Ground-dwelling game bird of the western U.S. / THU 9-10-26 / Portmanteau for a radical environmentalist / Simulator of coastal phenomena / Oldest sister on "The Brady Bunch" / Annoying knuckling / Evidence of burning rubber

Constructor: Simeon Seigel

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: missing-letter puns — clues are words/phrases that are missing letters, which factor into the answers as puns:

Theme answers:

• EYES OF BLUE (17A: Per_w_nkle?) (i.e. "i"s in a word meaning "blue")
• EASE OF OPERATION (34A: Proc_dur_?) (i.e. "e"s in a word meaning "operation")
• PEAS IN A POD (51A: Grou_ of _or_oises?) (i.e. "p"s in a phrase meaning "pod")
• USE IN A PINCH (11D: Min_sc_le q_antity?) (i.e. "u"s in a phrase meaning "pinch")
• SEES IN COURT (25D: Pla_e for a _ase?) (i.e. "c"s in a phrase meaning "court")

Word of the Day: SAGEHEN (46A: Ground-dwelling game bird of the western U.S.) —

The greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), also known as the sagehen, is the largest grouse in North America. Its range is sagebrush country in the western United States and southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada. It was known as simply the sage grouse until the Gunnison sage-grouse was recognized as a separate species in 2000. The Mono Basin population of sage grouse may also be distinct.

The greater sage-grouse is a permanent resident in its breeding grounds but may move short distances to lower elevations during winter. It makes use of a complex lek system in mating and nests on the ground under sagebrush or grass patches. It forages on the ground, mainly eating sagebrush but also other plants and insects. Greater sage-grouse do not have a muscular crop and are not able to digest hard seeds like other grouse.

The species is in decline across its range due to habitat loss, and has been recognized as threatened or near threatened by several national and international organizations. (wikipedia)

• • •

Yesterday's puzzle, with its humorless literal explanations of familiar phrases, made me actually wish for puns, so I guess I should be happy today. And I guess I am. A couple of the phrases didn't quite resonate for me—either seemed familiarish but not very evocative of anything (EASE OF OPERATION) or else were not the version of the phrase I'm most familiar with (USE IN A PINCH—I understand the phrase, but "it'll do in a pinch" is the version of the idiom that my brain most readily recognizes. But neither of those answers is wrong, exactly, and the overall theme concept here is clever enough to make for a mildly amusing solving experience. Those letters sound like this, that word or phrase means this, put them together, tada. Not hard, but kind of fun. The A PINCH part of USE IN A PINCH was the only theme-related bit to give me any trouble. I had USE IN ...??? "What means 'minuscule quantity'? SMALL DOSES? Bah." No idea. I also couldn't come up with the second word in WAVE TANK. "WAVE ... simulator!? Come on, brain, what's the word!?" So my progress came to a dead stop at the intersection of USE IN A PINCH and WAVE TANK, but no problem, I just went over to another section and started building off of that. My WAVE TANK highlights an interesting feature of this grid, which is that, with the exception of SYNOPSIS, every single answer over seven letters long in this grid has multiple words: WAVE TANK, TIRE MARK, LOSE HOPE, SLOT INTO, KEEL OVER, MOVIE REEL, AD AGENCY, FESSED UP TO, CLUB FACES; and then of course all the theme stuff. There's also POSE AS and ONE ONE and FOG IN. I don't know that this has any great effect on solving (except my inability to get from word one to word two with WAVE TANK). Maybe it gives the grid a little more bounce? Makes it a little more SASSY? Or maybe it's a meaningless coincidence. It's just statistically weird that (almost) none of your large bank of 8+-letter words is actually a single word.

["I'll give you television / I'll give you EYES OF BLUE..."]

Besides that little WAVE TANK / USE IN A PINCH hiccup, I didn't get held up much today. DAY ONE instead of ONE ONE (which I guess is supposed to represent 1/1, calendar-wise) (27A: New Year's date, concisely). UNWISE before UNWARY (24D: Incautious). Took a bit of work to get POSE AS, since I was looking for a single word (23D: Represent). Also, the SW corner got a little stopped up for me because I couldn't remember the term OUTGAS (specifically the second part of it), and ... ECOTEUR???? Come on, no one says this. This is a term only crosswords could love. If you say ECOTEUR people are going to either say "huh?" or else think you are talking about going on an ECOTOUR, perhaps as an ECOTOURIST (ECOTOURISM being way way way more of a word than ECOTEUR). I watched an episode of "The X-Files" the other day that was all about radical environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest, and they must've said the phrase "environmental terrorist" like a dozen times, but no one said ECOTEUR, I assure you. It's a combination of "eco-" and "saboteur," I guess. Sometimes you have to tell your wordlist "no." Don't let it push you around.

Bullets:

• 10A: Shell in the water (HULL) — I thought the "shell" was a whole boat ... like a "racing shell." I guess the idea here is that the HULL is the ship's "shell?" The HULL is the "frame or body of a ship," so ... "Shell," OK. 
• 41A: Abstract (SYNOPSIS) — this clue was troublesomely vague. Really wanted the adjectival meaning of "Abstract" here, but instead we get the noun: "a statement summarizing the important points of a text."
• 57A: Leaves for drinks (TEAS) — this just looks like a theme idea that didn't get used. [Un_es_ed?] = GREEN TEAS. Something like that.
• 45A: Bad spelling, perhaps (CURSE) — if there was one thing that was kind of tiresome about the cluing today, it was the repeated reliance on these old, worn-out misdirection chestnuts. "Bad spell" (or some other "spell" fakeout) meant to evoke either the spelling of a word, or, in other contexts, a period of time—a well-worn way of coming at HEX or CURSE or the like. The idea that you search for ORE "in vein," same thing (3D: Something you might search for in vein?)—pun as old as time. And in case you were looking for more of the Misdirection's Greatest Hits, we've also got one of the all-timers: "pitching" related to advertising (36D: Pitching staff? = AD AGENCY). Looks like baseball, actually about ADMEN. Ad infinitum. For as long as I've been solving.
• 13D: Pipe organ? (LUNG) — this is much more clever and original wordplay than anything I mentioned in the last bullet point. The "pipe" here is your trachea (or "windpipe"), and the "organ" that moves air through that "pipe" when you breathe is your LUNG (LUNGS, plural, if you're lucky). I also like that the clue here is (on a literal level) musical, considering that "pipes" is a term for a person's singing voice. Anatomical and musical resonance. Nice.

• 52D: Remote power source (AAA) — mild trickery. Seems like "remote" might mean "far away" but it's short for "remote control," which often takes AAA batteries (mine take AA, I think, but that's neither here nor there). 
• 32D: Rotating feature at the cinema (MOVIE REEL) — not most cinemas, not any more. Most movies are now projected digitally. Some rep theaters show movies primarily or exclusively on film, which requires film reels, but that's certainly no longer the standard: "virtually all global movie theaters have converted their screens to digital cinemas" (wikipedia).
• 53D: Completely savage (PAN) — another part-of-speech misdirection. Did not expect "savage" to be a verb.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Alice Jane Morgan (a resident of Ann Arbor—Go Blue!) interviewed me recently for her newsletter, "Act III with Alice," which is all about "midlife reinvention." I haven't "reinvented" anything about myself in decades, lol, but I am, roughly, in the "midlife" stage of my life, so it's not a terrible fit. Anyway, the interview came out nice. You can read it here.  

Also:

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