Constructor: Hoang-Kim Vu and Jessica Zetzman
Relative difficulty: normal Monday
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THEME: JUMP SUITS (58A: Garments similar to rompers ... with a hint to the shaded squares in this puzzle) — circled ("shaded" in your grid, maybe) squares spell out the "suits" in a card deck, and these "suits""jump" up one row somewhere mid-word:
Theme answers:
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Basically a very easy themeless, but without the openness and wonderful fill that a true themeless generally brings. So, an easy and fairly boring themeless that is super-duper reliant on the revealer to stick the landing—you need it to be perfect to make the total lack of genuine theme answers seem worth it. But the landing is not great. Shaky. The suits do jump, but they are ... jumping suits, not jump suits. The phrase just doesn't hit the mark. Yes, I get it, we all get, but this is not a horseshoes / hand grenades situation. Close isn't good enough. You really need le revealer juste here, and JUMP SUITS just wobbles. It's one where you squint a little and go "ok, yeah, I SEE," but this theme needs its revealer to have a much bigger impact. The "suits" restrict the fill the way a normal theme would, but they don't give you any theme content. So you get all the fill compromises and none of the theme pleasure. It doesn't add up. Also, the fill could be better all over, particularly in that northern section. ALPE really has no place in an easy-to-fill Monday puzzle (15A: French peak). It's a very rough foreignism, the kind you only wanna trot out if you're desperate to hold something amazing in place. And that desperation just isn't called for here. I redid this section a bunch of ways—WAILS can go to WAITS if you need, LAPELS to all kinds of stuff, like INPUTS and REPELS and IMPELS etc. I didn't *love* any of my quickly de-ALPE'd efforts, but they were definite improvements *and* in every case I also managed to DITCH the incredibly depressing (as clued) BEACHED (21A: Stuck ashore, as a whale). And I wasn't even using software. Unbeach the whale, de-ALPE the puzzle, make everything cleaner and nicer, it's very possible.
Relative difficulty: normal Monday
Theme answers:
- there are none (just look at the grid)
A jib is a triangular sail that sets ahead of the foremast of a sailing vessel. Its tack is fixed to the bowsprit, to the bows, or to the deck between the bowsprit and the foremost mast. Jibs and spinnakers are the two main types of headsails on a modern boat. (wikipedia)
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I have "no no no" as well as "LOL" written next to K-TURN, what is happening!? (61A: Three-point driving maneuver). It's a three-point turn. That's what it's called. It's always been a three-point turn. It doesn't need new names. How hard is it to say "three-point turn"? You did not need to bring a letter into the mix. Three-point turn is easy to understand and more accurately describes what's happening with the maneuver. K-TURN, what in the world? That sounds like a bad drug reaction. Like when you take "K" (short for Ketamine, I believe) and things take a very bad "turn"—like maybe you fall into a K-HOLE (an actual term, not making it up, I swear). Anyway, U-TURN would've worked fine here (the UFC is very much a thing), and I'd rather see K-HOLE in my grid than K-TURN. Actually, scratch that, K-HOLEs sound scary. But at least K-HOLE is not a fake name for a thing that already has a perfectly good name. My god, when I search [define k turn] the first hit I get is literally titled "Three-point turn," perhaps because That Is The Correct Name For It. Sigh.
Notes:
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- 28A: Dirty dozen? (BAD EGGS)— this term is slang for bad people, not a term describing actual rotten eggs (that term, funnily enough, is "rotten eggs"). So the cutesy clue kinda misses here.
- 6D: Big flaps in the fashion industry? (LAPELS) — Again, I want to like the "?" clue, but they're just flaps. LAPELS aren't inherently big. Like, in relation to what? Some LAPELS are big, but ... maybe specify the era? [Big flaps in '70s fashion?]. The internet is telling me that "the '30s and the '70s featured exceptionally wide LAPELS." Seems like that information could've been useful here.
- 34A: India's smallest state (GOA)— this was my favorite part of the puzzle, because I misread the clue as [India's smallest snake] and then, verrrrry reluctantly, wrote in BOA, thinking, "man ... how big *are* Indian snakes!!?"
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