Welcome to Week 3 of Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria!
Remember, T.G.I.F. (Think Good, It’s Friday!)
We remember also, on this most solemn of holiday weekends, to thank all those, living and deceased, who have served and sacrificed to make our world a more free, secure and better place. This includes, of course, those in the armed services. But here at Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! we also pause to remember and thank all those civilians (like our parents, teachers, friends, etc.) who have served and sacrificed to make our lives better.
We hope that this week’s trio of fresh Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! offerings proves to be memorable and will set your hearts aflame with puzzle passion… but will not give you heartburn.
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Memorial Day Weekend Slice“Memento Mori”
Explain what somewhat unusual property the following words share: Marine, hide, pal, flaky, wind, scar and the Latin word “mori.” Name another word with this property. Bonus points if you can name a seven-letter word with this property. Hint: “Memorial,” as in Memorial Day, just misses qualifying.
Sporty Slice (That’s Slice, not Spice!):“Tonight, Tonight, at the Palindrome!”
Professional sports has had scores of commissioners and other executives over the years. The last name of one of those professional pooh-bahs is the same as the last name of another spelled backward. Who are these execs?
Easy-As-Pizza-Pie Slice:“Frogs with Swords!”
“Gunfire and napalm overwhelm and bamboozle spineless and croaking swashbucklers.” What property do the non-conjunctive words in this sentence share?
Every Friday at Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! we publish a new menu of fresh word puzzles, number puzzles, logic puzzles, puzzles of all varieties and flavors. We cater to cravers of scrumptious puzzles!
Our master chef, Grecian gourmet puzzle-creator Lego Lambda, blends and bakes up mysterious (and sometimes questionable) toppings and spices (such as alphabet soup, Mobius bacon strips, diced snake eyes, cubed radishes, “hominym” grits, anagraham crackers, rhyme thyme and sage sprinklings.)
Please post your comments below. We feed you puzzles. You give us feedback! Feel free also to post clever and subtle hints that do not give the puzzle answers away. We may even post a few hints of our own as the week progresses.
Please wait until after 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays to post your answers and explain your hints about the puzzles. We plan to serve up at least one fresh puzzle every Friday.
We invite you to make it a habit to “Meet at Joe’s!” If you like our “mystic puzzleria” tell your friends about us. Thank you.
Not much cunning required for the Sporty Slice. The others will take me more time.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, good luck with Easy-As-Pizza-Pie Slice. I hope it becomes popular with the customers.
ReplyDeleteThanks David,
DeleteWithout U, Puzzleria! would be not as much fun!
Lego...
Thanks, Legolambda, for establishing this site. Please keep including ones that even an old dog would be able to solve so that those with occasional brain freeze (lilke me) can be successful. Will owes you a shout out and I hope many a man and woman go here for a slice of fun
DeleteRoRo, Thanks for the very kind words. It means a lot coming from you. Yes, I hope to continue offering a menu of puzzles with varying degrees of difficulty each Friday.
DeleteLegogo…
Would I get a demerit if I suggested Coca-Cola instead of beer with your Memorial Day Weekend Slice?
ReplyDeleteIgnore the above, there are more ingredients to the Memorial Day Weekend Slice than I first thought.
DeleteRe: Commisioners and frogs both from Mark Twain:
ReplyDelete"I was proud to observe that among our excursionists were three ministers of the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several military and naval chieftains with sounding titles, an ample crop of "Professors" of various kinds, and a gentleman who had "COMMISSIONER OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO EUROPE, ASIA, AND AFRICA" thundering after his name in one awful blast! I had carefully prepared myself to take rather a back seat in that ship because of the uncommonly select material that would alone be permitted to pass through the camel's eye of that committee on credentials; I had schooled myself to expect an imposing array of military and naval heroes and to have to set that back seat still further back in consequence of it maybe; but I state frankly that I was all unprepared for this crusher.
