Political cartoonist Edward / SAT 5-20-17 / Gullible rodent in Scott Adams comic / Celebratory move popularized by Cam / Real-life ice age beast seen on "Game of Thrones" / Muckracker who pushed for model tenements / Metric for gauging female representation in works of fiction / Ski town near Mount Mansfield

Constructor: Paolo Pasco and David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Medium (tilting easy)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Edward SOREL (26D: Political cartoonist Edward) —

Edward Sorel (born Edward Schwartz, 26 March 1929, The Bronx) is an illustrator, caricaturist, cartoonist, graphic designer and author whose work is known for its storytelling, its left-liberal social commentary, its criticism of reactionary right-wing politics and organized religion. Formerly a regular contributor to The Nation, New York Magazine and The Atlantic, his work is today seen more frequently in Vanity Fair. He has been hailed by The New York Times as "one of America's foremost political satirists".^[2][3][4] As a lifelong New Yorker, a large portion of his work interprets the life, culture and political events of New York City. There is also a large body of work which is nostalgic for the stars of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood when Sorel was a youth. Sorel is noted for his wavy pen-and-ink style, which he describes as "spontaneous direct drawing" (wikipedia)

• • •

AHI / CAD / CAPRA / NO FAIR — that is how I started this puzzle, or tried to. That's a .500 batting average, not bad, but not enough to get me real traction. For the second day in a row, I had to abandon my NW starting point and start elsewhere. And for the second day in a row things got much easier from there, and for the third (!) day in a row I like the puzzle.  This one is a little on-the-nose for teenage boys, with your requisite "GOT" clue and your requisite chess and computer and science clues and your requisite social media clues and that little bit of juvenile leering in the COOP clue (48A: Place to pick up chicks). Very on-brand, for better and worse. Mostly better. I feel like the NYT has no idea how to find a happy medium with its cultural frame of reference,so mostly it shuffles around with a solidly mid-'60s vibe, but then every once in a while a young former employee / loyalist is called in to "Do Something!" and we get a much more aggressively presentist and youth-oriented puzzle. Now I'm gonna take option B every day of the week, but man there has to be a middle way.

["'Superman II' is taking off all over America..."]

I started with VJS because I am old (12A: Onetime MTV figures). That turned out to be.a prime piece of three-letter real estate, and along with that corner's other gimme (AZIZ), VJS really got me going, both back into the NW (which ended up being a piece of cake when I came at it from east (?)) and into the SE, where I had my proudest moment of the day—remembering (sort of) BAHIA (50A: Brazil's fourth-largest state by population). That is *not* a promising clue—reminiscent of the bad old days when crosswords relied more heavily on obscurish geographical trivia—but while the "fourth-largest state" doesn't suggest crossworthiness, that letter combination (short, vowel-loaded, vowel-ending, with that odd central "H"), ensures that it will show up in puzzles more than most other countries' "fourth-largest states." Didn't know RATBERT (now and forever, from ASOK to RATBERT, always unfunny "Dilbert" can &^$% off) (46D: Gullible rodent in a Scott Adams comic), so that complicated things in the SE, but both BECHDEL TEST and ALICE WALKER were gimmes (!)—that's a lot of gimme. Gimme gimme. I teach Bechdel's "Fun Home" every year, and the BECHDEL TEST was just name-checked on "Riverdale" (of all places), so if you haven't heard of Bechdel or her eponymous test, now you have, and here it is:


Now maybe the long Acrosses in the SE weren't gimmes for you, in which case ... that corner is Awfully proper-noun-reliant (always dangerous). I mean, look:

Seems like that could be a danger zone for some. My danger zone was the SW, where (ugh, another) "Game of Thrones" clue and a chess clue kept me blocked out of the corner:

