Tuesday October 2nd 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 22:36
Average Tuesday: 13:54
Best Tuesday: 6:10

I worked on this one in the back of a van making our way across Islamabad and I was briefly worried that a Tuesday puzzle was going to be my undoing. I grasped the theme fairly quickly, with each answer being two popular musicals mashed together and clued with some limited wackiness (and also the years of the musical, which may have helped some people, I guess). HAIR GREASE ("Pomade? [1968, 1972]") is fairly straight down the middle and it wouldn't surprise me if this was the starting point. FROZEN ONCE clued "Melted? [2018,2012]" is probably my favorite while BIG COMPANY as "Megacorporation [1996, 1970]" is a complete yawner.  WICKED NINE is probably the trickiest with "Supreme Court that's corrupt? [2003, 1982]" and also calls up some completely unwelcome associations at this time. I also forgot about the musical "Nine," which I only knew because of a Muller Monthly Music Meta crossword from February anyway.

With most of the theme in place, I still got stuck forever in the middle. BASTE as a type of stitch comes as news to me and REGENT, from my perspective, is one of the most obscure university positions. I also can't say I loved the bland HAS FUN for "Doesn't take things too seriously." I suspect that there are probably 100 three-letter words meaning "worthless amount," but today it's FIG. Other fill that slowed me down significantly would have to be ARIOT (Yikes), SEGO, SELA, FARAD, STERE, and KERR. Despite my first decent night of sleep in Pakistan so far (even sleeping up to 2 hours in a STRETCH!), all of this made today's puzzle difficult to stomach for me. 

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