I fell under that titular avalanche a torn and blighted thing. I said that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I supposed he must -- but that to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary to send a dignitary of that tonnage across the ocean, it would be in better taste, and safer, to take him apart and cart him over in sections in several ships.
Ah, if I had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed old fossil the Smithsonian Institute, I would have felt so much relieved.
Old fossils indeed! I have the commissioners and am croaking over your frog puzzle, Lego.
(I wanted to add a bit of a treatise for your latter puzzle so the above is a bit of a whitewash ;-) )
DeleteThree planets align: Pooh-bah, bullfrog and fossil. An excellent literary tie-in you came up with there, WW. Leave it to Twain to trip this triptych off his tongue. He seemed to possess an amphibian fixation, which is helpful if one in a biology lab dissecting frogs. (BTW, my candidate for the most-mispronounced English word: dissect.)
DeleteKilljoys murder merry-reader makers like Mr. Clemens, and would whitewash his memorably earthy prose and keen observations on the human condition. See Chapter 2, here. (Incidentally, what in the blazes is a spool cannon?)
LegoFullBlog
'Twas that very Tom Sawyer chapter I had in mind, Lego, as I dissected your puzzle (but not your frog). I am phibious myself ;-).
DeleteSome topics can be danced around and others cannot, or so it would seem.
ReplyDeleteRamblin' dencing, Paul? One might use a map less for that though, I imagine . . .
DeleteBalderdash, Friggin' Balderdash!
ReplyDeleteTres amusant, Paul. I have fenced but I have never denced. I expect there is still time, O sage one.
DeletePaul and WW,
ReplyDeleteAfraid I’m feeling a trifle dense. But thanks to Paul‘s link, I now know “DENCING” is a blended word that names a sport combining Darts and fENCING. It would have been more memorable had they used the blended word combining Fencing and dARTS.
BTW, I hear that Harry Hyphen’s hairline is receding. He is now a balder dash.
David,
Given your Coca-Cola/beer comment, it is apparent you were getting very warm in your efforts to swallow the Memorial Day Weekend Slice. Remember, to enhance your Memorial Day BBQ cookout enjoyment: For pizzas and puzzles, very warm is good; for Coca-Cola, very warm is not-so-good.
LegoDarterDasher
I regret that I only have an answer to your Sporty Slice Palindrome. The other 2 were too difficult for me.
ReplyDeleteWARREN GILES & BUD SELIG.
I hope to do better next week. ☺
MDW slice: clue me in please, Lego Joe.
ReplyDeleteSporty Slice: GILES and SELIG
Easy As Pie Slice: All the words have types of trees in them, hence my "treatise" as well as reference to whitewASH, rambLIN DENcing, and MAP LESs.
David, I thought the POPuLAR clue and Lego's response to U were great.
And OSAGE ORANGE, favored wood of puzzles past.
Deleteron,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the links, and thanks for your feedback. It is very valuable to me.
Lego…
This week’s ANSWERS:
Memorial Day Weekend Slice
“Memento Mori”
Explain what somewhat unusual property the following words share: Marine, hide, pal, flaky, wind, scar and the Latin word “mori.” Name another word with this property. Bonus points if you can name a seven-letter word with this property. Hint: “Memorial,” as in Memorial Day, just misses qualifying.
Answer: Every consecutive pair of letters in each word is a U.S, State Postal Abbreviation. For example, MARINE is made up of MA, AR, RI, IN, and NE (Massachusetts, Arkansas, Rhode Island, Indiana and Nebraska). GALA, ARID and WINE are other words with this property, as is the seven-letter MALARIA.
Sporty Slice (That’s Slice, not Spice!):
“Tonight, Tonight, at the Palindrome!”
Professional sports has had scores of commissioners and other executives over the years. The last name of one of those professional pooh-bahs is the same as the last name of another spelled backward. Who are these execs?
Answer: Bud Selig, present Major League Baseball Commissioner; Warren Giles, former MLB National League president.
Easy-As-Pizza-Pie Slice:
“Frogs with Swords!”
