We’re one week into 2025 – how many times have you had to cross out/overwrite/backspace over the 4? At least it finally feels like a normal winter around here – we’ve had a string of near freezing days and a nice snow storm earlier this week with more on the way this weekend. Plenty of time indoors to solve puzzles (and write blog entries…) so let’s get to it.

• Name: Let Me Hear Your Body Talk
• Grid size: 15×15
• Entries: 70
• Difficulty: Medium Easy (my solve time: 6:52 – however I forgot to start the timer so this is an estimate)

I had an inkling what “Let Me Hear Your Body Talk” was going to entail, and while I had a faint thought it might refer to the hit Olivia Newton John song, I wasn’t surprised to find that the themers are all phrases/idioms that use a body part to describe a human trait or activity, clued straight in the form “Be [trait or activity]: Have one’s …..”:

• 17A: [Be sensible: Have one’s …..]: FEET ON THE GROUND – If you have your feet on the ground it’s unlikely you’ll also have your 51A, unless you are of a philosophical bent.
• 21A: [Be involved: Have one’s …..]: FINGER IN THE PIE – I initially entered this as “finger in the pot” which makes more sense to me – if your finger is in the pot, you are involved in making something (soup, stew, chili, etc.). But if it’s in a pie, the final product is already done, so it’s more like you are defacing or interfering with the making of the pie. However, it appears “pie” is more common, though it sometimes is said to be used in the sense of meddling rather than contributing.
• 31A: [Be cornered: Have one’s …..]: BACK TO THE WALL – If your back is to the wall, you don’t have many places to go, so you’re either doomed or need to fight it out.
• 47A: [Be competitive: Have one’s …..]: EYES ON THE PRIZE – While “keep your eyes on the prize” is certainly an encouragement to be competitive, I use it most often in a more specific way to mean “don’t be distracted,” to stay focused on what you are really aiming for and play the long game. It is also the name of a folk song (based on the traditional song, “Gospel Plow“) that became influential during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
• 51A: [Be daydreaming: Have one’s …..]: HEAD IN THE CLOUDS – If you have your head in the clouds you probably don’t have your 17A. The phrase is also the name of an Asian music festival.

This is a great theme and the themers are all nice and long with 2 grid spanners and 2 near-grid spanners. As a wannabe constructor, I’m curious why the clues use five dots (…..) rather than the traditional three underscores (___) to indicate a fill-in-the-blanks answer. Maybe Barb (or a reader – don’t be shy!) will enlighten us in the comments below. Barb had warned me that there were some potentially dodgy entries, and I had trouble with a few, but I don’t think there were any real howlers (well, maybe one). See “Other stuff” below for the nits I have to pick and entries that gave me particular trouble. As I noted above, I forgot to start the timer, so that measure of difficulty may not be as accurate here as for other puzzles. I was about halfway finished when I saw it hadn’t started, so I started it and added a bit of extra time after I finished to hopefully get close. In any event, it felt like a Medium Easy puzzle, with a few Hard entries.

Canadian content:

• 2D: [Singer Getty of Rush]: LEE – I’m sorry I didn’t catch this earlier, Barb – it’s Geddy Lee. He was born in Toronto, in the Willowdale neighbourhood.
• 6D: [Canadian band with a feline-sounding name]: KITTIE – I’d never heard of this band and initially tried entering CAT or KAT to start the answer.
• 10A: [Kim, to Janet in “Kim’s Convenience”]: APPA – I’ve watched a few episodes of this sitcom set in Toronto, but not enough to know the answer off the top of my head – hey, that could have been a themer (though it’s only 11 letters long).
• 25D: [Kobo display]: E INK – This one hung me up for a while – I was thinking kobo was some Japanese art form or something, then I vaguely remembered that it’s a Canadian e-book reader, so it must display e-ink.
• 37D: [“O.K. Blue Jays” co-writer Jack ___]: LENZ – Jack Lenz, who was born in Eston, Saskatchewan, co-wrote the song that is played during the seventh-inning stretch of Toronto Blue Jays home games. I’d never heard it but the lyrics are bonkers – I can’t wait to hear it in person at Rogers Centre sometime.
• 39A: [Chicoutimi “ciao”]: ADIEU – I saw that au revoir wouldn’t fit, so thought maybe there is a Chicoutimi somewhere in Spain or Mexico, so tentatively (and foolishly) entered adios. I need to brush up on my Canadian geography, and it looks like there is plenty to do there so I may need to schedule a visit.
• 41A: [My mom, in French]: MA MERE – I’m counting this as Canadian content as it has to be closely related to mémère, which is what I called my grandmother on my father’s French-Canadian family side.
• 50A: [Canadian Bruin #4]: ORR – Bobby Orr was born in Parry Sound and played for the Boston Bruins from 1966 to 1976, and the Chicago Blackhawks from 1976-1979.

Other stuff:

• 7D: [“The Lord of the Rings” realm]: ROHAN – Nearly everything I know about “The Lord of the Rings” (as well as literally all I know about “Frozen” and “Game of Thrones”) comes from its use in clues or entries in crosswords. But I don’t recall having seen this one, and so it really caused me problems.
• 13D: [B ___ (home robbery]: AND E – “Breaking and entering” in case it got past you.
• 16A: [Hammett’s “The ___ Curse”]: DAIN – This is probably one of the entries Barb was thinking of when she warned me, but even though I didn’t know it, it didn’t hold me up much. “Dain” has vaguely Scottish vibes (apparently it’s slang for “doing”), but at least in the book, it is a family name.
• 19A: [One-time bridge]: AT A – Hard to believe, but this was the last to fall and one of the toughest entries for me. It looks obvious now (“at a” is a “bridge” between “one” and “time” in the phrase “one at a time.”) but since I didn’t know either 6D or 7D, and was thinking of a physical bridge, it really hung me up.
• 27A: [Any human being]: ADAMITE – Another one Barb may have been warning me about, it is an infrequently used term for human being, meaning “one descended from Adam.”
• 35D: [Jewish Purim month]: ADAR – I really need to learn the Jewish calendar, since several of the months show up regularly in crosswords.
• 49D: [Rx filler: Abbr.]: PHAR – OK, um, no. Pharm., maybe.
• 57D: [Executive office: Abbr.]: STE – How many folks initially entered one of the “C-suite” 3-letter abbreviations (CEO, COO, CFO, etc.) in here? ✋ I should have forgotten the C and just abbreviated “suite.”
• 60A: [Passed along on Twitter, briefly]: RTED – I once retweeted Twitter X posts but not any more.

Quote of the week:
“January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory. […] Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.”
– Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt