Wednesday's New York Times puzzle solved: April 25, 2018

My time: 8:33, a few minutes faster than average but not great.

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Adam G. Perl shows that he KNOWS EVERY ANGLE by having four shaded answers depict themselves.  Hidden in each corner of the fill is a word for a type of angle: OBT/U/S/E, RIG/HT, ACU/T/E, and --- making me relearn elementary geometry --- R/E/F/LEX.  Those words are formed in the grid across, down, and diagonally, as needed to illustrate the kinds of angles they are.  (Right, for example, is hidden in the down and then across, no diagonals, while obtuse falls down and then diagonally wide, as an obtuse angle does.)

Frightfully clever, these maths wallahs!  I'm impressed.

On to the fill!  Ugh, sports.  "QB's stat" is ATT.  This is short for attempted passes.  And later on in the Downs, we're treated to another unpleasingly blunt clue: "QB's stat."  Yes, again.  This time it's INT, which even I know is interceptions.

For "Big Apple subway line, for short" I put *MTA and even considered *LIE (a road, not a subway) but it's LEX, short for Interborough Rapid Transit Company Lexington Avenue Line.  I didn't really process the "line" part of the clue.  And even if I had, this would have been one of the slow points of the puzzle; I lived in New York City and this didn't occur to me.  Once again the New York Times puzzle is a bit too fond of its environs.

I knew that Diana RIGG was a Bond girl in her day, but I couldn't have told you the name of the character (not that the puzzle asked for it).  She played Tracy Bond, the only woman the suave superspy ever married, and who was later shot dead by an assassin.

A newish word for me is ALIENEE, one to whom property is transferred.  Also NATANT for "swimming," but I got that from the French cognate.

I liked a lot of the fill this time around.  CASE FILE, ORESTES, SKOR, BASE TEN, ANGIE'S LIST, BUY-INS.  There was some esoteric stuff that I knew right off, too, like OGEE, Gustav HOLST, and SFPD ("Dirty Harry's org").

Tulsa school ORU last came up on March 20.

AT. NO. for "periodic table fig." appeared October 10, 2017, and I didn't like it much then either.

Clever clues: "Kings' guards may be taken in it" is NBA DRAFT.  "It's a gift" is GAB (I kept thinking *GAG, like gag gift, but knew it didn't quite work). "Family guy?" is MADE MAN.  "Concerns for many srs." is SATS --- I was thinking about the elderly kind of seniors and tried to make *SSNS fit.  "Red letters?" is USSR.  And "'towering' regulatory grp.?" is FAA.

This was a great puzzle.  I SPENT a lot more time on it than I wanted to, but I loved the theme and the fill.