Butter up? / SAT 10-24-26 / N.F.L. tight end Stowers / Subjects of Pixar's second movie / Noted surname in punk rock / Tip of Baja? / Ubiquitous head coverings / Sourdough starter component / Singer who had us at "Hello"? / Descriptor of a sleek kitchen material / Ball game in which you call your shots

Constructor: Robert Logan

Relative difficulty: Very Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ELI Stowers (34A: N.F.L. tight end Stowers) —

Elijah Stowers (born April 15, 2003) is an American professional football tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Texas A&M Aggies, New Mexico State Aggies, and Vanderbilt Commodores, winning the 2025 John Mackey Award with Vanderbilt before being selected by the Eagles in the second round of the 2026 NFL draft. (wikipedia) // “Unfortunately, throughout camp Stowers hasn’t shown much to get excited about as a receiver or as a blocker. He has not exhibited the explosive traits that are in his body, he has sometimes looked tentative as a blocker, and he simply hasn’t made catches further than, like, 10 yards down the field. The guess here is that Stowers is swimming mentally, trying to learn an offense while acclimating to the speed of the NFL. He’s thinking, and not just playing. The hope is that in time he will catch up mentally and begin playing fast. // But for now, Stowers is unplayable, and likely to be a gameday inactive. He is also currently on the shelf with a hamstring injury." (Jimmy Kempski, Philly Voice, via heavy.com)

• • •

I had things to say, but am now completely distracted by ELI Stowers. This has to be the flimsiest, most obscure sports clue in history. The young man has played precisely zero games of regular-season N.F.L. football. None. He was drafted by the Eagles, and is currently on the team, so calling him an "N.F.L. tight end" is technically correct, but ... yeesh. If you can put ELI Stowers in a puzzle, you can literally put any member of any sports franchise in the history of the four major American sports in a puzzle. I demand to see Mike TIMLIN in a grid! An absolute workhorse of a relief pitcher—18 seasons in the bigs, four World Series championships. Getting dudes out in big games well into his forties. But so far, zero TIMLINs in the NYTXW. Also, zero MIKEs clued as Timlin. But one ELI Stowers, who, I repeat, has not played a game. Correction: ELI Stowers played in precisely one preseason game before getting injured. That's it. The end. I mean, hopefully not the end of his career. I wish him well, hope he goes on to do great things, but when I say he has done absolutely nothing to earn crossworthiness as an "N.F.L. tight end," please understand that this is a literal description of the truth and not a judgment call. He has played literally no regulation minutes. He was a second-round pick. Maybe the constructor is from Philly or went to Vanderbilt (where Stowers played college ball)??? I have no idea otherwise how you explain this ELI. Lucky for me (and probably lots of solvers), ELI was very easy to come up with, because almost every other answer in this grid was a cinch. 

I haven't done a Saturday this easy in a long time. Took me about half the time of Friday's puzzle. Crazy remedial. The grid is very smooth, so hurray for that, and I got a great feeling of whoosh-whoosh zoom-zoom on this one, for sure, but unlike with yesterday, the clues didn't really seem to be trying. ELI's obscurity makes it a massive outlier—almost all the answers in the grid were familiar to me today, and the clues did almost nothing to hide them from me. I took one look at 1A: Doves, mentally filled in PEACENIKS, started in on the crosses, and the dam just broke:

Look at all that solid coverage I had, all inside of twenty seconds or so. From there I was able to PILE ON the answers, starting with PILE ON, then INEPT, EPT. Both the other longer Acrosses were obvious from there, and very shortly I had finished the top and broken into the center via an obvious S---T at 18A: Speak recklessly, with "off" (SPOUT). From there, everything in the center went up in flames. I don't think more than 90 seconds or so had gone by before I was here:

From there, all the middle Acrosses are Monday-easy. And on the sides of the grid, I'm really well set up to crush those long answers, with all the initial letters in place. First thing to go: SLEEP-DEPRIVED (11D: Like many new parents). From there, work the short crosses and boom, east side done. I think that maybe it will be hard to round the corner into the bottom of the grid, since I'll be coming at those long Acrosses from the back end. But no...

