Today’s Saturday Stumper

I started today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper by Rafael Musa in the upper left with 2-D, four letters, “Notation after ‘A new broom sweeps clean’” and 19-A, three letters, “Stain source.” Easy! And then the puzzle grew much more difficult. One “Hairy situation” (8-D, four letters) after another (61-A, five letters). And still more “Hairy situations” (48-D, four letters). Two longer answers that I filled in with no crosses helped hugely to open up the puzzle: 17-A, nine letters, “Infomercial order” and 28-D, ten letters, “Didn’t try very hard.”

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

11-D, ten letters, “Out of it.” ELIMINATED? UNEMPLOYED? No, a more delightful answer.

15-D, eight letters, “Performers with horses.” Also delightful.

16-A, five letters, “Frost and Eliot contemporary.” Well, maybe. One might say that Samuel Beckett and Joan Blondell were contemporaries (both born in 1906), but to my mind, contemporary suggests someone who shares a particular cultural space. My first thought was POUND, who had a connection to both Frost and Eliot. Interesting: Google AI names Eliot and Frost as contemporaries of 16-A. But I’m not buying this answer.

30-A, eight letters, “Word from the French for ‘cure in brine.’” I did not know that.

33-D, eight letters, “More than one soft touch.” Nice.

42-A, five letters, “Battle of Hastings participant.” Obvious, right? Wrong.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-A, six letters, “Spot-checked?”

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One I overlooked: 14-A, nine letters, “Cross-sectional side piece.” Yow!

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.