The new (to-me) SULU clue also made it hard to get traction in there (51A: The Philippines' ___ Archipelago). So I just sank to the bottom and got POD (66A: Edamame discard) and guessed ODE, and then boom, DUST MOP. From there I guessed TRAPS (I actually already had USED), and then it came together, though DIRE took every single cross ((DI-EWOLF had me first thinking: "DIMEWOLF!?") (39A: Real-life ice age beast seen on "Game of Thrones"). All in all, this was zippy and entertaining. Pasco has done consistently great work, which is crazy, as he is still just a junior in high school, I think—he's roughly my daughter's age. My daughter, btw, just got destroyed yesterday (when doing one of Patrick Blindauer's "Piece of Cake" puzzles) by a Nick NOLT- / Janet R-NO crossing. I wanted to shout at her "Why can't you be more like Paulo!? You're not my daughter!" But I bought her "Hamilton" tickets instead (this anecdote has been based on true events and may not have transpired precisely as written).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Moorish castle / FRI 5-19-17 / Bratty girl on Little House on Prairie / Savory Indian appetizer / French filmdom / Port whistler / Classic arcade game with a glass backboard that shatters / Large WW II area / Ponytail's hipster cousin per GQ / Commander during John Brown's capture in 1859 / Half spoken half sung

Constructor: Matthew Sewell

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ALCÁZAR (1D: Moorish castle) —

An alcázar (pronunciation: /ˈæl kəˌzɑːr/) is a type of Moorish castle or palace in Spain and Portugal built during Muslim rule, although some were founded by Christians and others were built on earlier Roman or Visigothic fortifications. Most of the alcázars were built between the 8th and 15th centuries. Many cities in Spain have an alcázar. The term is sometimes used as a synonym for "castillo" or castle; palaces or forts built by Christian rulers were also often called alcázars. (wikipedia)

• • •

Fridays are my best chance to catch an enjoyable puzzle in any given week, and this one worked just fine. About where an average Friday should be. Varied, semi-tough, and armed with at least a few original- / fresh-seeming answers (today, e.g., KISSCAM and CRUSHING IT). This will do. It's a kind of palate cleanser. Light, refreshing. It's not totally filling, but (along with yesterday's decent offering), but it goes a long way toward getting the taste of the Sun-Wed junk out of my mouth. The most notable feature of this puzzle, from my perspective, was the uneven difficulty—specifically, the whole thing seemed phenomenally easy *except* the NW, which definitely made me work. And since I always start in the NW, I struggled early, and so the whole thing felt somewhat harder than it probably actually was. I couldn't do anything with 1A: Walk all over (ABUSE), or any of its crosses until finally I alighted on ECHO (after wondering, possibly aloud, why ALEXA wouldn't fit) (5D: Voice-activated Amazon device). From there it was ON BASE, MAN BUN, and off to the races. Once ENGAGEMENT PARTY dropped, I went down into the SE and up the east coast, no problem. Had some problems getting into the SW, but SAMOSA / CINE / SLEW ended up sliding in fairly easily, which left me, finally, with just that damn, pesky NW corner. Here is a red-line map of my trouble spots.

 [Had IN A SECOND at first—did you?]

So, yeah, the NW. If I've heard of ALCÁZARs before, I definitely forgot about them. Had the -GE at the end of 2D: Heavy rain and wanted only DELU(U?)GE. And then [Wrongly assumed] is just a brutal clue for USURPED. Not the meaning of "assumed" I was expecting. I ended up having to back into that area after getting the back ends of the long Acrosses. Not having any idea who Abby Sciuto is definitely hurt me at 8D: Org. for forensic specialist Abby Sciuto. I tend to think of NCIS as fictional (for obvious reasons) (see also JAG), and Abby Sciuto sounds like a name with wordplay involved. I keep saying it to myself expecting to find it's some kind of pun. Like "Abby Normal" or something. Anyway, NCIS is common enough in crosswords that I guessed it and then finally worked my way back to those first, vicious Downs. The end.

[Last Dance ... LAST CHANCE for love ...]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Looking at my wife's puzzle now, I realize that I forgot what made getting USURPED especially hard to see—like my wife (right now, mid-solve), I spent a good part of my solve with ABASE at 1A: Walk all over. That is a perfectly reasonable answer. *BUT* ...  then for 3D: Wrongly assumed you get a word starting ASU- ... and your brain starts to catch and whirr and stutter and overheat trying to find an ASU- word ... *any* ASU word. The only ASU- word I could think of was ASU (as in Arizona State University). Maddening. So something must be wrong. But everything looks so right ...

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