It's true I botched one of the crosses here (YEN for SEN) (53D: Cent : U.S. :: ___ : Japan), and I weirdly couldn't think of a three-letter univ. ending in "L" at first (CAL), but AWARE MENSA MANTA went in one two three, and so those little three-letter hiccups didn't stand a chance against the momentum of my onslaught. Rounded the last corner and, aided by YEAST (23A: Sourdough starter component) and ADELE (38A: Singer who had us at "Hello"?) (again, just child's-placemat-level clues), I handled the west coast easily. Again, my biggest problems there were with the short stuff, specifically IFSO (which I had as ALSO and then ERGO before finally straightening things out) (43A: "Following that .."). I wasn't timing myself, but this would've been a sub-4-minute Saturday, which, for me, is record territory. I do love the feeling of speed and power that comes with slaying a Saturday so easily, but I think I like wrestling with clever cluing more. Great grid, but weak cluing, and not an ounce of Saturday fight in it.

Bullets:

• 10A: The practice of growing plants without soil (HYDROPONICS) — never even saw the clue. Had the thing almost filled in before I ever considered it, and then the missing letters were obvious. Thing is, if I had looked at the clue with zero letters in place, I still would've gotten it. Easy. The clues, as I say, just seemed like they weren't in the game (kinda like ELI Stowers so far this season) 
• 17A: What might get filled up around dinnertime (OVEN) — weird attempt at double-cluing led to two of the less transparent answers in the grid: PITA and OVEN. In a doubled clue scenario, there's always one answer that feels like a stretch. Today, it's PITA. I mean, yes, you can "fill" a PITA with ... whatever, but it's a bizarrely specific food item, as opposed to OVEN, which is a general thing that might be used at "dinnertime" worldwide. But at least the clues showed a tiny amount of life here. 
• 41A: Ball game in which you call your shots (H-O-R-S-E) — in case you're unfamiliar:

• 3D: Butter up? (ARIES) — the puzzle's finest hour, at least as far as cluing goes. I had no idea, even with the "A." Once I got the "ARI-" I had a nice aha moment. "Butter" = "one who butts" = ram, and the ram that is "up" (in the sky, as a constellation) is ARIES. A great, clean, concise "?" clue.

• 22A: Tip of Baja? (PESO) — wanted "B" or "A" here (the tips of the word "Baja"), but no, it's money you might leave as a tip. One PESO. I'm not aware of the current conversion rates, but I don't think that's much of a tip.
• 9D: Ubiquitous head coverings (SCALPS) — I kinda like this clue. After scanning my mental inventory of hat types, I thought "wait, if they're truly 'ubiquitous,' then they're Everywhere ... but hats are culturally specific, so ... must be anatomical?" Bingo.
• 13D: Becomes less interesting over time (LOSES LUSTER) — a fine answer, and maybe the only longer answer that made me hesitate—I needed a few crosses to get LUSTER to come to me.
• 29D: Norma who gave Sally Field her first Oscar (RAE) — crosswordese of yore. The clue is really oddly phrased. "For which Sally Field won her first Oscar" makes more sense. I'm imagining her character (or the real-life woman she was based on, Crystal Lee Sutton), standing on stage literally handing Field the statue. 
• 30D: Photographer Goldin (NAN) — more crosswordese of yore. Both RAE and NAN were autofills. The other major NAN is editor/publisher NAN Talese. NAN is also one of the Bobbsey Twins (again, of yore). It can also be the Indian flatbread, though that typically gets a double-A spelling (it's been five years since we've seen the single-A spelling of the bread—we've seen 29 double-A NAANs since then)

