Regional flora and fauna / MON 7-17-23 / Suárez, tennis star with eight Grand Slam doubles titles / Informal term for college in Great Britain / Icon that lights up during a turbulent plane ride

Constructor: Alexander Liebeskind

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (total guess)

THEME: "ARE YOU OKAY?" (58A: Query of concern ... or a phonetic hint to two pairs of letters appearing in 17-, 24-, 37- and 48-Across) — theme answers have both "RU" and "OK" letter pairings in them:

Theme answers:

• RUM AND COKE (17A: Two-ingredient drink order)
• BRUSHSTROKE (24A: Distinctive effect of paint applied to a canvas)
• INSTRUCTION BOOK (37A: How-to manual)
• RUNNING JOKE (48A: Recurring comical reference)

Word of the Day: PAOLA Suárez (31A: ___ Suárez, tennis star with eight Grand Slam doubles titles) —

Paola Suárez (American Spanish: [paˈola ˈswaɾes]; born 23 June 1976) is a retired tennis player from Argentina. She was one of the most prominent women's doubles players throughout the early and mid-2000s, winning eight Grand Slam titles, all of them with Virginia Ruano Pascual, and holding the No. 1 doubles ranking for 87 non-consecutive weeks. She was also a singles top ten player and semifinalist at the 2004 French Open. (wikipedia)

• • •

Oh this one was a tragedy. And it was all going so nicely. The Downs-only solve was relatively smooth, the longer theme Answers were holding their own—solid, if not scintillating—and I had no occasion to wince or grumble. For most of the solve. Right up til the end. And then ... well, I cannot recall a puzzle collapsing and thudding this heavily in some time. The problem isn't the revealer. That was just fine. Loopy, but in a light, fun, entertaining way. I don't know how hard it is to find answers with both an "RU" and an "OK" pair in them, but this set seemed strong, and anyway, the word (letter) play is cute. Thumbs up. See, this is part of what makes it all a tragedy—the fact that things were really going swimmingly and ULTIMATE (!) success seemed imminent. And then ... well, the SE corner happened. At first I didn't have either of those last two themers. Because JOY would not come to me from its clue alone (50D: Delight), I had to wait on that "K" and then infer the JOKE part of RUNNING JOKE. The "Y" from JOY gave me the hint I needed to get "ARE YOU OKAY?" which in turn gave me the "Y" that I needed to remember HYDE (56D: Park name in London and Chicago). This left me with one major problem: an eight- (?) letter word for 40D: Yawn-inducing. And man was it a problem. The first part of the word seemed to be BORE-, but since the only reasonable BOR-starting answer was BORING, and that wouldn't fit, I was fresh out of ideas. Worse, it was impossible to infer three of the four letters in the second half of the word. -ASH could be lots of things. IN-IND looked to me like it wanted to be IN KIND. Now LIENEE really seemed like it *had* to be LIENEE, but that word is so singularly ugly that my brain was rejecting it as one's body might reject an organ or one's stomach might reject rotten meat. Long story short, this puzzle's big finish was the collision of the world's ugliest word (LIENEE) with the world's stupidest word. BORESOME!?!?! BORESOME? BORESOME. You can BORE SOME people some of the time, but you can't ... well, I forget how the saying goes, might involve a FOURSOME, but all I know is that I actually literally audibly exclaimed "OMG that is awful!" when I was ultimately forced to send BORESOME crashing into LIENEE. And that act, that exact moment, was it. The End. Roll Credits on "The BORESOME LIENEE." What was the theme again? Don't know. Too traumatized. 

BORESOME. Sorry, not over it. It's like you're trying to say Martin BALSAM and ORSON Welles simultaneously and kind of choking on it all. Did they ever work together? I don't think so, but if they'd ever formed a production company together, I hope it would have been called BORESOME Productions. Speaking of Hollywood. the last image I saw on screen before I walked upstairs and solved this puzzle was the lovely but distraught face of one Ms. Meryl STREEP, who plays a fabulously wealthy romance novelist who steals Roseanne Barr's husband (Ed Begley, Jr.) in the 1989 movie "She-Devil" (directed by Susan Seidelman and streaming now on the Criterion Channel, the most used streaming service in this household by a long long longshot). I absolutely beamed at the coincidence, as I saw STREEP's name come into view. Lots of other names in this one, most of them familiar (if not overfamiliar) except for PAOLA Suárez, yikes, what? Not really Monday fare, that one. Really glad I was solving Downs-only and so never had to think about it. The fill on this one seems a little on the iffy / wobbly side (ANAT ERMA SKYS ERST BIOTA and then a slew of hypercommon answers: ONO TAT ETA ORE TSE PTA OPEC ERR etc.). But as I say, my Downs-only solve was actually pretty smooth and griefless. I just really (really really) wish the puzzle had managed to land the plane safely instead of overshooting the runway and ending up in BORESOME LIENEE Bay. I need to go recover from the crash. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. I hope someday soon to see GRETA clued as the actress GRETA Lee. She's wonderful in supporting roles on the TV shows "The Morning Show" (Apple+) and "Russian Doll" (Netflix), and her lead performance in Celine Song's "Past Lives" (which I just saw on Saturday) is truly stunning. I hope she wins all the awards.

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