Oldest golfer to win PGA Tour event / WED 6-26-19 / Shade akin to rust / Two tone beast that sleeps standing up

Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (4:44)


THEME: THEYDOSTUFF  — all-caps clues are ordinary words that are meant to be understood as verb phrases (pronoun + verb) and answers are professions those phrases might fit:

Theme answers:

• 17A: HEBREWS, i.e. he brews ... BEERMAKER
• 24A: WEAVER, i.e. we aver ... TRUE BELIEVERS
• 52A: SHERIFFS, i.e. she riffs ... JAZZ GUITARIST
• 63A: IRATE, i.e. I rate ... APPRAISER 

Word of the Day: MARS RED (46D: Shade akin to rust) —

1: any of various red to orange, brown, or violet artist's pigments made by calcining Mars yellow

2or mars red

a: COLCOTHAR sense 2

b: TOTEM sense 3

LOL ... so:

COLCOTHAR
: a reddish brown iron oxide left as a residue when ferrous sulfate is highly heated and used formerly in polishing glass and as a pigment
: a moderate reddish brown that is yellower and deeper than roan, yellower, stronger, and slightly darker than mahogany, and yellower, less strong, and slightly darker than oxblood — called also angel red,  Coromandel,  English red,  Mars red, Prussian red,  Tuscany 

Also LOL ... there literally is no "sense 3" of TOTEM at the m-w.com website


I really like the restraint on this one. No clunky revealer stressing the grid means the fill, while not exactly scintillating, is clean, and we're allowed (or forced, depending on your POV) to figure the gimmick out on our own. This is the opposite of yesterday's monstrosity, where a clumsy "note" explained a phenomenon that didn't need explaining (and was dumb to begin with). This is carefully crafted work, mindful of the solver experience in a way that I appreciate. It took me a While to figure out what the hell was up with this theme. I might've been way down on the last themer before putting it all together. Yeah, that feels right, then I worked my way back up the grid figuring out the themers in reverse order. Having only four themers means there's a lot of non-theme space in the middle of the puzzle. You could make a lot of headway in the puzzle without knowing what was going on themewise. NW was by far my roughest spot. Screwed up everything possible in that section, so much so that when I returned late in the solve to clean it up, I was briefly but genuinely worried that I was going to get badly stuck. This is because I just could not make sense of the simple clue at 1D: Short cut (BOB). Had the BO- and still no idea. I was thinking "short cut" as in "a shorter path" and also "short cut" as in "snip," like a cut with scissors. Not thinking of haircut. "Short" seems relative and not such a great way to clue BOB. I have a shaved head, though, so my idea of "short" may be skewed. Also couldn't figure out the [Empathetic comment] at 3D. Wanted "THERE, THERE," but it wouldn't fit. And then clue on APP made no sense to me (5A: Store offering that can be free) (I wanted something like TOTE) and PAK, my god, no way. My brain tried to envision "east of Iran" and it was just a hazy blur. Where have you gone, Se-ri PAK!?


Noooo idea MARS RED was any kind of color, so ___RED was killing me. Totally blanked on Gore VIDAL (49D: Author of "Burr" and "Lincoln"), which is horribly embarrassing for this English Ph.D. "Ooh, that guy ... so venomous ... wrote crime fiction under the name Edgar Box WHY CAN I REMEMBER THAT BUT NOT HIS FAMOUS ACTUAL NAME!?"

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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