Thursday September 20th 2018, NY Times Crossword

Time: 29:59
Average Thursday: 26:35
Best Thursday: 10:18

I think I struggled with this one more than I should have. The theme was straightforward enough, especially with the helpful note in the app that "the clue at 53-across indicates an answer that begins in the first squares of the 12th row." After spending a moment dumbly counting down the side, I guessed that these single squares would, in fact, connect with Across answers somehow. Only after I finished did I notice that the parts of words that INTERLACE were all things that could be sewn or woven or whatever. STRING SECTION and MESSAGE THREAD were the other two, although the simple answer could have simply been MESSAGEs, which threw me off for a time. Is it not a problem that the INTERLACE answer just trails off into the rest of the puzzle? That seems like a construction problem to me.

My struggle came mostly from the unfamiliar fill and what I'd call an excess of three word answers, which always elude me for a while. GO TO RUIN, IN ONE ACT, I GET IDEAS, and MADE IT BETTER are all not terribly exciting and just take a fair amount of parsing for me. EMAIL ACCOUNT, with its "Corresponding need?" clever-type clue, is also phenomenally boring as an answer.

Rusty STAUB, 23-year baseball journeyman who ended his career in 1985, was just a tad before my time, so that clue brutalized me. I also couldn't remember the word GLOTTIS, which meant that overall the north was an extended struggle. That said, I loved to see BOAR HUNT in there, mostly because it calls to mind Greek Mythology and I'm currently reading Circe by Madeline Miller and just waiting for Odysseus to make his appearance. I believe that Odysseus' hound Argos was known for his boar-hunting skills.

TONY is slang for "fashionably high class?" I doubted that but the internet is confirming so what do I know? One thing I am not is fashionably high class.