Sunday November 11th 2018, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 55:13
Sunday Average: 49:29
Best Sunday: 21:55

I'm finally back to Sunday mornings at home with coffee and crossword and I'm as happy about that as I am to see NEKO CASE making an appearance. However, as you can see from my time, this one was an absolute slog for me, mostly because of fill that I didn't know more than a somewhat tricky theme, although that was definitely a factor in one case. Also, arbitrary theme instructions making up the long acrosses doesn't make things any easier. NICAD batteries (short for nickel–cadmium) rarely come up in my everyday life, nor does 20s gangster slang SIMOLEONS for dollars, which, by the way, has an alternate spelling with an 'a' as the sixth letter, which is crossing "Algerian port" ORAN. I didn't love all that.

Even worse for me was the NE corner where we have OATER, which apparently is an informal way to refer to a western movie or television show. No idea here. A little below that we have IMARET for "Turkish inn," which I'll admit sounds a little familiar, since I've spent a fair amount of time in the former Ottoman Empire, but still. Both of these words cross the answer for "Native Iowan," which was the last space to fall as I plugged in letter after before finally landing on HAWTE. What? Googling "hawte" yields absolutely nothing and only after spending a while staring at the puzzle did I realize that this was one of the theme answers.

So, the accompanying text reveals that this is an Escape Room themed crossword and as you'll see, the word "key" needs to be substituted in a couple places. So, for "Sycophant" we get LACA (replace the 'a' to get 'Lackey'), "'Fine with me'" yields OWDOKE (replace the w to get 'Okey doke'), and "Symbol of fire prevention" gets SMOY ('Smokey'). I got all those, but wasn't looking for HAWTE yielding 'Hawkeye,' because I foolishly assumed that since three of the keys were across answers, so would the last one. If you follow the theme instructions, you may be able to solve the meta answer for this puzzle and submit it to the NY Times to get a prize. I won't reveal that here, because I think that's counter to crossword etiquette, but it's pretty straightforward as metas go.

Despite my many difficulties with this puzzle, I still enjoyed spending a good chunk of my morning on it and learning about 19th century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille COROT. 

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