Nothing really clicked, though, until I got to 92-Across, [Lab mice in a 1990s cartoon]. This had to be “Pinky and the Brain,” an animated buddy series that was very popular in its day, and I was positive it was the only possible answer. There were too many squares in this grid for that title, but I could see a pattern in the letters from completed down entries, and, this time, a pair of duplicated letters helped me out. The entry is PPIINNKKYY AND THE BRAIN; every letter in “Pinky” appears twice.
Aha, I thought; that must have something to do with the puzzle’s title, “Double Digits,” which originally struck me as an indication of numbers in the theme. Revisiting 22-Across, it turns out that the entry solves to EATT HHUUMMBBLE PIE.
So, now we have a PPIINNKKYY at the bottom, and a TTHHUUMMBB at the top of the grid. The “Digits” are fingers, and the theme entries are all illustrations of the phenomenon named by the revealer at 107-Across, [Excuse for texting errors, jocularly … or a hint to this puzzle’s theme]: FAT-FINGER SYNDROME. This affliction has grown more common as technology speeds up and keyboards shrink; the result can range from a texted miscommunication to a billion-dollar trading mistake. This gives me perspective when I become frustrated looking for an errant letter in a crossword on the New York Times Games app.
I love how the fingers appear in this puzzle in the same order as they do on your hand, and I find it quite funny that the doubled double letter in the answer to 48-Across, [Royal whose wedding had a whopping 1,900 guests], gave Mr. Karp a fit (as he explains in his notes). I got it wrong myself while trying to fill in the correct entry, but it was because of miscalculation, not my fat fingers.
Tricky Clues
27A. A puzzle like this, whose theme manipulates the length of words, makes me paranoid about any entry that I can’t immediately parse. An example is this clue, [Clear to see, maybe?], which solves to IN HD. I looked every which way for wordplay before I realized the “HD” was simply high definition, like a modern TV where you can count the freckles on someone’s face.
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