This is not in fact, the first time tzdata has completely destroyed apt's ability to work when not set to UTC on one of my installs. In fact, this is the 3rd time this has happened. And there is no easy fix. No "just reinstall a fresh image". A silly little "set your timezone" package touches so many things that you can't remove it normally without getting thrown into rescue shell either. It's infuriating that this is the state of things. On UBUNTU of all distros