Thursday April 25th 2019, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 24:09
Thursday Average: 24:43
Best Thursday: 10:18

I keep laughing about The Flophouse Podcast episode about The Emoji Movie in which EMOTICONS are apparently treated as the elderly. Elliott Kalan correctly questions if this posits a world in which emoji age and die or maybe one might even be a LEPER. Why not? Within the theme, we have the COLON HYPHEN and PARENTHESIS to make up the HAPPY FACE, which we then find in the rebus squares in the middle to represents the EYES NOSE MOUTH. I got stuck for a while in the center, failing to realize that there were rebus squares, unsure if we were dealing with SNeerS or SNORTS, and never having heard of HORST, a "Raised block of the earth's crust, to a geologist." Since I'm not a geologist, there's no amount of specificity possible in that clue that will allow me to get that answer.

Argentina being named after SILVER just came up on a Jeopardy episode that I was watching on Netflix, so I was all over that one.

Now it's time to return to a SERENE stormy evening. Cheers!

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