Monday's New York Times crossword puzzle solved: October 29, 2018

My time: 4:16, pretty swift!

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Peter Gordon gives us this colorful puzzle, in which five answers have in common "black and white animals" in their names.  The theme is given away in the clues, which kind of ruined the fun for me.  I would have been a lot more amused by seeing the answers without an explicit connection being made, and at the end maybe a capper clue like "how old TV was watched, or what the theme answers have in common" with the answer black and white.

But as it is, we are told right out that PUFFIN BOOKS, ZEBRA CROSSING, PANDA EXPRESS, PENGUIN SUIT, and SKUNK CABBAGE make up the theme because they share animal names.  I found it a bit ho-hum, unfortunately.

I know LENA Dunham from her show, but I doubt I would have been able to identify her from her book Not That Kind of Girl.

Pago Pago is listed in the puzzle as being in SAMOA, but that's not entirely accurate.  It's the capital of American Samoa.  On June 15 the capital of the independent nation of Samoa, APIA, was identified.

ESSEN is a city in Germany was one of Germany's most important coal and steel centers from the onset of mass industrialization to about 1980.  Nowadays it is striving to be a green capital.

Yes, we know Guadalajara is in MEXICO, but do we also know that it's the capital of Jalisco, and known for tequila and mariachi music?  I took a class in Mexico history ages ago, so I forgot, if I ever knew.

I would TSE this was a pretty easy puzzle!  I'm disappointed with the unsubtle theme, but harbor no ANIMUS otherwise.