Unidentifiable protein / MON 11-22-21 / Toy that goes up slow and comes down fast / Shpeak indishtinctly / Member of a DC squad

Theme answers:

• FANTASY BASEBALL 917A: Pastime for armchair sports enthusiasts)
• MYSTERY MEAT (29A: Unidentifiable protein)
• WESTERN WALL (45A: Holy site in Jerusalem)
• ROMANCE LANGUAGE (61A: Spanish or French, but not German)

Word of the Day: St. OLAF College (40D: Minnesota's St. ___ College) —

St. Olaf College is a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. The school was founded in 1874 by a group of Norwegian-American pastors and farmers led by Pastor Bernt Julius Muus. The college is named after the King and the Patron Saint Olaf II of Norway and is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The college was visited by King Olav in 1987 and King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway in 2011.

As of 2017, the college enrolled 3,035 undergraduate students and 256 faculty. The campus, including its 325-acre natural lands, lies 2 miles west of the city of Northfield, Minnesota; Northfield is also the home of its neighbor and friendly rival Carleton College. Between 1995 and 2020, 154 St. Olaf graduates were named Fulbright Scholars and 35 received Goldwater Scholarships. Of the nation's baccalaureate colleges, St. Olaf ranks 12th in the number of graduates who have gone on to earn doctorate degrees. (wikipedia)

This is a perfectly good Monday theme concept with perfectly good Monday theme answers. Really wish the clues had been better, more accurate, more specific, more fun. The clue on FANTASY BASEBALL was annoying because there's nothing "baseball" about it at all. "Sports enthusiasts" makes it sound general, so FANTASY SPORTS or FANTASY LEAGUES or something like that seemed most plausible. FANTASY FOOTBALL also definitely exists. Would it hurt you to baseball up the clue a little, or at all? Maybe the cluer thought "pastime" somehow evoked "national pastime," which baseball somehow technically still is, but "pastime" is just a word and didn't evoke baseball for me at all. Colorful clues help Mondays be fun instead of just perfunctory walks in the park. Don't skimp on detail and specificity! The clue on MYSTERY MEAT was even worse. Give me a context! Where would I hear that! Give me some sense of the revulsion such a "meat" usually evokes. Paint a dang picture! But no, we get the mystery clue [Unidentifiable protein]. That's just [synonym for 'mystery'] + [synonym for 'meat']—not cleverness or humor or thoughtfulness at all. Just a waste of an entertaining cluing opportunity. The revealer was also disappointing, in that it was anticlimactic and probably totally unnecessary. I can look at the themers and see the GENREs pretty easily. If GENRE is all you got for a revealer, why not just not have one? Even the clue on GENRE feels like it misses the mark. FANTASY, MYSTERY etc., those GENREs whether you're "in a bookstore" or not. It's not like, as a set, you would ever mistake them for anything but GENREs. They are GENREs no matter where you are, no matter what art form you're talking about. Movies, for instance. All this redundancy and awkwardness could be avoided by the elimination of the revealer entirely. The fact that GENRE is not even in the final Across position makes it that much more awkward. It's sad to see a good theme idea mishandled in the details like this.

The fill is fine, though I honestly stopped to take a deep breath of dread when I hit ESTAB. before I'd even exited the NW corner. Felt like a fill omen, and a bad one. But it was just one bad abbrev., no biggie. What was a biggie, though, was all the UP nonsense. BUTTON UP and OPENS UP are too close to each other for a repeat of "UP," given that UP appears in the same position both times (the preposition following a verb). But what was a minor ding becomes a major one when you throw UP BOW into the bargain. UP UP UP, three UPs ... you're out. Three UP three down. Whatever, I'll work on the baseball metaphor later, the point is that littering your grid with UPs is negligent. It suggests a failure of polish. An inattention to detail. A "meh, good enough" attitude. And bah to that, I say. 

The clue on SLED wants very much to be good (22A: Toy that goes up slow and comes down fast), but it isn't because the SLED doesn't go "up" slow or at all without being carried (presumably by a human), whereas it goes down all on its own, due to gravity, whether a human is on it or not. Clue plays too fast and loose with the question of agency, i.e. the question of who or what is actually doing the action. Plus how do you know how fast I take my SLED up the hill!? You don't know me! Only thing I had any trouble with today was "WAS IT YOU?" (just slow to put it together) (5D: Question to a suspected culprit); COIFFEUR (I spelled St. OLAF with a "V," sadly), and "I NEVER!" which I had as "INDEED!" (57A: "The very idea!"). Oh, and of course I wrote in CPU instead of UPC because that's a thing I do. Happy Sagittarius season to all who celebrate (me!). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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