Japanese mat / THU 3-5-15 / CSA general Stuart / Funny Silverman / Jean-Claude Van Damme film set in 1994 2004 / Kona catch / Jose to friends / Great Wonder Woman cry / Session meeting after legislative dissolution

Constructor: Jim Peredo

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME: FALLING BEHIND (38A: Lagging … or a hint to 17-, 19-, 56- and 61-Across) — several Across answers "fall" (i.e. go Down) at their tail end … the parts that "fall" are all synonyms for "behind":

Theme answers:

• BABY AL(BUM) (19A: Record of infantile behavior?)
• DONALD T(RUMP) (17A: Who said about himself "Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money")
• UNAMERI(CAN) (61A: Hating baseball and apple pie?)
• GORY DE(TAIL) (56A: Part of a story you might not want to know)

Word of the Day: DRAY (58D: Farm cart) —

noun

1. a truck or cart for delivering beer barrels or other heavy loads, especially a low one without sides. (google)

Hey, this works. I wasn't so sure at first. I wasn't having a ton of fun cutting through the grid (even though the fill was OK), and when I saw that BABY AL(BUM) drop I was like "man, didn't we just see this idea? … answers that turn or bend or whatever … this better be good." I had no real hope that it would, in fact, be good. I could see that the Acrosses made nonsense but the Downs made real words—or, rather, that the Acrosses made sense if you threw in the Down bits. But I honestly didn't see the connection that all the Downs had until pretty late, because I didn't get the front part of the revealer until pretty late (3/4 done). This is all to say that when I did, finally, fill in FALLING BEHIND, I did, in fact, have a genuine AHA moment. (I think I'm going to call the opposite of an AHA moment an "AHI moment," as in "Oh … I get it … that's fishy.")

[Profanity, but mostly incomprehensibility, ahead]
So the theme wins—makes a tired concept (bend-the-answer) interesting, and BEHIND ends up having a cool double-meaning (i.e. the part that falls means "behind," *and* comes at the "tail" end of the answer). The overall grid has pretty solid bones, and GALACTIC and (esp.) WE'RE LOST add a little color. Not much to complain about in the fill. Suboptimal stuff is pretty spread out. Things get a mite dicey in the NE (with the two 5-letter prefixes and the French and the two abbrevs.), but whatever bad taste is up there doesn't linger. Very decent Thursday.
Bullets:

• 45A: José, to friends (PEPE) — José Le Pew?? I had no idea. 
• 62D: Low (MOO) — last letter in the grid were those "O"s, both because I forgot exactly what James DOOHAN's last name was, and because (predictably) I misspelled DIARAMA thusly.
• 3D: "Hurray" or "alas" (IAMB) — very, very tough clue. I spend much of Tuesday explaining exactly what an IAMB is to my 17th-century lit class, and *I* didn't get this until virtually everything around it was filled in. Unstressed stressed. "Eclipse,""Today," etc. The opposite (stressed unstressed, e.g. "tailor,""panic,""Batter (my heart three-personed God…") is a TROCHEE, which we somehow never see in crosswords.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld