Late journalist Ifill / WED 9-6-17 / One-named Swedish singer with 1997 hit Show Me Love

Constructor: Daniel Raymon

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Y" sound [so ... 'yuh'?] added to familiar answers to get wacky answers, clued wackily —

Theme answers:

• FJORD EXPLORER (20A: One traveling around Scandinavia?) (Ford)
• BEAUTY CALL (35A: Visit to the salon?) (booty!)
• FINGER FEUD (40A: Argument that involves pointing?) (food)
• MILITARY QUEUE (49A: Soldiers in line formation) (coup)

Word of the Day: Pic de Rochebrune (42A: France's Pic De Rochebrune => MONT) —

The Pic de Rochebrune (or Grand Rochebrune or, simply, Rochebrune) is a mountain in the Cottian Alps belonging to the French department of Hautes-Alpes. // The mountain is the highest summit of the Central Cottian Alps.

The Cottian Alps (/ˈkɒtiən ˈælps/; French: Alpes Cottiennes [alp kɔtjɛn]; Italian: Alpi Cozie [ˈalpi ˈkɔttsje]); are a mountain range in the southwestern part of the Alps. They form the border between France (Hautes-Alpes and Savoie) and Italy (Piedmont). The Fréjus Road Tunnel and Fréjus Rail Tunnel between Modane and Susa are important transportation arteries between France (Lyon, Grenoble) and Italy (Turin). (wikipedia)

• • •

This started very, very badly. So badly, I stopped to take a picture (usually on a Wednesday, I don't have the time / inclination to do this, but that opening corner was horrific):

Trouble begins with the "J" in the terminal position, and then cascades from there. I have to endure HADJ and then get the worst kind of dated crosswordese (EZIO) in the bargain, and *then* run into the why why why!? III (23A: Senior's grandson). If you're dropping EZIO, you better be getting a Lot in return. Here, you're not. Also, DIF 🙁 Also the clue on RETRIAL there is wrong, or at least misleading / incomplete (4D: Result of a deadlocked jury).

So I'm pretty much done with this thing before I've even properly started. Fill does *not* improve much. It's not that URB and SMS etc are So terrible on their own, it's just ... we shouldn't be seeing this much fill that's this weak. URB and SMS are answers I'm using only out of desperation. They're OK, but I don't want them. I can probably make any corner they're in (in this non-demanding grid) better. The bottom of the grid is a perfect example of the problem of relying on merely adequate, I've-seen-it-before-so-it-must-be-OK fill. RIVE, LO-RES*, AGAR, DOGIT—all of those are answers I would try to keep out if I could. Yet they are *all* here. In a tiny 4x5 section. Please try (a lot) harder. AGAR and DOGIT are a notch better than RIVE and LO-RES*, which are not really in use and really stupid-looking, respectively. Again, the problem here is a cumulative one. One of these answers in a corner—I don't blink, Two, I blink. Three+, I just close my eyes and smh.


Had no appreciation for the theme until I was done, at which point ... I appreciated it somewhat, I guess. I especially admire that boldness of using BOOTY CALL as your base phrase (35A). I also like seeing ROBYN, and, strangely, AGGREGATOR (not a pretty word, but a very real, modern ... thing). Mostly the puzzle was easy, though the eastern seaboard really smacked me around for a bit. Couldn't drop RILING or OF LATE off of ROMERO, and so needed a lot of hacking and flailing to finally fill those in. I think TIA was the only cross I was certain of. BIG IF was really, really difficultly clued (33A: Significant qualification), in that "qualification" commonly means something like "asset" and so I never considered its other meaning. I was like "... BIG UP?" Also, I thought the Pic de Rochebrune was a bridge 🙁

I think the theme is just OK, and the fill is weak-to-dire, so overall it's a no.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*Mail suggests LORES is indecipherable to many of you (one more reason never to use it). It's short for "lo(w)-resolution." 

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