Thursday's New York Times crossworld puzzle solved: December 6, 2018

My time: 8:52, very close to the record!

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Sophia Maymudes has us feline fine with this [CAT]-themed rebus.  Where do some house pets go?  LITTER BOXES, or maybe... letter boxes?  They go "diagonally," or KITTY-CORNER.  That means, you guessed it, CAT goes into the four corners.

This makes [CAT]TLE ("things driven on ranches") crossed with [CAT]ALOG, MUS[CAT] crossed with COPY[CAT], and so on.  One that was a little harder to guess was [CAT]ER because of the long vowel sound.   In all, it's a purr-fectly clever theme, not too hard but initially puzzling.

Meow let's put a paws on the cat puns.

For "put on" I thought of the meaning *ACTED but it's AIRED.

I thought "what thirsty flowers do" is a great clue for WILT.

Did you know RNA is single-stranded, while DNA is double-stranded?

For "ingredient in many a breakfast cereal" I put *RYE but it's DYE, as in kid's colored cereals.  This slowed me down some.

Did you know New Jersey was originally named NOVA Caesarea?

How is a NOOSE an alternative to a guillotine?  That doesn't chop your head off.

"Ski resort vehicle" is SNO-CAT.  Their logo is a cat with an orange scarf.

The Latin word for road, ITER, came up on August 16.

I remembered that Lily Potter's maiden name had come up before, but I forgot what it was.  It's EVANS, as seen on the July 1 post.

Other than the slim scatterings of uncertainty above, I had very little trouble with this one!  But Friday's coming!  DON'T PANIC.