New York Times, Thursday, February 3, 2022

A few years ago my wife Anna made cake pops for my birthday. When I asked how the heck she made such perfect, Paul-Hollywood-handshake-worthy treats, she texted back that she used a "cake baller." I assumed this was a typo that was supposed to read "cake batter," but no — apparently cake ballers are very much a thing. For a good few seconds though, I found it very funny and bizarre that a digital text could make such an analog mistake as "forgetting" to cross a pair of ts. And thus a theme was born!

Big thanks to my brother-in-law Jacob for writing code to help me find l/t pairs. (If you're looking for something similar, XWord Info has since added a letter replacement tool, and Adam Aaronson's Wordlisted has one too that lets you search multiple wordlists).

By far the hardest part of this puzzle, though, was writing natural-sounding *non* thematic clues without any extraneous Ls, Ts or capital Is. That means no "to" "at," "all" "with," "this," "that," or "the" "other" "thing." To use a millennial reference, it felt like playing QWOP, where something as natural as running (or in my case, writing), suddenly became a near-impossible task, where I had to be hyper-aware of my every move, and would constantly faceplant by typing "it" without thinking about... it.

If you want help getting started making weird Thursdayish puzzles like this one, or if you just want to be my xfriend, come find me on the bird app.

I SLUMPED from being STUMPED but quickly went from WTF? to FTW! How could [Key lime] possibly be MOMENT OF TRUTH? Doubly fun to realize in that moment of truth that the clue writer hadn't followed the reminder the CROSS YOUR TS — as in [Key time], not [Key lime]. Such a perfect obfuscation, "key lime" sounding perfectly legit!

All of Adam's tomfoolery was so innocent, not a single theme clue making my Thursday-trickery-radar ping. My favorite was [One for whom libel is a major issue]. I plunked in PUBLISHER and happily admitted getting gotten, when the DALAI LAMA appeared on behalf of not libel, but Tibet. The double-t-crossing double-cross = genius!

I'm not often a fan of "Thursday trick in the clues," because the wordings can sound weirdly unnatural, or they get lost in the shuffle. There's a reason why most editors focus on long grid entries for 99% of puzzles.

Today's falls into that rare category of trickery-in-clues puzzles that works brilliantly. I rarely want to spend time reviewing anything after finishing a crossword, but I spent half an hour marveling at all the natural-sounding flim-flammery — as well as the fact that Adam didn't have any stray Ls in the non-theme clues!

In case you missed any of the genius, we've highlighted the themers below. Note that although symmetry wasn't 100% necessary, Adam did a great job of putting all his long themers in opposing spots. Dotting so many short themers around the rest of the grid made my Is open wide, too.