New York Times, Wednesday, January 1, 2020

CHRISTINA: I'm very excited that this will be the first puzzle of the new decade. May this be a year and decade with many more female constructors!

I had the idea for a Y2K puzzle but had no idea how to get started with finding a theme set. Staring at every word in the dictionary that has a Y didn't seem very promising. When I pitched the idea to Jeff, he immediately ran some code and sent back a list of every word/phrase that became another word when the Y changed to a K. Then we pored over the list and picked the words we thought had the most potential to be funny phrases. STORY to STORK had seemingly endless possibilities. BOY to BOK, not so much.

The initial puzzle we submitted came back as a no, with an invitation to resubmit a new theme set over e-mail. The editing team liked the idea, but only one of our theme entries — KELP REVIEW. We pored over the list again and came up with two whole new theme sets, which they also rejected. But, they suggested "FINDING DORK" which we liked, so then we just had to come up with two more. It was definitely worth all the work, and they finally accepted our theme with the set you see here.

My favorite rejected entries:

• A LIKELY STORK [Result of unprotected sex?]
• LAKER CAKE [What Magic Johnson might jump out of?]
• KALE LAW SCHOOL [Where one goes to learn the ins and outs of leafy greens?]
• ITS A LONG STORK [Description of a shoebill?]

JEFF: I realized a long time ago that my sense of humor and Will Shortz's don't mesh well. Kooky themers that make me giggle tend to elicit a "the theme didn't excite me" critique. Humor is subjective, no doubt. So it was a huge surprise that Will and I both liked KELP REVIEW, especially when said in a snarky, "It's too GREEN and SLIIIIIMY."

Not such a surprise that BIRDS OF PRE-K [Feathered friends starting school?] and LIKELY STORK didn't make the cut.

Admit it, Will, the unprotected sex joke made you laugh a little.

ADMIT IT!

And expect to hear from LeBron James and/or Anthony Davis, whose high-flying acrobatics make them OZONE LAKERs.

I enjoyed going back and forth with Christina on grid filling once Will approved the current set. She pointed out that it'd be elegant to not have any other Ys in the grid, so I wrote some quick code to eliminate any entries containing Y.

But it wasn't working. It should work! I told the computer to do everything right! Why the frick would Crossword Compiler tell me that I asked it to accomplish an impossible task?

Ah. The Y in Y2K was already fixed in place. I instructed my computer to use anything that fit a ?Y??? pattern (at 31-D) … using a word list containing no Ys.

It's a good thing I don't work in computer science.

This was the third or fourth puzzle Christina and I developed together, and her speed up the learning curve was amazing. Usually, by this point, I'm still leading the gridding efforts with a newer constructor, but it was Christina's suggestion to insert CALVINBALL, with the surrounding areas tested to make sure they were fillable. So much of the color in the grid is all her.