Tongersdei (Frisian Thursday)

In the Thursday NYT, Pat Merrell dishes out another twisty theme—this time, if you add the parenthetical initials to the beginning of the words in the theme entries, you get a famous (or semifamous) name; e.g., HARLEY RIDE yields Charley Pride. I don’t wish to contemplate how long it might have taken Pat to identify a theme’s worth of names that become clueable phrases after dropping their first and last initials. Can you think of other candidates? (And did anyone else solving in the timed applet have a glitch where the numbers disappeared from the grid until you clicked on that area?)

In the Sun, Jeffrey Harris (a.k.a. Jangler) provided a math twist on Oscar week in “Hollywood Squares”: a rebus involving four movie titles that contain a square number (1, 4, 9, 16). Assorted structural limitations relating to the 15x16 grid and the rebus apparently forced a surplus of black squares and 3-letter words.

NYT 5:50
NYS 5:29
LAT 3:54
Newsday 3:08 (on paper)
CS 3:07