Constructor: Lindsey HobbsRelative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (somewhere in the low 4's)
THEME: ICED TEA (39A: Beverage with a phonetic hint to 17-, 26-, 51- and 63-Across)— familiar phrases that start with "T," only the letter "T" has been "iced" (as in "murdered" (!?), i.e. lopped off, omitted), resulting in wacky phrases, clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style):
Theme answers:- APE RECORDER (17A: Jane Goodall, at times?)
- EAR JERKER (26A: Corn farmer at harvest time?)
- AX DODGERS (51A: Lumberjacks in unsafe working conditions?)
- URN OF EVENTS (63A: Caterer's coffee dispenser?)
Word of the Day: Glacier Bay National Park (
27D: Capital near Glacier Bay National Park => JUNEAU) —
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is an American national park located in Southeast Alaska west of Juneau. President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the area around Glacier Bay a national monument under the Antiquities Act on February 25, 1925.[4] Subsequent to an expansion of the monument by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) enlarged the national monument by 523,000 acres (817.2 sq mi; 2,116.5 km2) on December 2, 1980, and created Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The national preserve encompasses 58,406 acres (91.3 sq mi; 236.4 km2) of public land to the immediate northwest of the park, protecting a portion of the Alsek River with its fish and wildlife habitats, while allowing sport hunting.
Glacier Bay became part of a binational UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, and was inscribed as a Biosphere Reserve in 1986. The National Park Service undertook an obligation to work with Hoonah and Yakutat Tlingit Native American organizations in the management of the protected area in 1994. The park and preserve cover a total of 3,223,384 acres (5,037 sq mi; 13,045 km2), with 2,770,000 acres (4,328 sq mi; 11,210 km2) being designated as a wilderness area. (wikipedia)
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I like the weirdness of this one. It's a little gruesome, using the language of the hitman to refer to the simple omission of a letter. I probably would've gone with something like URN OF PHRASE instead of
URN OF EVENTS, just so I wouldn't leave any "T"s uniced in those theme answers, but other than that, the theme seems to do what it sets out to do, and it does so consistently and elegantly (and wackily) enough. The nature of the theme made this one harder than a typical Tuesday for me. Figuring out what the base phrase is supposed to be and/or figuring out what the clue is trying to get at turned out to be a lot of work for me today. Weirdly, the first one (
APE RECORDER) was probably the easiest for me to get; I came at it from the front end, and I managed to reason the answer from the clue, even though I still didn't know the gimmick (i.e. *why* the "T" was missing); would subsequent themers remove "T" or some other letter? Would that letter always be removed from the front of the answer, or might it disappear from somewhere else? No way to know early on. And that second themer, yikes, that clue was zero help and I couldn't find the base phrase (i.e. "tearjerker") until I figured out the very last crosses. Getting to the concept of "jerk" from farming / harvesting was ... uh, not intuitive to me. I can see the connection now, but then, no way. Also, having EAR --RKER I put in EAR MARKER, completely forgetting that the answers are supposed to be wacky, not legit.
TORTAS seemed like a plausible answer for [
High-calorie bakery offerings], so the only answer left that could get me off of EAR MARKER and over to EAR JERKER was the [Capital near Glacier Bay National Park], and wow
JUNEAU took a long time to get without that "J" to help me along the way. I didn't know exactly where said "National Park" was, and I was frozen by the lack of specificity in the clue (i.e. what kind of "capital" were we dealing with? National or state? Or province? Is it Canadian? Sounds like it might be Canadian). I sort of forgot
JUNEAU existed.
Found
AX DODGERS hard as well, as the base phrase eluded me and the clue had me thinking of DANGERS, not DODGERS (
51A: Lumberjacks in unsafe working conditions?). Then after getting OF EVENTS in the last themer, the only way I could think to start that phrase was "(C)HAIN." But HAIN isn't a thing, and didn't fit anyway. So, as you can see, it was a struggle. As struggles go, it wasn't back-breaking, but compared to most Tuesdays, it played hard for me.
The fill wasn't doing me any favors either. I wanted my parishioners to "sit" in PEWS, of course, so
NAVE had me all messed up over there in the west (
29D: Where parishioners sit). I think of the phrase as "
It'll COST you," not "That'll
COST you," so that fill-in-the-blank was weird (wanted something like "That'll SHOW you!"). [
Ancestry] is a fine clue for
ROOTS, but I found it hard to get from clue to answer. Had GTO before
REO (64D: Old car that's a homophone of another answer in this puzzle) (OK, first, don't make me go hunting through The Entire Grid to find your dumb "homophone," and also, make sure you know what "homophone" means, because R-E-O and
OREO do not have the same initial vowel sound, wtf!?).
AUTONYM took some doing (
50A: Name of self-identification, as "Deutsche" for "Germans"). Worst, though, was
TIN CAN, which could've had an ordinary clue but instead got an olde-tymey automotive clue, thus turning
TIN CAN into slang I've never heard of (
68A: Jalopy). "Crate,""Heap," these I've heard as slang for "jalopy" (which is pretty old itself). A "tin
lizzie" is a "dilapidated or cheap car" (slang from the days of the
Ford Model T). But
TIN CAN, nope, to me a
TIN CAN is a
TIN CAN. So, overall, theme works OK, felt like a Wednesday, the end.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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