Constructor: Katie Hale and Zachary David Levy
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (for a Monday)
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THEME: Rhymes with "puce"— last words in the theme answers all ... rhyme. I think that's it.
Theme answers:
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Pretty flimsy excuse for a theme. Each answer's rhyming part is spelled slightly differently than the others (-USE, -OOSE, -OUSSE, -EUCE, -UICE), so I guess that's something, but not much. Probably just best to think of this as a Monday themeless. That way, you can appreciate a few of the themers as standalone answers ("WHAT THE DEUCE!?" being the obvious highlight). But then there's not much to appreciate besides the theme answers. LAY TO WASTE is good, STOOD ASIDE is OK, but on the whole the grid is definitely below average, with lots of short fill, much of it overfamiliar and stale. NENE LSAT SIB DEI ... just a BEVY of answers like that. Again, as is true every Monday, solving Downs-only helps. It's harder to be distracted by subpar fill and a weak theme when you are distracted by having to fight your way down the grid, inferring all the Acrosses and hoping to god you don't have one of the Downs wrong. It's always fun trying to piece together longer Acrosses from whatever Downs you are able to drive through them—a great test of your pattern recognition skills. The hardest one to get was probably the first, as I had the HYP- part and could only think of words like "HYPNOTIC""HYPNOTIZE" etc. Maybe "HYPODERMIC." Didn't see the "O" right away because I couldn't get SPOOFS without some help (3D: Comedic sendups). But after sorting out HYPOTENUSE, none of the other themers presented any trouble. Didn't really notice the theme until I was done or nearly done, and as I've said it hardly matters, because the theme is hardly there.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (for a Monday)
Theme answers:
- HYPOTENUSE (16A: Longest side of a right triangle)
- FAST AND LOOSE (23A: Reckless way to play things)
- CHOCOLATE MOUSSE (38A: Dessert made with cocoa and egg whites)
- "WHAT THE DEUCE!?" (47A: Quaint cry of surprise)
- JAMBA JUICE (60A: Smoothie chain founded in 1990)
An exclamation used to emphasize surprise, shock, or bafflement. ("Deuce" is a minced oath in place of the word "devil.") (idioms.thefreedictionary.com)
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Besides SPOOFS, there were only four other Downs that I couldn't get either immediately or very quickly. The first was SLY NOD (21D: Surreptitious gesture with the head). My trouble was due entirely to my misreading "Surreptitious" as "Superstitious.""What the hell kind of superstitious head gestures are there, even!?" I was imagining superstitious people doing all kinds of strange things with their heads, possibly on Friday the 13th or when black cats crossed their paths, but none of the gestures seemed plausible or nameable. I worked the crosses for that answer to the point where it *had* to be SLY NOD before I finally noticed that I'd been misreading the clue the whole time. Fun! Also had trouble with (the grimly clued) WHACK, which I wanted to be WASTE (neglecting the fact that WASTE was already in the puzzle, in LAY TO WASTE). Seemed like there might be a few options for a five-letter head covering with an Arabic name, so I had to wait for inferred crosses to help me with HIJAB (49D: Head covering whose name means "curtain" in Arabic).DEBATE was also weirdly not obvious without some help (45D: Argue back and forth). But that's it for Downs-only trouble. Kind of a throwaway theme. Mondays have been much better than this of late—along with Thursday, the best themed day of the week in recent months. Today was a bit of a letdown. But as I say, I'm never truly bored or dissatisfied when I'm solving a Monday Downs-only. Hope you liked this better than I did. See you ... soon, I hope.