Lover of Giorgetta in Puccini's Il Tabarro / THU 12-24-20 / What benchwarmers ride with the / High-quality French vineyard / Poker slang for three of a kind / Tract of low-growing vegetation

Constructor: Billy Ouska

Relative difficulty: Medium (untimed)

THEME: CAN'T FIND THE TIME (52A: Is unable to get away, say ... or a hint to 17-, 24- and 40-Across?) — familiar phrases with "TIME" in them have "TIME" pulled out of them, creating wacky phrases, clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style):

Theme answers:

• LET THE GOODS ROLL (17A: Spill a shipment of bowling balls?)
• WAITS FOR NO ONE (24A: Works during a slow day at the restaurant?)
• TAKE ONE'S SWEET (40A: Go on a date with a honeybun?)

Word of the Day: "Il Tabarro" (56A: French setting for Puccini's "Il Tabarro") —

Il tabarro (The Cloak) is an opera in one act by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Adami, based on Didier Gold [nl]'s play La houppelande. It is the first of the trio of operas known as Il trittico. The first performance was given on 14 December 1918 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. (wikipedia) 

The scene is Michele's barge on the Seine, in a corner of Paris. Giorgetta, Michele's young wife, is in love with Luigi, a longshoreman hired by her husband during the loading of the barge. Michele, by mere accident, guesses the truth. Having overheard his wife giving a rendezvous to Luigi by night, Michele waits for the man, surprises him as he jumps on the barge, seizes him by the neck, compels him to admit he is his wife's lover and strangles him. Then he hides the body under his cloak, and when Giorgetta, in mortal fear, comes on deck and asks Michele if he does not wish her to come and rest near him under his cloak—for, according to the text, “every man carries a cloak, hiding sometimes a great joy, sometimes a terrible sorrow”—her wronged husband throws it open and Giorgetta utters a shriek of horror as her lover's body rolls at her feet. (opera.stanford.edu) 

• • •

Not for me at all. This is the kind of theme where the wackiness really has to land perfectly, and this one only does that once (WAITS FOR NO ONE, that's good). And with only two other examples of the theme, there's no way to recover. It's an OK concept, but the execution was a let-down. The grid overall was pretty dull, and the cluing was just my bad luck, i.e. nothing that seemed very interesting to me, and a lot that didn't. I do want to single out the clue on HAT TRICK as particularly good (4D: Series of goals). A HAT TRICK is when you score three goals in a game (typically in hockey ... at least that's the context in which I've heard the term). But the clue is worded in such a way that makes you think of tasks or life goals, so when I couldn't make BUCKET LIST fit, I was stumped. Always nice to be mad at a clue only to have it turn out to be clever in an undeniable way. But most of this grid is just filler. Short dull stuff. Hard even to find a suitable Word of the Day today. AMBER / ALERTS was way too grim for me, to be honest. Something about the playfulness of the whole split-answer thing ([With 5-Down, etc.]) is really really really at odds with the answer itself. If you clued AMBER as [___ Alerts] or ALERTS as [Amber ___] I would wonder why, why in the world you were dragging child abduction into the grid for absolutely no reason. And in a grid with PREDATOR? Yeesh. 

Some of the clues just seemed obnoxious to me. The one on BRIDES, for instance (23D: There are more of these in the U.S. in October than any other month, surprisingly). First, ugh, trivia. Second, what's "surprising" is that "October" gives you absolutely zero information. I was expecting something ironic due to the Octoberness of it all. That wouldn't made sense, just as it would've made sense if the clue had actually included "not June"—then yes, that would've been surprising, and there would've been *some* hint (but not too obvious a hint) as to what the clue was getting at. You need the "surprising" part, the part that touches the point of it all, in the clue. Without "not June," this clue flops. I am terrible at [Word with X or Y]-type clues. Just awful. Today, no different. SLIDE?? LOL sure. Couldn't think of a single word that would go with "tackle," but SLIDE, sure, soccer, OK. I honestly thought SLIDE rule here referred to the rule in baseball about what defines a legal slide (nothing that could seriously harm a fielder, essentially). But of course a SLIDE rule is a ye olden measurement thing I've actually never seen. Like an abacus, as I understand it.

One last thing re: yesterday's puzzle. I have heard from a couple people that the DQS clue (26A: Blizzards are produced in them, familiarly) was OK because the theme was "weather." I cannot stress enough how wrong this is. The point is, you can't have an initial in your answer that stands for a word that appears elsewhere in the grid, and you *especially* can't do that when the initial *crosses* said word (as DQS, meaning Dairy QUEENs, was crossing QUEEN yesterday). The weatherness of the DQS clue is totally beside the point. First of all, DQS wasn't a themer. Second, sure, you can weather up all the non-theme clues you like in your weather puzzle, go to town, but you can't dupe a word like that. Cannot. I'm not making this up. I've seen editors scrub far less obvious dupes than this one. If they are careful, they pay close attention to these things. The idea that "Q" can't both stand for "queen" and *cross* QUEEN, that is not some random opinion. Here's a random opinion: poker clues suck (see 39A: Poker slang for three of a kind = TRIPS). That one's all mine. Precisely zero editors are gonna care about that opinion. But the duping thing, that's careless / bad editing. If you watched the solving video, you saw how fast Rachel reacted to the DQS / QUEEN crossing. No hesitation. Because everyone who works in the world of crosswords knows you can't do that. The fact that the theme was weather-related couldn't be less relevant. Doesn't justify the dupe at all. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Merry Christmas Eve.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]