My time: 14:12, one minute slower than average. I'll take it! This puzzle had a lot of abstruse information in it and an original, hard to discover theme.
Theme: RUNS ON EMPTY ("keeps going despite fatigue"). This means that in three instances, the letter series R-U-N, or three "run"s, are over, or on, three squares that remain.... EMPTY.
The three answers that are meant to be unfilled are clued thusly: "what's theorized to have preceded the Big Bang;" "what polar opposites have in common;" and "what's uttered by a mime." In other words, nothing! Leave those squares EMPTY.
Well, I have to say WOW, and I guess OOH. I'm impressed; my hat is off to Sid Sivakumar, who constructed this amusingly challenging puzzle! It was fun to solve. Even having the key capper phrase RUNS ON EMPTY did not clue me in, until I realized that the reason the Down crosses ON PUR-POSE and N-ERVE didn't fit was they needed an extra letter. Once I saw the trick, knowing that R-U-N was in the answer helped me get LABOR UNIONS.
Okay, on to the fill.
I know AC/DC well and I have given Back In Black many a listen, but I didn't know it went 25x platinum. That's a lot of rock! It achieved that status on December 9, 2019.
For "it may lead up to a letdown" I put *HOPE and thought, "Geez, that's pretty grim, New York Times, but I guess that's the age we live in!" But it's HYPE, which makes much more sense.
Never heard of the five-star hotel in Kolkata TAJ Bengal, but it's pretty easy to guess.
Not so easy to guess, on the other hand, is GURU NANAK, the founder of Sikhism. A sixteenth-century mystic, Nanak is said to have traveled far and wide across Asia teaching people the message of ik onkar ("one God"), who dwells in every one of his creations and constitutes the eternal Truth.
"_____ ears" is a terrible clue for JUG. "Actress Laura" is a boring clue for DERN.
"Houseware brand that's easy to read in a mirror" for OXO, though, is fun. See the difference?
I didn't know that LENT was once known as Quadragesima (Latin for fortieth), but with that translation it's easy enough to connect the dots, Lent being the period of forty days before Easter.
"Harrison, e.g., but not Ford" is the kind of fun clue that made me smile. It's WHIG; William Henry Harrison, who died in office after a month, was the WHIG candidate for president. The president Gerald Ford was a Republican, not a Whig. And Harrison Ford has nothing to do with it. Whigs advocated the rule of law, written and unchanging constitutions, the right of property, maintaining social order, and preserving a distinct cultural heritage. Sort of like Scalia conservatives.
Apparently a liter of water weights a KILO. A gallon of water weighs about eight pounds. A pint's a pound the world around! The weight of a volume of water can be found given the density, which is the mass compared to the volume. The density of water is 1 kilogram per liter (kg/L) at 39.2°.
UTAH is home to Bryce Canyon, Sego Canyon, Zion National Park, Desolation Canyon, the skiing resort Alta, the Wasatch Mountains, and its national flower the sego lily. What I'm getting at is that UTAH appears in the puzzle a lot. This time, "its name is said to mean people of the mountains." This is a conjecture, and the name's origin is unknown.
Actress UZO Aduba appeared on December 7, 2018.
Clever clue: "Down-hearted softies?" is DUVETS. "Telephone when all lit up?" is DRUNK DIAL. "It's used to carry out an order" is TRAY; that's a great one. "Ones arranging spots" is AD EXECS.
This was a great puzzle! It's nice to see an original grid with a clever trick. The clues were largely well-written and the fill has some rare words (like LABOR UNIONS, GURU NANAK, DATES UP). I'm fairly proud that I managed to complete it in the time that I did.
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