Wednesday October 24th 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 15:11
Wednesday Average: 17:35
Best Wednesday: 7:24

I ended up enjoying the unexpected tricky theme this Wednesday, something that might be more standard for a Thursday. I'd been up since 5am in order to make my flight from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar. If you haven't made your way through the Beijing airport, it's probably as much of a TOIL as you expect it to be. Still, my overtired brain didn't have too much trouble with the POP UP AD theme, which had the letters AD (helpfully circled) jumping up and then back down to complete four across answers. It's a bit tough to describe, but if you look at the gird, you'll see that 19 across is ROPE(AD)OPE, 28 across is DEC(AD)ENT, 42 across is CAN(AD)IAN, and 54 across is TRE(AD)MILL. It works nicely and the circles help bring the difficulty into line.

The fill, however, was fairly brutal at certain points and left me trying out various letter combinations for several minutes. First of all, the corners are one point short of being completely isolated, which makes things fairly difficult. Second, I can see at least 3 crosses that require a somewhat random proper noun and an uncommon noun. The ones that got me were the PERIDOT ("Birthstone for most Leos") and EDA (Author LeShan) crossing (actually I didn't know "R&B trio Bell Biv" DEVOE either) and the BEZEL ("Ring around a watch face") with ZAMUNDA ("Fictional African kingdom in 'Coming to America'"). I can also see struggling with TARSAL ("Ankle-related") crossing TARA "Reid of 'American Pie.'" Fortunately, I recently learned the word "tarsal" from a previous crossword.

In the end, we have a well-executed theme with fill that, for me at least, seemed unreasonable. I'll chalk it up to a learning experience, although now that I look at the nine total sentences about Eda LeShan on her WikiPedia page, I wonder if this is really someone I can reasonably be expected to know.  

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