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Letterboxd]
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Cartoonish bouncing sound / FRI 10-23-26 / Band at a Jimmy Buffett concert? / Annual appraisal statement / Have serious plans / Emma ___, protagonist of "A Woman of Substance" / Poetic device with inexact sound-alikes / Minestrone morsel / Penalty for exceeding a payroll threshold, in sports lingo / Strap-and-buckle shoes named for a comic strip character who wore them / Kind of joint associated with smoking, informally / "America's Largest Classroom"

Constructor: Katie Hoody

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: A Woman of Substance (2D: Emma ___, protagonist of "A Woman of Substance" (HARTE)) —

A Woman of Substance is a novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford, published in 1979. The novel is the first of a seven-book saga about the fortunes of a retail empire and the machinations of the business elite across three generations. The series, featuring Emma Harte and her family, also includes Hold the Dream, To Be the Best, Emma's Secret, Unexpected Blessings, Just Rewards and Breaking the Rules.

A Woman of Substance was adapted in 1985 as an eponymous television miniseries (as were the sequels Hold the Dream and To Be the Best). In 2026, an eight-part television adaptation was released on Channel 4. [...] 

Barbara Taylor Bradford OBE (10 May 1933 – 24 November 2024) was a British-American best-selling novelist. Her debut novel, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 and sold over 30 million copies worldwide. (wikipedia)

• • •

Except for SLANT RHYME (nice) (29D: Poetic device with inexact sound-alikes), the fill here wasn't that exciting to me, but I did appreciate how hard the clues were trying to make the puzzle tricky—mission largely accomplished! The grid is very clean, which is another mark in its favor, but it's also loaded with names, many of them, let's say, OLDEN, so I expect the name-haters to come out in force today. I capitalize OLDEN, even though it's not in the grid, because it was the first thing I actually put in the grid, at 1D: ___ days (times past) (THOSE). One of several mistakes that kept me from ever getting up a proper whoosh-whoosh / zoom-zoom with this thing. But back to the cavalcade of names: Bobby DARIN! Sonia HENIE! Amanda BYNES! KYRA Sedgwick! Joyce Carol OATES, RON Chernow, somebody named HARTE (checks puzzle...) ... ok, Emma HARTE, in something called A Woman of Substance (!?) (sounds familiar, but I honestly have no idea what that is, let alone what the protagonist's last name is) (see "Word of the Day," above), and finally, team captain, NITRO! IIf I left someone out, I apologize to that person. There's also Jimmy Buffet, about whom I know several things, none of which would've led me to connect him to LEIs (26A: Band at a Jimmy Buffett concert?). I was like "... OBI?" Then after the "L" showed up, I wrote in LSD ("LSD comes in 'bands' now?"). I admire the lack of real crosswordy gunk in the grid, but what I primarily remember about it, besides some clever cluing, is the names (and my mistakes, of course, but that's true with every puzzle).

I started the puzzle ... strangely. The whole OLDEN (wrong) HARTE (who?) thing in the NW forced me to abandon it, and so I ended up following crosses out of that section all the way to the NE corner, in lightly interlocking fashion:

That's about the most zoom I got out of this puzzle, blazing my way across the top, getting each new word off just one letter. After that, things settled back to a slowish but steady pace. Never totally hung up, but never really speeding either. My OLDEN mistake wasn't actually my worst (as you can see, THINK BIG managed to eliminate OLDEN). No, my worst mistake was a compound mistake that no one else on earth is likely to have made. I somehow convinced myself that the clue on 20D: Daughter of one's 9-Across was going to be a foreign-language answer. Like TIA or something. Once I pieced together MOMMA, I sincerely Still Thought 20-Down Was Foreign—like, maybe MOMMA was Italian (!?!?). And so I ultimately convinced myself that SIA was a word, primarily because I had no idea what "America's Largest Classroom" was and had put in first NEA and then PTA. So ... SIA, not SIS. This left me briefly confounded by what the hell was in my minestrone (8D: Minestrone morsel). A GREEN ... TEAL? TEAK? TEAT? I spent many seconds carefully constructing a mental image of minestrone. No TEALs, no TEATs. As I say, I dare you to find a dumber cascade of mistakes today than the one that started with me convincing myself that SIS was going to be in a foreign language, or that SIA was anything but a pop singer. Mercifully, once I fixed all that, I had no other errors for the entire second half of the puzzle.

