Tuesday's New York Times crossword puzzle solved: June 19, 2018

My time: 5:54.

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For those snowflake liberals among us who cringe at the free and proud exercise of the Second Amendment (motto: the Only Amendment Worth Learning or Keeping), true American Peter Gordon has a TRIGGER / WARNING for you.  (Oddly, this answer is clued as "caution before a potentially upsetting lecture," which means someone thinks it's only used among fearful freshmen, but I see the phrase used in all manner of places and contexts.)

The three themed answers are RIDES SHOTGUN, RIFLE THROUGH, and BAZOOKA BUBBLEGUM.  Armed with that knowledge, let's move on.

I loved the movie ZOOTOPIA.  I had forgotten its tagline was "Welcome to the urban jungle."

GREEK food moussaka came up in a clue on August 8, 2017 (noted then as including feta),  while souvlaki is meat on a skewer.

Did you know an ERG is one ten millionth (10⁻⁷) of a joule?  An erg is the amount of work done by a force of one dyne exerted for a distance of one centimeter.   It seems like the only way to define units is by using other units.  It's units all the way down.

"The Sleeping Gypsy," by ROUSSEAU, is one of my favorites!

"Three up, three down threesome" made absolutely zero sense to me.  It means there's three OUTS in an inning, and no batter on base.

The New York Times crossword absolutely adores corporate acquisitions.  Today we learn that Verizon bought MCI, a telecommunications company with itself a dizzyingly complex history of name changes and buy-outs, for 7.6 billion dollars in 2005.  Also in 2005, their CEO Bernard Ebbers went to prison for 25 years for securities fraud.

SANREMO, an Italian resort city, came up on October 11, 2017.

I liked the theme of this one, though the clues were pretty blah: no wordplay, and mostly straight-up synonym definitions.  Well, they can't all STUN us with their brilliance.