My time: 18:06, two minutes faster than average and quite lucky to get it.
There was a lot of new material in this one, sly clues, and a lot of fresh fill. In general today's grid construction is quite a NEAT TRICK. I actually came close to saying I CAN'T while trying to finish this, so I'm surprised I beat my average.
The famously walled Spanish city of AVILA appeared a cuple of times in this blog, most recently February 4, 2019. However, I didn't remember, and didn't put it together with the Spanish languge clue "Muralla de" AVILA. Their official name is Muralla y Puertas.
For "categorized by district" I put *ZONED but it's ZONAL. This messed me up a bit in the northwest. Similarly, I put *AUTOPILOT for the clunky-sounding AUTO DRIVE.
"Sazerac cocktail ingredient" is RYE whiskey. I'm not a drinker, and when I was, never drank RYE. Apparently it started with brandy, though.
I am still puzzled about this one: "in-person setting for the Emmys, but not the Oscars." PDT. Pacific Daylight Time, surely. But... aren't they both held on the west coast? Am I missing something? Is it because the Oscars are aired later? I have no idea.
"One of 30 on a regular dodecahedron" is EDGE but I put *AXIS. (A pyritohedron has 30 edges: six corresponding to cube faces, and 24 touching cube vertices.) This caused me to think that its Across contact, "hole maker," ended in -axe but it's SPADE.
I had a little trouble spelling TREF, or non-kosher. (trif? tryf? tirf?)
"Going from petticoats to pants, once." I was looking for a synonym for being bold or breaking tradition, like when women started wearing pants. But that's barking up the wrong historical tree. It's BREECHING. I must confess I had no idea about how this one works, either. I had to look it up. BREECHING is the term marking the rite of passage when a young boy moved into wearing pants. From the mid-16th century until the late 19th or early 20th century, young boys in the Western world were "unbreeched" and wore gowns or dresses until an age that varied between two and eight. Breeching was an important rite of passage in the life of a boy, looked forward to with much excitement, and often celebrated with a small party. It often marked the point at which the father became more involved with the raising of a boy. In more modern times in Britain, a parallel was going from short pants to trousers.
I had to reply on a lot of crosses to get BAD BOUNCE ("challenge for an infielder").
For "eternally, in religious parlance," I put *AGE ON AGE but it turned out to be AGE TO AGE. This kept me in tangles down in the southwest corner for a while. Especially since I stayed with *SOIL for "pileup after digging a hole" but it's a financial hole and DEBT.
HAL's earthbound "twin" in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 is SAL 9000 (I had *SAD and thought that couldn't be right). SAL had a female voice.
Never heard the term OBAMACRAT! It means, obviously, a Democratic supporter of Obama, but on the net I've also seen it defined as a person who might have voted for Obama but isn't necessarily a Democrat.
The Hokies of the ACC is VA TECH, more properly abbreviated VT, sometimes VPI, and formally Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Hokie sports! Go Hokies! Ha ha!
I only didn't have trouble with this clue because of the wording: "'This is prophetic' in 'Nixon in China,' eg." Title in title is an example of what four-letter word? ARIA. This one is sung by Pat Nixon. The opera was written by John Adams, not only our second president but an accomplished composer and conductor as well as veteran time-traveler.
"New Hampshire's Gate City" is NASHUA, a burg of 86,000. Built around the now-departed textile industry, in recent decades Nashua has been swept up in southern New Hampshire's economic expansion as part of the Boston region. It was twice named "Best Place to Live in America" in annual surveys by "Money" magazine. Why is it called Gate City? I don't know. Because it's on the border with Massachusetts?
I didn't know there was a Disney show called "TRON: Uprising."
Icelandic currency KRONA has some up quite a lot, but I still mistakenly spelled it with a final E.
The ABBA song "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do" appeared on August 15, 2018.
I never remember that KSU is home to the Wildcats.
A plethora of clever clues today: "Jacket material" is COVER ART, as in book jackets. "Function with no limits?" is not about math but refers to an ORGY. Let's keep it PG-13, New York Times! "Takes a ride?" is one I've seen before for REPOS, so I got it fairly quickly. "Passing options" is A, B, C, D. (I initially had *ABC'S.) "Intellectual property?" is IVORY TOWER. "Digital access points" has nothing to do with technology and is FINGERTIPS, hardy har har!
This was a fun, well-thought-out, challenging Saturday! Some of the cluing was RAZOR SHARP. I liked "things relied on in desperation" as a clue for A WING AND A PRAYER.
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