Em

@Striker That was the one letter I missed in the whole puzzle.

@Erick “spider sense” was more common originally but now “spidey sense” is about three times as common according to Google’s ngram viewer (<a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spidey+sense" target="_blank">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spidey+sense</a>%2Cspider+sense&year_start=1970&year_end=2024&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true). I think they’re both legit.

@Ricky You might sit to talk to a toddler at their level, but it’s not a strong link. I like babysitting better.

@Lpr I was trying to guess which three letters and noticed that ATO (the fraternity) is the only three-letter sequence in SHERATON that isn’t a common English word.

@Steve L Stanford sports teams (our archrivals across the Bay) are also called the Cardinal due to their school color. I always thought this was a weird use of a singular noun, but now I think it may be a slightly archaic use of the adjective form, instead of nounifying it. Like “the red [players] are coming” instead of “the reds are coming”.

@Isabeau The uses of “thy/thine” are quite similar to “my/mine” if you allow a little archaism: “my cat” / “thy cat”, “mine eyes” / “thine eyes”, “what’s mine is thine” / “what’s thine is mine”.

@Red Carpet Same for my dad in Georgia. According to him it was brought over to control erosion on train embankments and then got out of control. I suppose I could check if that’s true now, but prefer to stick with pre-internet lore.

@Petrol I once read about a pool sign that could be read the same whether standing upright or doing a handstand on the diving board: “NOW NO SWIMS ON MON”

@Chrissy I struggled with that area for a long time, not knowing Al HIRT. I spent a long time with possibly “Doc” for a calculus professor but then “?NHo” didn’t make any sense. Getting “INHD” helped a lot, and some time after that I thought of DDS and half-remembered that calc-something was another word for tartar. I also struggled with REOS, but may have been helped along by the fact that REO appeared in the crossword last week. I thought that clue was a little unfair, since those cars haven’t been made since the 1930s, but they were famed in their day and constructors need Es and Os!

@Tony I agree, it would be nice to have some hint like that. I’ve read about how to fill in rebuses, whether they’re shared across and down or separate. Here it seemed like somehow you needed to write “yes” across the two boxes and “NO|NO” for the down. So I tried similar combinations to you, e.g., “y/NO|es/NO”, but those were a no-go. I ended up going to the column to learn that I should substitute “yes” in my mind when I saw “NONO” across. I’ve been similarly flummoxed when invisible letters were supposed to be written inside the lines or outside the grid (i.e., not actually written at all, just imagined). It generally makes sense when you get the explanation, but seems impossible to figure out a priori. I don’t know whether this counts as a lack of experience, failure to figure out the last fraction of the theme, or unfairly arbitrary puzzle design. But those of us who start a little later do have the column to provide that hint if needed.

@Rob Look closer at “lookups”.

@SP I got permanently stuck with PRIcE, crossing HAcE for a “state of confusion”, since HACE can stand for “high altitude cerebral edema” (acute altitude sickness), of which a key symptom is confusion. I thought it was an overly technical answer and not a great clue. I should have looked harder for a better match.