Greetings a day late (again) from the wifi black hole of the Baltimore court house where I am on jury duty and apparently unable to connect to websites with a .ca ending. So this will get posted when I am sprung this afternoon or if I can grab a non-restricted wifi signal sometime today. Need to keep occupied while I wait for my juror number to be called (or not 🤞) so let’s get on with this week’s puzzle.

• Name: You’ll Eat Your Words
• Size: 15×15
• Entries: 76
• Difficulty: Very Easy (my solve time: 4:55)

The title is pretty spot on and helped me figure out the theme early on in the solve. The themers are two-word idiomatic phrases where the second word is a kind of food – i.e., a word you can eat:

• 17A: [Gobbledygook]: WORD SALAD – Let’s start with an appetizer. This is something I heard a lot between 2015 and 2021.
• 25A: [Extremely touchy subject]: HOT POTATO – Now a side dish. I assume the phrase came about from the game where you toss a (figurative, I hope) hot spud from person to person (who ever came up with that?). I remember a toy version with a plastic potato that had a timer and you didn’t want to be the person holding the potato when the timer went off.
• 36A: [Big flop, despite the hype]: NOTHING BURGER – The main course. While I remember first hearing this phrase in the late 90s/early 00s apparently its origin goes back to the 1950s.
• 51A; [“Awesome!”]: COOL BEANS – Another side dish, I’d think baked beans but if they’re cool, maybe three-bean salad? Used to express approval or delight, the origin of this phrase goes back to the 1970s though I think I first heard it used in the 1980s.
• 61A: [Just dessert for a regretful one]: HUMBLE PIE – Time for dessert. I hope folks are listening to but not eating humble pie after solving this puzzle.

A pretty smooth solve as evidenced by my 4th fastest time ever, even though there are some unusual entries and a few examples of Barb’s sly cluing in here. I pretty much solved from the top down, getting the themers pretty quickly (they whetted my appetite – now I’m starving) and not really hitting any snags.

Canadian content:

• 1A: [Provincial partner of Labrador: Abbr.]: NFLD – Was off to the races with this one. It took me a while to realize that the postal abbreviation NL was not just for Newfoundland but also for its provincial partner.
• 18D: [First Nation of southern B.C.]: SALISH – Another one I knew right off having lived in the area a few years ago (and visited many times since). I’ve taken the ferry to Vancouver Island many times through the Salish Sea.
• 34D: [RCMP rank above Cpl.]: SGT – A sergeant ranks above a corporal in most (maybe all?) services, but specifically in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
• 55A: Juno winning Young]: NEIL – Always love to see Canadian Neil Young show up in puzzles.

Other stuff:

• 5A: [Men’s neckwear brand]: OZIE – Never heard of this, though I now have to wear a tie frequently for my job (and I hate it).
• 7D: [Spud state]: IDAHO – Clever to have this intersecting with themer 25A.
• 19A: [Remove a beaver’s work]: UNDAM – Canadian content or not? 🤔
• 21A: [Angry cat’s back shape]: ARCH – When my cats do this we call them “Halloween kitties.” They’re usually not angry but just stretching.

Quote of the week:
“You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect yourself as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.”
– Kevin Mitnick