My time: 14:47, beating the old Sunday record by two minutes exactly! Woot!
Theme: "Alternative Cinema," by Francis Heaney. Movie titles are replaced with other movie titles that might describe the clued movie. So, DOCTOR STRANGE for "Frankenstein," THE AFRICAN QUEEN for "Cleopatra" (that's a good one), AMERICAN BEAUTY for "The Name of the Rose," and so on. The funniest one is BYE BYE / BIRDIE for "To Kill a Mockingbird."
I didn't know St. PAUL's Chapel of the Trinity Church Wall Street, "the Little Chapel that Stood," has been open since 1766.
SOO has come up often in the puzzle, but usually as the locks of the same name on the Great Lakes. This time it's Phillipa SOO, who played Eliza in the original cast of "Hamilton." And not much else yet.
Hello Kitty is owned by the Japanese company SANRIO. It was founded in 1960.
Nabisco's first cracker was the UNEEDA Biscuit, discontinued in 2009 or so. Uneeda biscuits were an attempt to make a cracker that was flakier and lighter than any of their competitors’ versions. Their selling point was that they were sold in air-tight sanitary packages, unlike other crackers that were packed in barrels.
Apparently Terry Bradshaw was a STEELER for his entire career. That's nice. As quarterback, he led the Pittsburgh Steelers to eight AFC Central championships, and an unprecedented four Super Bowl titles in a six-year period from 1974 to 1979.
Never heard of Charles Grandison FINNEY, "Father of Modern Revivalism." He was a key leader of the evangelical revival movement in America. In the 1800s he conducted revival meetings across many north-eastern states and won many converts. His revival meetings created anxiety in a penitent's mind that one could only save his or her soul by submission to the will of God, as illustrated by Finney's quotations from the Bible.
Also never heard of Hideki MATUSI, left-fielder and hitter for the Yankees.
VARESE is a city northwest of Milan. It is home to a sacred mountain with a chapel on it.
Nail polish remover OPI has come up before.
Clever clues: "Stone to cast?" is SHARON. "Lengths for rulers" is REIGNS.
This puzzle really wasn't hard for me. I was definitely surprised at how basic and straightforward so many of the clues were, just simple definitions. "____ Hari" for MATA, "something trademarked" for LOGO, and so on. While I did my first go-throughs, I kept assuming that at least a few of my placeholder "first idea" answers would turn out to be tricks or wrong, but none of them was. This stuff just happened to be in my wheelhouse today!
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