Thursday September 6th 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 33:30
Average Thursday: 26:38
Best Thursday: 10:18

Wow, this one gave me a lot of trouble. Part of it may be the jet lag and I'm also now feeling the pressure of not being 9.5 hours ahead of my reading audience. More than that, however, the cluing was pretty tricky and I didn't find the theme revealer to be remotely intuitive.

Fortunately, there's only one phrase involving icebergs, as far as I know, so once I had the end of the revealer, I could easily complete TIP OF THE ICEBERG, which gave me a lot of letters to work with. I thought maybe that the black squares in the middle represented a tip of an iceberg, but couldn't figure out what that would lead to. Eventually, there was enough wrong in the north that I started adding letters to the top of words, yielding the following answers:

(I)SLAM
(C)OVER CHARGES
(E)MERGES
(B)ARES
(E)ASTERN
(R)ENUNICIATION
(G)UN IT

 As I said, I'm not sure the revealer quite works, but I'm happy enough because, again, I recognize this as a puzzle that I would never have completed last year. A silly plural like ECRUS was no help either and I've never heard of the self-styled "Internetainers" RHETT and Link.

"It's between an A and a B" seemed like heroically tricky way to clue NINETY. That crossing SATAN as "Leader of the land down under" and LAPIN, which I didn't recognize as "rabbit fur" meant that the SW was the last region to fall once I'd grokked the theme. I really wanted probITY for "Superhero's defining quality" instead of the blander but correct ABILITY.

We'll see how the blogging goes now that I'm in my normal working routine for a few weeks and can't say fun things like "I'm off to Jaipur!" I remain committed. 

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