Wednesday's New York Times crossword puzzle solved: February 20, 2019

My time: 5:36, missing my record by 20 seconds!

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Byron Walden had higher education on his mind when he made this puzzle  Several answers which are paired phrases shared their first word with the name of a school: BROWN AND SERVE, DUKE AND DUCHESS, SMITH AND WESSON, RICE AND BEANS, "DRAKE AND JOSH" and so on.  There's no wordplay based around the fact that the answers are word pairs, and the capper is that the URL ending associated with their first word is EDU.  That's kind of anticlimactic.  Why the "blank and blank" format if it's not going to feature in the clues as a joke?  I found the whole thing somewhat confusing and unsatisfying.

"Completely mistaken" means ALL WET.  I have used this expression erroneously all my life.  I thought it just meant pathetic.  I was all wet about that.

Never heard of Mark GOODSON, a producer of game shows, most notably with his partner Bill Todman.  The long list of Goodson-Todman productions includes "The Price Is Right," "Family Feud," "Match Game," "Password," "Beat the Clock," "To Tell the Truth," "I've Got a Secret," "What's My Line?," "Card Sharks," and "Tattletales."

The insurance giant AETNA has come up a few times, but today it is clued as being based in Hartford.  It was founded in 1853 and is now a subsidiary of CVS.

Almond-flavored liqueur AMARETTO came up on May 5, 2018.

EDOM, located partly in modern-day Jordan, was discovered on December 6, 2017.

Rigel and Spica were both cited as an example of a B-STAR on April 13, 2018.

ETON was noted as having been founded by Henry VI on July 16, 2018.

And that's that.  Somewhat of a blah quiz.  Sure, it's admirable that those long answers were all fit in the puzzle, but they weren't used in an interesting way.  Boo.  HISS.  Etc.