Bullets:

• 14A: Annual appraisal statement ("WHAT A YEAR!") — cute. I don't know when you say this exactly (sometime in December, probably), but I can definitely imagine someone saying it.
• 16A: Track event won by the fastest four legs (HORSE RACE) — this clue kind of trips over itself because it wants to make you *think* the clue is about human racing, but the syntax is so awkward that it's easy to guess that they're trying to trick you. I actually thought they were trying to reverse-psychology trick me—like, the clue was so obviously suggesting horsiness that it must actually be about a relay race. But no, it's horses.
• 19A: Ensemble piece (ACCESSORY) — from not-humans-but-horses to not-music-but-fashion. I actually thought the answer was about furniture. A living room ... ensemble? Maybe it has ... ACCESSORY pieces. And maybe SIA lives there? (My brain is clearly still sleep-fogged)

• 30A: With whom one pools pounds for quarters (FLATMATE) — the "quarters" misdirect is one of the oldest in the book, so I got this easily. 
• 38A: Boundaries between areas with different coverage (TANLINES) — boring-sounding clue that ends up being pretty clever.
• 55A: Penalty for exceeding a payroll threshold, in sports lingo (LUXURY TAX) — this answer has appeared twice before in the NYTXW, but never with this clue, which is the only way I've ever heard it outside a Monopoly board. A nice answer, an original clue, and, for me, a gimme.
• 59A: They can help one get a leg up, informally (QUADS) — more slanty misdirective ambigu-cluing (Ambicluity!) from this puzzle. 
• 57A: Cartoonish bouncing sound (BOINK) — pretty sure you mean BOING. BOINK means ... something else.
• 11D: One may sit near a bench marking time (METRONOME) — and still more. It never stops (which is fine, it's Friday, bring it on)

• 12D: Strap-and-buckle shoes named for a comic strip character who wore them (MARY JANES) — always proud to be able to slap down anything from women's fashion without tripping all over myself. I don't know why this shoe type is familiar to me, but it is, and I got the answer off the first few letters. I do not, however, as of this second, know the "comic strip character who wore them." Hang on ... oh wow, she was Buster Brown's sweetheart, so we are going way back, comic strip-wise. Buster Brown also had a dog named TIGE, whose name you used to see in crosswords sometimes (69 total appearances, last seen in 2019). Holy cow, TIGE was in one of my puzzles (!?!!?)

[IMONA ELHI TIGE I,TINA and EHUD are killing me rn. I plead "it was 2012"]

Buster Brown is a comic strip character created in 1902 by Richard F. Outcault that was adopted as the mascot of the Brown Shoe Company in 1904. The characters of Buster Brown, Mary Jane, and his dog Tige became well known to the American public in the early 20th century. [...] The comic strip began in the New York Herald on May 4, 1902. Outcault left to work for William Randolph Hearst in January 1906. He continued to produce the comic strip in Hearst's newspapers after a court battle which left it nameless, while the Herald continued their own version of Buster Brown with other artists. The Herald version lasted until January 1911, and Outcault's version until May 13, 1923. (wikipedia)

• 25D: Beat a map app's arrival time estimate, say (SPED) — ambiguity here is in the verb tense—your instincts will tell you "present tense," but this "Beat" is past. 
• 49D: Cellphone hot line? (SEXT) — splitting "hotline," nice. 
• 47D: Writer of the story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (OATES) — this story was the basis for the movie Smooth Talk (1984), starring Laura Dern in one of her very first movies. Excellent. Gripping. Disturbing. Co-starring the late great Treat Williams in a memorably terrifying role.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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