Thursday April 4th 2019, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 22:50
Thursday Average: 24:50
Best Thursday: 10:18

This Thursday gave me quite a bit of trouble and I'm sure that I would have given up on it in my early crossword days. Of course, there's the trickiness of having the rebus squares in unknown spots, mitigated somewhat by the two that were placed in the long across answers, which is predictable enough. As you can see, the theme would have you go BACK TO SQUARE ONE, as the first square of the clues are rebus and you would say that same word in the rebus square to finish the common phrase. The most devilishly clever was probably "Iconic introduction in cinema" for [BOND] JAMES (Bond). The rest, [YOU] CAN'T TAKE IT WITH (you), [DO] AS I SAY NOT AS I (do), and [NO] MEANS (no) were all fine, but considerably less exciting and did not elicit an Aha Moment for me.

I threw in Oslo for "European capital," because that's the standard 4-letter European capital in crosswords, but I was very pleased to find that it was RIGA, one of my favorite cities to which I hope to return.

As far as unknown proper nouns, I ran afoul of "Longtime Mississippi politico Trent" LOTT, dancer TWYLA Tharp, and Tony award winner Tyne DALY, who's apparently in Spider-Man: Homecoming. At least I knew Batman creator Bob KANE.

I was thrilled to see the TAJ Express, which I'll have to take next time to get to Agra from Delhi.

Finally, I only know 1998 P.G.A. Player of the Year Mark O'MEARA because back when I was in Russia, there was a sports channel that only had the rights to a few sports events, so I watched Mark O'Meara win the same random golf tournament maybe 25 times over the course of 9 months. So, I know that that is the name of a golfer. 

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