were the only bit of trickiness, with the other elements falling into place for a charming "aha" moment. BELLE, LEIA, XENA, and ANNE lie directly atop QUEEN(OF MEAN), FULL(BODIED), TWIN(SISTER), and KING(SOLOMON), respectively, each with a rebus "Pea" below those that, you know, might disturb or ROUST them from sleep. Also, I can only hear "Twin sister" in Darth Vader's voice, which matches up nicely with Leia across the grid there.

Actually, there's quite a bit of fill tangential to the theme, with royalty represented by NOBLE, SULTAN,  EMIRS, and MUFASA and some extra sleep stuff with BED REST, RISEN, and ROUST. Overall, it's an impressively executed theme with a fair amount of fun fill.

Does anyone use a HIT COUNTER anymore? I can only associate them with old Geocities SITES. There's no way I'd put one on this blog because, as of now, it would be a bit depressing. 

I struggled extensively with two crosses. TESORO ("Western gas brand") with EGESTA ("Discharged matter") and FOB ("Watch chain") with FAT TAIL ("Feature of a probability distribution where extreme events are more likely") were all unknown to me and took a fair amount of playing with before I got the happy crossword music. Actually, I could barely read through that last clue without getting a headache. But I'm not really complaining about those, even if they cost me about 10 minutes, because I'm sure those are things I could or should know. And hopefully I'll remember them for next time. I also learned LANAI, another Hawaiian island!

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