Double Digits – The New York Times

Nothing really happened, though, until I got to 92-Across, [Lab mice in a 1990s cartoon]”It had to be this way”Pinky and the Brain“A cartoon about friends that was very popular in its time, and I was sure it was the only possible answer. There were too many squares in this grid for this title, but I could see a pattern in the letters from the completed entries, and this time, a pair of duplicate letters helped me out. The entry is In Pinky And the brain; every letter in “Pinky” appears twice.

Ah, I thought; this must have something to do with the puzzle title, “Double Numbers,” which at first seemed to me to be a reference to the numbers in the subject. Upon revisiting 22-Across, it turns out that the entry solves EATT HomebbThe pie.

So, now we have In Pinky At the bottom, and Thumb At the top of the grid. The “numbers” are the fingers, and the subject entries are all illustrations of the phenomenon the detector mentioned in 107-Across, [Excuse for texting errors, jocularly … or a hint to this puzzle’s theme]Fat finger syndrome. This disease has It is becoming more common. As technology accelerates and keyboards shrink, the result can range from poor communication via text messages to billion dollar business mistakeThis gives me a new perspective when I get frustrated looking for the wrong letter in a New York Times Games crossword puzzle.

I love how the fingers appear in this puzzle in the same order they appear on your hand, and I find it funny that the doubled double letter in the answer to 48-Across, [Royal whose wedding had a whopping 1,900 guests]Mr. Karp threw a fit of rage (as he explained in his notes). I made a mistake myself in trying to fill in the correct entry, but that was due to misjudgment, not to my fat fingers.

Hard evidence

27A. A puzzle like this, whose subject plays with the length of words, makes me suspicious of any entry that I cannot immediately parse. An example of this is this clue, [Clear to see, maybe?]which resolves to IN HD. I looked everywhere for the words before realizing that “HD” simply means high definition, like modern television where you can count the freckles on someone’s face.