New York Times, Thursday, February 14, 2019

My initial concept with "OUT OF ORDER SIGNS" as the central reveal was for common signage text entries consisting of two words, but with the words reversed to make a totally different meaning. I.e. WAY WRONG (Clued: Totally not right) for the out-of-order WRONG WAY sign; or WANTED HELP (Clued: Needed assistance) for the out-of-order HELP WANTED sign. It was really limiting trying to find strong entries that would work both ways.

At some point a asked Jeff if he would look at a couple of puzzles I was playing around with and give me an opinion on whether I was wasting my time or not. He liked the OUT OF ORDER SIGNS concept but right away saw the potential in an anagrammed theme for the out-of-order connection.

Once Jeff "signed on" ;-) , a lot of fun anagramming options sprang up! I was surprised at how many anagrams can be made from words like "speed limit"! We also had a discussion about whether the entries should be the out-of-order signage text or the anagrammed clues. My recollection is that we thought it would be less confusing for solvers if the entries were clean, even though the central revealer seemed to be addressing the entries, and not the clues!

Not being a super savvy anagrammer, I though we should include an optional clue addition that would help solvers place where the out-of-order clue signage would be found. I.e. For SPEED LIMIT we submitted the clue "TEPID SLIME along an interstate". Will opted for the more difficult version without the locator clueing. He also revised our anagrams to be less humorously offbeat. Hmm…

This puzzle has a lot of Jeff Chen's constructing expertise rolled up in it from grid layout to entries. I was happy to be on the Chen team once again!

Jeb and I meet up a couple of times a year, and it's fun to brainstorm with him. He showed me one built around OUT OF ORDER SIGNS, but he had flipped pairs of sign words, i.e., WANTED HELP and WAY WRONG. I didn't find that interesting, but there was something about the revealer that tickled my fancy.

Several weeks and several hundred anagrams later, voila! I liked the image of a "Fawlty Towers" imp or Bart Simpson scrambling road signs. It amuses me to think about people confusedly driving past a sign reading DECAL ODORS.

Well, amusing, until they ran off the ROAD that was CLOSED. Ahem.

I almost always do the grid skeleton work in collaborations, but this one was all Jeb. I hesitated at his layout at first, especially considering how many down answers had to work through the first two themers (in the north region of the grid), but he made it work pretty well. Always interesting to see another constructor's process — I would have shoved SPEED LIMIT all the way to the right to create better spacing. Pleasantly surprised to see that it all worked out. Just took a few back and forths to figure out best options for each region after that.

We were hoping that this would run on a Wednesday, as I want more out of a Thursday theme. If you're gonna toil away at a tough solve, the payoff better be good! Hopefully at least a few of the anagrams were amusing enough to be worth your time.

P.S. Jeb and I have a much more juvenile taste than Will. Our submitted anagrams:

DONE ROTTEN

TEPID SLIME

GREASED PET

DECAL ODORS