“Gunfire and napalm overwhelm and bamboozle spineless and croaking swashbucklers.” What property do the non-conjunctive words in this sentence share?
Answer: Each word contains a type of tree: Fir, palm, elm, bamboo (which is actually a grass, not a tree, but I could not resist using “bamboozle”), pine, oak and ash.
Yes, the overlapping aspect of the state puzzle was terrific, Lego. Just like one's cat over lapping up some milk. ;-)
DeleteAs Ron said for the Sporty Slice, Selig/Giles, which is why I used cunning as a synonym for Guile in by comment.
ReplyDeleteFor the Easy-As-Pizza-Pie Slice, each word has an embedded tree name (e.g., gunFIRe), which is why my comment included POPuLAR, almost a tree.
The Memorial Day Weekend Slice contained linked postal code abbreviations, as in flaky being FL, LA, AK, KY (Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, Kentucky). I initially missed the linked part and thought they were just consecutive, hence my Coca-Cola comment. I never came up with a 6 state, 7 letter word. Also, it was unclear whether abbreviations for non-states (District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, etc) were allowed from Lego's examples.
David,
DeleteCongrats on the solve. It was tougher than I thought it would be. I need to get more savvy about what is, and what is not, a difficult puzzle.
You are correct about the non-state postal codes. Using them might have slightly increased this puzzle’s vocabulary, but would have made it more difficult to solve also. For example, my throwing a “vinca” or “viny” into the mix would be akin to throwing a wrench into the puzzle works (especially for those familiar with the state codes but not with the Virgin Islands’ code).
At first glance, the additional codes (DC, MH, FM, MP, PW, VI) would not yield that many additional words, although, who knows, this might be grist for a future puzzle!
Lego…
PR and AS (and maybe GU) could add some decent words, like "pride" and "Pascal", if proper nouns are allowed (and "gut"). I agree that would make the puzzle harder because the non-state codes are not as well known.
Delete1) I thought of postal abbreviations, but never thought about them overlapping. Brilliant puzzlecrafting, lego!
ReplyDelete2) I was all prepared to declare, today, that I spent entirely too much time trying to find a sportpersonage names Giles. Clearly, I didn't spend enough.
3) .333 isn't such a bad average, is it? "Danced around" contains cedar, and I've heard that some people dance around oaks and "maypoles". I wood knot consider doing such a thing.
Once upon a time, Odin and Frigg's boy, Balder, was having some very scary dreams pertaining to his mortality. In an effort to comfort the lad, Frigg circulated a petition amongst everyone and everything calling for a moratorium on injury to Balder (I might have suggested he stop eating pizza right before bedtime and/or stay away from the hot turkey sandwiches, but what do I know?). Everybody signs (almost!!!,) and, the crisis being past, all begin to disport themselves in the newfound game of ... I dunno ... "dunk the unsinkable" seems eerily appropriate. Enter Loki (low-key, of course). Chaos ensues.
Dashing, disporting even, to the Finnish Line, Paul...just not sure where that is or where to sign.
ReplyDeleteStill time for a May Pole event until Saturday.
Don't mean to cause distress, but aren't we about 4 weeks late for May Day?
DeleteI May pole all month long, jan.
DeleteWord Woman, et al.,
ReplyDeleteYou are all too young to remember this TV commercial, and I almost am. But dancing
’round the May pole conjured Maypo from the recesses of my brain.
Thanks, David. I overlooked PR, AS and GU. “Pascal” is great! In my book, proper nouns would be quite proper for this puzzle. Heck, I used “mori!”
Thank you, Paul.
Nothing at all wrong with .333. It’s .133 above the Mendoza Puzzle Line threshold (which is closer to my puzzle-solving and hint-grasping average. I totally whiffed on your “danCED ARound” pitch, for instance.)
Love you’re Balder-faced Norse mini-myth. Sounds like a case of the Christmas kiss of death. A shame Loki’s aim was Elvis-like true. A shame Hod did not miss with his missile-throw. A shame Balder did not Dodge Dart, or at least foil it with an epee.
