Sunday October 7th 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 37:45
Average Sunday: 50:22
Best Sunday: 21:55

I worked on this one throughout the day while wandering Karachi with Super Sawari tours, which was generally NEAT-O but also had a few moments of UNEASE. Karachi doesn't see many tourists these days, it seems, so I certainly felt like the bus full of Americans stood out.

I enjoyed this Sunday's theme of interrupted words that somewhat literally explain the fact that a given word is being broken up within the answers. Fortunately, the circles were there to let you know where the extra letter would fall and, in the end, the circled letters spell out "Square peg," which I guess tangentially fits the theme. I feel like I'm missing something. The theme ended up being perhaps more difficult than intended because many of the downs overlapping the circles weren't the most intuitive. For example, the OUT(Q)ER SPACE answer had the down for the Q as Q AND A, which is always a bit tough for me to see and also the clue "Followers of talks" didn't indicate that it would be a shortened or abbreviated solution. OK, I'm being nitpicky, but I was a bit frustrated toward the end when I saw that almost all of my empty squares were circle spaces that effectively didn't have crosses. Or I'm annoyed that I couldn't remember the animal TAPIR and I didn't know enough about curtains to be able to intuit SHEERS and not SHEEtS. I also thought maybe SHEEfS were a thing to give me "aRf" for "Scottie's warning" rather than GRR. Shrug.

Just one more college fair today in Pakistan, then high school visits tomorrow and then I'm flying off to Dhaka!

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