My time: 9:37, five minutes faster than average.
Theme: AND. The two plus symbols made of black squares in the grid stand for and inside four answers — two Down, two Across. The themed answers are SHEN[and]OAH RIVER ("tributary of the Potomac"), DAGWOOD S[and]WICH, THE GR[and] OLD OPRY, and GOLDEN H[and]CUFFS ("financial incentive for an executive to stay at a company").
And that explains the theme.
I don't think I have ever heard of a savings bank called simply a THRIFT.
"About 600 million viewers watched its pilot in 1969" is a sly way to reference not the pilot of a TV show, but Neil Armstrong, the actual pilot of APOLLO XI, as he walked on the moon.
SERUM in blood refers to all the proteins that are not involved in clotting. It may be defined as blood plasma without fibrinogens, which I think you'll agree clears it up nicely.
LYME disease has a classic "bull's-eye" rash, but it also can cause rashes of other shapes.
SOBA noodles and HODA Kotb are familiar old friends by now.
The SI unit for measuring angles is the radian, abbreviated RAD, and it's equal to 180 divided by π, or about 57.3 degrees.
I see "Scottish isle," I guess SKYE, but I didn't know it was connected by a road bridge to the mainland in 1995. It's known as the Skye Bridge. Ha ha! Skybridge.
We all know the artist Salvador DALI. Apparently he has been called "Avida Dollars" by André Breton and the other surrealists for becoming too commercial, and also for staying apolitical. People who cry "sell-out" are so tedious.
I didn't know that Elizabeth Warren was NEE Herring. But does one need to?
Clever clue: "in-flight announcement, for short?" is APB.
This was a fun puzzle. I like it when the grid plays a part and when there's that aha moment when you catch on that something isn't exactly right. FEEL ME?
OK, I do the NYT crossword every day, and I really have trouble with the Thursday puzzles, because their themes, and the physical applications of them, are often incredibly obtuse. I do not get the "and" theme at all. With your help, I finally found the first three linked answers, but where (and why) is the H for handcuffs? This week is almost as bad as the one a few weeks ago with the "all for one, one for all" theme, which I had dutifully filled in with rebuses, and finally gave up to see that I had to put just the one, wrong, 3-letter group in each word, making the answers nonsensical. Grr. I like a challenge, but I don't like obtuse themes!
ReplyDeleteDo you see the H after GOLDEN, going down? There's the H. It crossed at SEHN[and]OAH RIVER. In both the across and the down, the [and] is not really there, it's represented by the three black squares of the grid. "Golden handcuffs" is an expression meaning the money the give you to stick to a job you don't like.
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