Grid: 20 minutes; meta: two days 

Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Find Us Online!” — Conrad’s writeup.

This week we’re searching for one thing you will discover on-line. There have been theme entries:

• 1a: [U.S. armed forces branch (Find them online!)]: NAVY
• 5a: [Group that protects nonhumans (Find them online!)]: PETA
• 57a: [U.S. body with 100 members (Find them online!): SENATE
• 62a: [Social media giant (Find them online!): PINTEREST
• 68a: [Ivy League university (Find them online!): BROWN

Each site ended with a different top-level domain (TLD), leading to NAVY.MIL. PETA.ORG, etc. It took me two days to find the next step, although it was a fairly straightforward meta. Here are various rabbit holes I chased:

• PARGET/PAT was really odd fill (TARGET/TAT would have been cleaner), and I thought it had to be thematic
• I tried working a (T)ARGET.COM angle, swapping letters in other letters to form web sites
• I found the websites online and compared home pages, looking for any similarities
• I wondered if CODE (clued as “secret language”) was thematic
• I looked for other sites in the grid: TSA.GOV, ROKU.COM, CATO.ORG, UTAH.GOV (but also UTAH.EDU). I didn’t want to abandon this idea, but the sites started becoming obscure, (and I couldn’t find anything dot MIL), so I finally did

WSJ Contest – 09.23.22 – solution

I periodically re-scanned the grid and clues, kept eyeing PARGET. I finally saw it: PARGET contained all of the letters in PETA.ORG, except for “O.” I had the rabbit: each site name mapped to another anagrammed grid entry with one letter left over:

• NAVY.(M)IL -> VAINLY: M
• PETA.(O)RG -> PARGET: O
• SENATE.GO(V) -> STONEAGE: V
• P(I)NTEREST.COM -> CONTRETEMPS: I
• BROWN.(E)DU -> RUBDOWN: E

The leftover letters spell MOVIE, our contest solution. Interesting meta that played tough for me. Solvers: please let me know how you made out, and describe the rabbits you chased (and how long you chased them).