Constructor: Joe Hansen
Relative difficulty: Challenging (nearly 4, lol)
THEME: FLOWER / GARDEN (5D: With 50-Down, place that this puzzle grid represents) — circled (or shaded) squares spell out kinds of flowers, and (I ... guess?) are flower-shaped:FLOWERS:
So many things had to go wrong for this to be as unpleasant as it was. First, it's Monday, and Mondays are often very good—the best themes are simple, with a nice, tight, interesting themer grouping, and then squeaky clean fill as far as the eye can see. If you blow a Monday, I get extra mad because it's clearly a day that can routinely be executed to a high degree of precision, overcoming even the occasional editorial malfeasance. But this puzzle ... wow. First, it's way way way too theme-dense for a Monday. What this does is make the grid buckle. The fill is just bad, all over. No one should have to endure stuff like LIA AINTI AGRI YAYAS EKEBY ACIDY ASA ISTO ONTV etc on a Monday. A couple of those, OK, but it was like being assaulted, over and over. Worse, there are no themers with actual ... theme in them? So the revealer was a bear to get without a ton of crosses. And then the cluing, it just didn't compute, over and over. Usually on a Monday I can run the first three Acrosses easily. Maybe I can't get one of them right away, fine, but the clues tend to make sense, anyway. Today, right off the bat, I couldn't understand any of the clues. Whiffed on first two Acrosses and only tentatively guessed the third. BEST ... from that present participle to a simple adjective was yikes (1A: Winning a blue ribbon). And FRAN!?!? I was born there, LOL. Seriously, no idea until (very late, toward the end) I got the "F" from FLOWER. Is it AVOW or AVER!? (14A: State as fact) Who can say? RATED R or RATED X? Shrug. A LEGO is a "toy"? Don't most toys hurt when you step on them barefoot? Four-letter word for [Sweetie]? Lots of options. Just flailing around. Obviously there are easy answers in that NW section too, so it was all ultimately gettable, but only after flopping around, with no real reward for the flopping. Ugh, the longer answers not being themers is so annoying. SERVE TIME instead of DO TIME (3D: Be in jail) ... it's just irksomeness all over. A very hot case of Trying To Do Too Much and just face-planting as a result. If this had been a Tue or a Wed, I'll admit it would've been a little easier to take. But only a little. Further, AZALEA is a flowering *bush*, and seems slightly out of place in your FLOWER / GARDEN. At any rate, I think of them as flower shrubs more than as flowers, per se. Beyond the theme (and all the yuck fill and vague cluing), I don't get why you give a good word like NICHE such an awful, bizarre "business" (???) clue (11D: Limited kind of market). A NICHE is a "market"? Isn't NICHE the adjective, as in "a NICHE market"? Seems like NICHE goes with "limited," but it's not clued that way. I mean ... your clue could just as easily have been [Limited], tbh. But even that is terrible. The authorial / editorial voice on this one just way far away from my idea of a good time. Take your show-offy "feat of construction" puzzles and ... well, put them somewhere I never see them, but above all keep them far away from Monday (or Friday, for that matter—some days are sacred). Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld