Boozy holiday confection / SUN 11-3-24 / Word with the wave of a wand / Tower in a port / Relatives of narwhals / Calming oil compound, for short / Popular video game franchise since 1997, for short / Actress Krishnan of South Indian cinema / Land inhabited by the Alutiiq people / Doppler effect phenomenon / Eponym of a popular root beer brand / Like Thor, shortly after arriving on Earth in 2011's "Thor"

Constructor: Sid Sivakumar

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Can I Have a Raise?" — words meaning "money" (which appear in circled squares) hop over one shaded square each, creating a literal "raise"—or PAY BUMP, which is what the shaded squares spell out (when read from top to bottom):

Theme answers:

• ALASKA PENINSULA ("kale" jumps the "P") (23A: Land inhabited by the Alutiiq people)
• GODDAUGHTER ("dough" jumps the "A") (39A: Zoë Kravitz, to Marisa Tomei)
• FREQUENCY SHIFT ("cash" jumps the "Y") (46A: Doppler effect phenomenon)
• GUTENBERG ("tender" jumps the "B") (69A: Inventor of the printing press)
• MOOD CONGRUENCE ("green" jumps the "U") (86A: Psychological effect whereby memories are recalled more easily when they match one's current emotional state)
• CIVIC-MINDED ("coin" jumps the "M") (93A: Conscientious of one's community)
• SWITCHED PARTIES ("cheddar" jumps the "P") (115A: Moved across the aisle)

Word of the Day: The Franklin Mountains (7D: Texas city at the foot of the Franklin Mountains = EL PASO) —

The Franklin Mountains of Texas (Spanish: Sierras de los Mansos) are a small range 23 miles (37 km) long, 3 miles (5 km) wide that extend from El Paso, Texas, north into New Mexico. The Franklins were formed due to crustal extension related to the Cenozoic Rio Grande rift. Although the present topography of the range and adjoining basins is controlled by extension during rifting in the last 10 million years, faults within the range also record deformation during the Laramide orogeny, between 85 and 45 million years ago.

The highest peak is North Franklin Peak at 7,192 feet (2,192 m). Much of the range is part of the Franklin Mountains State Park. The mountains are composed primarily of sedimentary rock with some igneous intrusions. Geologists refer to them as tilted-block fault mountains and in them can be found 1.25 billion-year-old Precambrian rocks, the oldest in Texas. (wikipedia)

• • •

It's pretty literal, this one. Consistent and well made, but also pretty dull. The gimmick is awfully simple and there's really no element of surprise here, nothing fun to discover once you grok the basic premise. Well, there's one surprise, which is MOOD CONGRUENCE, whatever the hell that is (86A: Psychological effect whereby memories are recalled more easily when they match one's current emotional state). If you need to write an entire paragraph in order to justify your clue or make it make sense, that's a good sign you should rethink the answer itself. Seriously, that clue is three times longer than every other theme clue LOL. I'm sure this so-called "Psychological effect" is a real thing to someone, somewhere, but it really looks like something an uncurated wordlist coughed up ... I'm reading the wikipedia entry for MOOD CONGRUENCE and there's nothing up front about "memories" at all, so ... no idea what this clue is doing. Some super-specialized stuff. Real outlier. The rest of the theme answers were fine as answers, but the basic concept here, however neatly executed, just didn't seem that interesting. Very one-note. I can see what's happening ... and it keeps happening. Also, I made the mistake of reading the "Puzzle Notes," which spelled out the shaded-squares portion of the gimmick. 

Would've been much more fun to discover that on my own. Also, only crosswords think "KALE" is a slang term for "money." Never seen it anywhere else. Maybe in some hardboiled crime fiction of the '20s. That's possible. But KALE makes even CHEDDAR seem modern (it isn't). I can't say the idea isn't cute. I like that the revealer is actually built into the theme answers themselves—that is, if PAY BUMP played like a regular revealer (that is, if it were its own separate answer), the puzzle wouldn't have any charm at all. If you're jumping over letters, those letters really need to do something, and today, they do. So it all makes sense. It just wasn't terribly exciting. Not bad. Just ho-hum.

Aside from MOOD CONGRUENCE, which I had to get almost entirely from crosses, there were only two thorny patches today, and "thorny" is perhaps exaggerating the amount of pain involved. The first such patch was in and around BARQ (such a horrible answer to begin with—the root beer is BARQ'S; BARQ on its own is ridiculous). I had -A-- for the [Eponym of a popular root beer brand] and wrote in DAD'S. Now, DAD'S is the full name of the root beer, not an "eponym," but, see, I just ... I ... it was wishful thinking, in that I was wishing (desperately) that 41A: Word with the wave of a wand might be TADA because, well, the first thing that occurred to me there was ABRA, and there is no more horrible piece of crossword fill than ABRA. It is not, as the clue claims, a "word." It's an incantation partial. Oof. I die a little every time I see it in a grid. And so my brain willed it away. Refused to accept it. "Maybe we can write in DAD'S and TADA and everything will be OK." Nice try, brain. DAD'S gave me --D for 30A: Member of the fam, and the only answer I could think of there was ... DAD. And DAD crossing DAD'S seemed, let's say, unlikely. So I tore it out, worked out SIB, then BARQ, then sighed the world's deepest sigh as I defeatedly wrote in ABRA. Allow me to resigh. Sigh. You know how you can tell ABRA is completely invalid? First of all, would you really spell "Abracadabra" as two words? When have you ever seen that? And second, imagine seeing CADABRA in the grid ... yeah, that's right: you can't. No such "word" as CADABRA, so no such "word" as ABRA. Case closed on this worst of all possible "words." (Note: this is the fifth ABRA of the year, more than any year since 1991; not a promising trend!)

The other (minor) trouble spot today came from Pirate's Cove (you know ... the bar on Love Boat ... where Isaac, Your Bartender works (nights) ... no Love Boat fans, eh? Philistines ...).  

Annnnyway, I expected my pirate to make one sound and she made another, and man you would not think a three-letter [Word from a pirate] could cause significant havoc, but ARR(gh)! What does the pirate say? The pirate says "ARR." That is what the pirate says. Yes, ARR is usually [Flight board abbr.] or [Sheet music abbr.], but four times in recent years it has been a "word from a pirate" (three [Pirate's exclamation] and then one [Talk Like a Pirate Day greeting] earlier this year). AYE, on the other hand, while very sailory, is not very piratey. AYE has made 155 appearances in the modern (i.e. Shortz/Fagliano) era, and only once (once!) before today has "pirate" been used in the clue (the other time being only just this year). So for decades and decades, pirates never ever said AYE in a crossword. If they said anything, they said ARR. And now all of a sudden in 2024 they're all good little obedient sailors!? Bah. Give AYE back to Popeye and the Scots and people voting in favor of things, and let pirates say weird pirate things. Things like ARR. 


Notes and explainers:

• 23A: Land inhabited by the Alutiiq people (ALASKA PENINSULA) — minor issue, but I thought it was the ALASKAN PENINSULA, with an "N." And in some places (like the NASA website!), that is how it's spelled. But the official name of said peninsula appears not to have that extra adjectival "N" at the end of ALASKA.
• 52A: Actress Krishnan of South Indian cinema (TRISHA) — never heard of her, but she's a huge star. They don't call you "The Queen of India" for nothing, I'm guessing. Look at all these damn awards! According to wikipedia, she works primarily in Tamil and Telugu films. 

• 81A: Word following a comma in an alphabetized list (THE) — my brain could not process this clue at all. But yes, in an index, say, you will see book or movie titles that begin with "THE" written out this way (with the THE following a comma). Here are a couple examples from the index of a book that just happens to be sitting next to my desk—David Thomson's How to Watch a Movie:

• 109A: Popular video game franchise since 1997, for short (GTA) — stands for Grand Theft Auto. You get to do horrible things to people, if I remember correctly (I haven't played or even thought about the game since roughly the turn of the century)
• 18D: One willing to take the hit? (STONER) — a "hit" on a joint or pipe, for pot (marijuana) smokers. You probably knew that, but sometimes these idioms will be strange to non-native speakers, so I'm explaining, just in case. Although I'm hardly the one to be explaining this stuff, as last time I "took a hit" was ... well, before the last time I played GTA, that's for sure.
• 19D: Like Thor, shortly after arriving on Earth in 2011's "Thor" (TASED) — about as niche a film clue as I've ever seen. Look, you know TASED evokes awful things, most notably police violence, so maybe just don't use it, rather than asking us to remember one specific scene in an old superhero movie. There are too many superhero movies for anyone to be able to keep track of this junk. There have been four Thor movies alone. 34 films in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). 10 more in development. Make it stop. 
• 73D: Sign of a packed house (SRO) — Sold Right Out!*
• 88D: Sites of conch piercings (EARS) — so ... [Sites of piercings]. You didn't need "conch" there at all. So why is it there? To misdirect me? Toward the ocean? Well, that didn't work, just FYI. ("conch piercing" involves the piercing of the upper ear cartilage)

• 94D: Cushion upon which a ball rests (INSOLE) — "ball" as in "the ball of your foot."
• 104D: What's seemingly impossible to find when storing leftovers (LID) — I'm not a particularly well organized person and yet this is not a problem I've ever had. The lids go with the containers ... why are you separating them? 
• 87D: Calming oil compound, for short (CBD) — short for "cannabidiol," a compound found in marijuana. This is CBD's seventh NYTXW appearance in just two years (debuted in 2022).
• 73A: Where a ham might be on display (STAGE) — a "ham" is a bad (over-) actor.
• 118D: Tower in a port (TUG) — this is like the old trick of using "flower" to clue a river. Not "tower" like Tower of Babel or Tower of London, but "tower" as in "thing that tows." A TUG (boat) tows. It's a tower.

I'm headed up to Rochester today to see piano prodigy Yunchan Lim play Bach's "Goldberg Variations," which makes me sound way more "cultured" than I am. But sometimes I do indeed like to leave the Love Boat and experience the broader artistic world. Also, sometimes I just need to get out of town for a day, and the kid can play, apparently, so I'm excited. 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*I know, I know ... SRO actually stands for "Seats Ran Out"**

**I know, I know ... 

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