Big purveyor of fishing gear / THU 8-13-15 / Dutch city where Charles II lived in exile / Like Potala Palace of Tibet / World of Suzie 1957 novel / Israeli city on slopes of Mount Carmel / Bit of letter-shaped hardware on door / Queens stadium eponym / Transmission-related units

Constructor: Jim Hilger

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging


THEME: breaks— word "break" is supplied by actual break in answer (i.e. a blank square); four such squares appear in the grid

Theme answers:

• SHORT LUNCH (BREAK) / JAIL (BREAK)
• BAD (BREAK) / STATION (BREAK)
• SPRING (BREAK) VACATION / SERVICE (BREAK)
• COMMERCIAL (BREAK) / HEART (BREAK) 

Word of the Day: SHAVETEAILS (11D: Rookie officers, in slang) —

noun

USmilitary slangderogatory

plural noun: shavetails

1. a newly commissioned officer, especially a second lieutenant.

   • informal

     an inexperienced person.

     
     

     "the shavetail Assistant District Attorney"

Origin

figuratively, from the early sense ‘untrained pack animal’ (identified by a shaved tail). (google)

Probably maybe gonna try to see this meteor shower thingie, so I'm going to keep this short. Maybe just bullet points. Or ... nah, I'll just do bulletish paragraphs.

Didn't take me too long to check out. Here's where:

ASHE crossing ASHEN is pretty bad. FER, yuck. [some letter]-HINGE, ARUN, no and no. I mean, I've down-voted half the fill and this thing just started. The point at which I checked out came roughly 10 seconds before I figured out the theme. My reaction to figuring it out was, "Oh." (Imagine a vocal inflection tinged more with ENNUI than elation ... speaking of ENNUI, I think it goes deeper and is more existential than the mere boredom suggested by yawning.) So there are problems aplenty the theme answers, for starters. The SHORT in SHORT LUNCH (break) turns the answer to total "green paint," i.e. you now have a made-up phrase—a phrase one might say, but that is not a tight, stand-alone phrase. "LUNCH (break)," sure,; SHORT LUNCH (break), absurd (from a crossword themer standpoint). More absurd is SPRING (break) VACATION, a phrase that is cumbersome and without much colloquial validity. "We went to Florida for SPRING (break)"—the phrase itself implies "vacation." Yes, one might say "SPRING (break) VACATION," but again, as with SHORT LUNCH (break), an added word has made the whole answer dumb and wrong-sounding. (Also, who gets "A couple weeks" for SPRING (break)??? Lucky people, that's who.).


OLD BAT (and [Biddy]) = sexist. ORVIS = ??? AARE = UUGH. DOST ILSA NAS? Who knows? The fill here is standard-issue NYT substandard. DAH? DAH. OK bedtime for me now.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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