LokiLambda
Some of us are not too young (nor too old; memory being another of those things that one acquires and then loses) to remember the Maypo ad, by renowned animator, John Hubley, husband of renowned animator, Faith Hubley, father of renowned animator, Emily Hubley (wife of a good friend of mine). The voice of Marky Maypo was Mark Hubley, John's son. Daughter Georgia is 1/3 of Yo La Tengo. Being without artistic talent, I'm always in awe of families like that.
Deletejan,
DeleteGreat group. Small world.
“Yo La Tengo!” yelled Jose Canseco right before the fly ball beaned him. (The highlight that never gets old.)
LaTengoLambda
That's cool to know, jan. Do they still eat Maypo? (Do they still make Maypo?)
DeleteHighlights keep us young, Lego (to go with the theme) ;-). Btw, highlight from PEOTS this week: Trilobites, Pixels, Surgery, and Smart Phones
Looks like they still make Maypo. I also found some interesting info about Marky Maypo. Who knew that's where "I want my MTV" came from?
DeleteHuh, I never knew. Was Marky the ultimate Maypo' boy?
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe abecedarian appeared to grapple over the steak and a gunfight ensued.
ReplyDeleteAbecedarian is a great word, ron. Now I'll always see cedar in it. A Tree Grows in Abecedarian: a great John McPhee word from Annals of the Former World.
DeleteThat should read "abecedarians." (plural)
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
Deleteron,
DeleteAgain, a Puzzleria! patron is making a habit of topping the “Easy as Pizza Pie” puzzle slice that I, master puzzle chef Lego Lambda, have served up! And, believe me, I know a thing or two about toppings.
I arbor no resentment toward you, ron, although I do feel like a sap.
Seriously, ron, nice riffing. I especially appreciated that you retained the bellicose tenor and dark, shady co(r)pselike quality of my swashbuckling slice. (BTW, I believe that “abecedarian” is on my top-50 list of favorite words.)
Log O’Limbda
For a piggyback on the postal code puzzle (non-state codes allowed), what phrase might an opera singer say is a career highlight? Overlapping occurs both within and between words. Ignore punctuation.
ReplyDeleteDavid,
DeleteThanks for posting this bonus “Canadian-bacon-back” puzzle. My best answer so far consists solely of a common noun and a proper noun that includes and article. I would like to connect this somehow to a five-letter common noun that would seem fitting, but I cannot figure out how.
Lego…
David,
DeleteOK. Is this my final answer? Yes, Regis (… or Meredith, or whoever).
But I won’t just blurt my answer out because I hope others are also still working on your puzzle. My solution is entirely in Italian (and Italian is Greek to me!) It starts with a possessive proper noun (with article), then an adjective and noun. It totals 16 letters. I had a choice between two adjectives and went with the one with an “a” instead of the one with an “o”. My answer does not include the “five-letter common noun that would seem fitting” that I mentioned above.
Thanks again for this bonus puzzle, David.
Lego…
I think your first solution is what I was thinking of, total of 11 letters. I could not figure out how to add a name to my answer.
DeleteAgreed, David. Maria Callas probably comes the closest were it not for the AC between her names and the HeLLish double-L in her surname.
DeleteLegarotti
If only she were Kalas.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI’m watching the Scripps Howard Spelling Bee on ESPN. Television does not get any better than this.
ReplyDeleteDavid, just tying up the loose ends on your puzzle: I pretty much just flung Italian words against the wall to see what would stick. My answer is… tortured:
“La Scala’s cari aria” which translates (I guess) to something like “Milan Opera House’s beloved solo performance.”
See you all tomorrow!
LegO sole mio
The alternative adjective to “cari” is “cori” which means “chorus” or “choir.” The English noun I fecklessly tried to shoehorn into an answer was “pride.”
DeleteMine was simply, "Aria, La Scala". On to next week...
Delete