Monday by Jess Shulman and Amie Walker

Time: circa 4 minutes (messed up a letter and didn't have the patience to try and figure out where my typo was but ballpark)

Hello Card Nation! (cringe)

Back at it again with a fairly easy and pleasant Monday puzzle. Theme for today is short and sweet, solid Monday fare that's reasonably inspired—two-word phrases that mean "[Get my innuendo?]". Nice themed answers, and only quibble is that I've personally only ever heard 17A "NUDGENUDGE" and 37A "WINKWINK" uttered in one breath, not as their own individual phrases as this puzzle implies. In principle, I don't think they belong apart, but there's definitely plausible deniability.

As I finished this puzzle, I was reminded why I find Monday puzzles, which are meant to be the easiest, a little stressful. I've had a handful of really lucky Monday times that have been sub-4 minutes which have (sillily) made me feel pretty good about myself. Though that's nice and good, it's had the unpleasant side effect of making every Monday puzzle an exercise in anxiety whenever I feel like I'm taking too long. Then, the stress that makes me slower, which makes me more anxious, which makes me slower, etc. Not healthy or fun. It's a bit dumb because I, like anyone else who's ever done a decent number of crossword puzzles, know that whether you get a time of 3:30 or 4:30 really comes down to luck and alertness.  

Anyway, some answers I struggled with / found interesting / found lacking:

10A "PEAT" — Didn't know that peat had a flavor, much less that that flavor was infused in Scotch whisky. Whenever I think of peat, I think of bog bodies. Creepy but very cool. 

24D "BEATTHEHEAT" — Cute phrase and pretty apropos for the warm winter we've been having. Been doing a lot of heat-beating up in QC recently—not enough snow for ski de fond, so a lot of lounging about and waiting for colder days. 

44D "HATE" — wrote in "PAIN" at first, which upon reflection would have made that line sound kind of stupid. "Pain leads to suffering," yeah no kidding Yoda. Haven't seen much of the new Star Wars stuff and certainly don't remember this line from the old movies, but I do know that meme about Anakin Skywalker fighting Obi Wan Kenobi, so this answer was easy to get especially with the crosses.

10D "POTBROWNIES" — Pot is definitely no longer in the lingo. Whenever I see it in a puzzle it invariably makes the whole thing feel kind of dated. 

That's it for today! 

See you tomorrow, perhaps.

Cardinal Crossies

PS:

I didn't do a write-up for Sunday's puzzle and I'll say first that the puzzle had some interesting trivia and was pretty straightforward and I liked it overall. 

However, for me, there was one really uncharacteristically awful moment. 108D Hideki "TOJO", the prime minister of Japan during WWII, isn't a nice thing to see in a crossword puzzle. From Wikipedia: "During the course of the war, Tojo presided over numerous war crimes, including the massacre and starvation of civilians and prisoners of war, as part of the wider Asian Holocaust." It seems that there would be a ban on convicted war criminals appearing in my nice crossword puzzles, but guess not.