Saturday January 19th 2019, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 12:03
Saturday Average: 37:36
Best Saturday: 10:34

I'm embarrassed to say that my initial thought when I had LE-- for "King of the stage" was "of Leon?" Fortunately that doesn't work or make sense at all and obviously it's King LEAR.

I was surprised at how easily I cruised through this puzzle without any coffee. I may have been fortunate that since I'm already about 10% of the way into her book, MICHELLE OBAMA for "'Becoming' someone?" was an automatic long across. That always helps along with fairly easily dropping MESOPOTAMIA, which I can only hear in the voice of The Tick yelling "The Cradle of Civilization!"

There's really no reason that "Suits and such" would have to be MENS WEAR. Suit is a pretty vague term as it is, but even if you assume the typical suit, anyone can wear that.

Apparently the root word for KAVA KAVA is from the Tongan and Marquesan words for "bitter."

I think this puzzle is really drawing attention to the fact that the tagline "The nightmare isn't over!" could be for literally any horror film sequel. In this case, it's HALLOWEEN II although, since I've never heard of the cheer phrase "SIS Boom Bah!" I figured it was possible that it could be the fourth Halloween film too. But, as we all know, the tagline for that film is "HE'S BACK!" or "Horror has returned to Haddonfield" or "It's gonna be one hell of a family reunion!" I love taglines.

I'm only vaguely familiar with the Mohs hardness scale, so after managing TOPAZ at number 8, I've learned that Corundum is at 9 and Diamond, of course, is 10. The more you know!


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