Seat of ancient Irish kings / WED 1-20-21 / Wading bird with long slender bill / Digital media player since 2008 / Classic of daytime TV first aired in 1962 [Atlanta Bangor] / God is the perfect Robert Browning

Constructor: Natan Last, Andy Kravis and the J.A.S.A. Crossword Class 

Relative difficulty: no idea ... harder than usual, I think

THEME: THE UNITED STATES (36A: Red, white and blue land ... or what 15-, 22-, 45- and 57-Across feature?) — familiar phrases where one word signifies "united" and the other word is made up of two state abbrs. "united" (or "fused" or "joined") together:

Theme answers:

• MIND-MELDING (15A: Sharing thoughts like a Vulcan [Detroit, Fargo])
• "MATCH GAME" (22A: Classic of daytime TV first aired in 1962 [Atlanta, Bangor])
• JOINT PAIN (45A: Arthritis symptom [Altoona, South Bend])
• WINE PAIRING (57A: Sommelier's suggestion [Oshkosh, Omaha])

Word of the Day: TARA (37D: Seat of ancient Irish kings) —

The Hill of Tara (Irish: Teamhair or Cnoc na Teamhrach) is a hill and ancient ceremonial and burial site near Skryne in County Meath, Ireland. According to tradition, it was the inauguration place and seat of the High Kings of Ireland, and it also appears in Irish mythology. Tara consists of numerous monuments and earthworks—from the Neolithic to the Iron Age—including a passage tomb (the "Mound of the Hostages"), burial mounds, round enclosures, a standing stone (believed to be the Lia Fáil or "Stone of Destiny"), and a ceremonial avenue. There is also a church and graveyard on the hill. Tara is part of a larger ancient landscape and Tara itself is a protected national monument under the care of The Office of Public Works, an agency of the Irish Government. (wikipedia)

• • •

This felt like a Thursday puzzle that they ran today because it's Inauguration Day (Happy Inauguration Day, by the way). The level of gimmickry is much more Thursday than Wednesday, and though much of the cluing was ordinary Wednesday stuff, there was enough difficulty early on, when combined with the theme shenanigans, to get me pretty badly stuck at the outset. The worst part, in the end, was that there was far less shenanigans than the confusing cluing let on. It's weird ... this is just a themeless puzzle if you take away the random place names in brackets at the end of the theme clues (and the post-ellipsis bit in the revealer clue). You don't need any of the theme stuff to solve. But then ... it feels like they made the puzzle hard enough that you actually might have needed to resort to the theme to help you out. I definitely resorted to it in the SE to figure out WINE PAIRING. Still, it really is just a high word-count themeless puzzle, totally solvable without any of the theme elements. It's bizarre. The theme helped me out late in the solve, but early on it absolutely confounded me. If there hadn't been two city names at the end of the MIND-MELDING clue, I would've plopped MIND-MELDING down without a second thought; but because the cities suggested something themey was clearly going on, and because I couldn't get a couple of the MIND-MELDING crosses, I was certain some kind of rebus or shared-square scheme of some kind was going on, specifically where the "E" and "L" were in MIND-MELDING (more on that in a bit). So adding the city names to the end of the clue actually made things much less clear than they would've been otherwise. In fact, the confusion produced by the city names combined with horrendous / weird / vague cluing on some of the fill (POET, TIED, SLOMO) to make the NW a total nightmare. 

So, the NW ... I hate hate hate clues like 1A: "God is the perfect ___": Robert Browning (POET). Fill-in-the-blank quotes are The Worst. They probably seem to make sense to the cluer, but to the solver, honestly, most of the time it could be any word. The fact that the quote is from Browning is actually useless. So what if I know he's a poet. That doesn't make me think POET is the right answer here. In fact, I thought the answer (after I got a few crosses) was POEM. I like POEM so so so much better than POET. I should've been Browning's editor. Much more interesting to think of God as something multi-layered, ineffable, and invented by humans than as some sad human analogue in the sky, scribbling at His desk. Bah. Combine my mistake there was the absolutely baffling clue on TIED (4D: One up, for example). "One up" is the opposite of tied, in that if you are one up, you are ahead. Is this ping-pong-speak? I am used to the term "all" to express a tie. But "Up"? I know that it's used ... maybe casually in tennis or soccer? Anyway, that clue was super-confusing. I had POEM / MIED (??) and then no idea about SLOMO (13D: It helps you see details—just no help, this clue). This meant two answers running through MIND-MELDING were mysteries. Two adjacent answers, two adjoining squares. I went down and picked up the revealer and then somehow got *more* lost because, well, two adjoining squares were giving me trouble ... and the theme is something about uniting states ... I kept trying to figure out how "MI" could fit in one square or "ND" could fit in the other. Again, nightmare. Eventually, I got out of there, somehow, and the rest of the puzzle was easy enough, except the SE, which like its symmetrical counterpart, was filled with rough cluing on the short fill (NEO-Latin!?). But at that point I knew what was going on with the theme, so I could get WINE PAIRING and pull myself through. 

Let's see, what else was tough? I forgot the Gulf of SIDRA was a thing (5D: Libya's Gulf of ___), which made the NW even rougher than it already was. Also, couldn't believe ANN was the answer at 7D: She's a doll, since you would never ever ever say just ANN without "Raggedy" in front of it. Woof and oof to that clue. Had PAN (or was it POT) before WOK (hyper-vague clue there) (57D: Cooking utensil) and STEP before KICK (54D: Rockette's move), and distrusted SNIPE, since a SNIPE hunt is a hunt for a fictional animal, or so I thought from having watched that one episode of "Cheers" (44D: Wading bird with a long, slender bill) You can see how badly I needed the theme trick to pull me out of this morass in the SE.

I really think the theme is cute, actually. I don't see any logic behind the city names in the theme clues, though, beyond the fact that they are (random?) cities in the relevant states. Why not use capitals? I mean, Altoona, wtf? So arbitrary. But the theme answers themselves are solid and I did get a genuine (if grudging) aha when the theme clicked. Most of the difficulty for me was caused by overthinking the theme early on, and by a pile-up of bad luck (again, early on) that sent me down a horrible rabbit-hole of wrong ideas about the theme. In retrospect, it all seems so clear. Except for the POET / TIED thing. Not forgiving the cluing nonsense there. You hear me, Robert Browning!? Unforgiven!!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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