Esslessness; Soup and Salad Included; Serveat Emptor

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzle –ria! It’s Friday. Time again to “meet at Joe’s” to chew the puzzles and the fat.

Hey, wait just a second… Friday. Joe’s… Joe. Friday. Joe Friday! As in Sgt. Joe Friday of TV’s “Dragnet” fame. And, he was part of an answer to the following puzzle originally posted on our June 6 Puzzleria! 

Specialty Of The House Slice:

Proper Nouns in Common
The following proper nouns share something in common:
Billy, Jeff, Joe, Rick, Ruby…
What do they share? Can you find other proper nouns that also share it?

But Sgt. Joe Friday on “Dragnet,” created and portrayed by actor Jack Webb, also has a bit of wise advice for… me. (No, I didn’t take his advice on smoking cigarettes, and neither should you!) Friday is famous for saying, “Just the facts, Ma’am,” although he never actually said exactly those words on “Dragnet.” 

But it is the title of Webb’s authorized biography, and the phrase does epitomize his character Joe Friday’s no-nonsense approach to police work.

And it is good advice those of us who tend to ramble on a bit. Lately I have sensed this blog becoming a little wordy, linky and photo-ey. Phooey! Let’s just say, in light of the forthcoming holiday weekend, that Puzzleria! has recently tended to come across as somewhat... labored. We need to inject some Joe Friday terseness into our Friday meetings at Joe’s. So, from one Joe to another, “Thanks, Joe. Here’s to a more no-nonsense approach to puzzle work.

There’s just one more thing that’s bothering me, one other loose end to tie up first (Now I sound like that other great TV character and Los Angeles detective, Lt. Columbo, portrayed by Peter Falk.) 

Last Friday evening I posted this quick bonus puzzle slice in the comments section:
Take a name used in (last) week’s blog. Remove the space. Change one of the letters and move it elsewhere to create a breed of dog.
(Names used in last week’s blog were: Joseph Young, Will Shortz, Sam Loyd, Bill Lloyd, Ogden Nash, William Tell, Lego Lambda, and automotive wizards Tom Magliozzi and Ray Magliozzi.)

Unless someone beats me to it, I will post the answer later in this week’s comments section.

Now, Joe, on with this week’s show:

Menu

Easy As Pie Slice

Esslessness

The title of an American 20^th century work of fiction contains four words, two of them plural nouns, but no esses. What is the title?

Lighter Menu Slice

Soup And Salad Included

Take the title of a theatrical production. Bisect it and replace one letter from each half with the same consonant, thereby producing two new words: something you might put into a soup and a variety of something you might put into a salad. What are this title and the two words?

Better Business Bureau Slice

Serveat Emptor

Name a customer service many stores perform, in two words, with the second one plural. Remove a letter. The result sounds like a brand-name product you might buy at a store. What are the customer service and the product?

 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. Feel free also to post clever and subtle hints that do not give the puzzle answers away. 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 enjoy our weekly puzzle party, please tell your puzzle-loving and challenge-welcoming friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! Thank you.

William Tell Ov-orchard Archered; Gold 'N' Silver; Diamonds & Rubies

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzle –ria! We’re serving up three cheesily chewy puzzle slices this week. Here’s hoping they’ll provide you with just the right measure of intellectual challenge and solvific resistance.

You will notice that our preamble this week is loaded with Loyd (illustrations). That’s because this week’s National Public Radio Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle offered by Dr. Will Shortz was the following Sam Loyd chestnut:

 

“You have a target with six rings, bearing the numbers 16, 17, 23, 24, 39, and 40. How can you score exactly 100 points, by shooting at the target?”

Commentors over at the Blainesville and An Englishman Solves American Puzzles blog sites deemed this to be a not-so-challenging challenge. Blainesville commentor Enya_and_Weird_Al_fan said the answer to the puzzle is unique, and commentor PlannedChaos said that, had the target been 93 instead of 100, that answer also would have been unique. (Enya_and_Weird_Al_fan, yesterday on Blaine’s blog, proved these uniquenesses via the “modulo method.”)

Our first puzzle this week was inspired by that Sam Loyd NPR puzzle, as well as by a National Public Radio “Car Talk” puzzler from a year or so ago. We hope ours is a somewhat-more-challenging challenge than Mr. Loyd’s target puzzle. We are dubbing it our “Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants” Slice (SOTSOGS), with the giants being Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi, Will Shortz, Sam Loyd and Bill Lloyd (no relation). Broad shoulders indeed!

With apologies to Ogden Nash:

The one-L Loyd’s a puzzle springer.

The two-L Lloyd’s a pop tune singer.

But I’ll bet a pink trapezoid

There isn’t any three-L Llloyd

(Pop tunesmith BiLL LLoyd is a four-L …ll Lloyd, however, when you consider his full name, and ignore the space.)

There is a “thread” connecting the three slices this week: one to two, and two to three. If you don’t like threads in your slices you can return them for a refund, no questions asked! But, if you don’t mind threads in your slices, and if you solve one of the puzzles, especially the second, CharacterMystic Slice, it might very well assist you in solving the other two.

But, time Will Tell. To help you keep on target, here is a bit of music-to-solve-puzzles-by. Or, you can just cut right to the chase. Or, you can opt for something completely different…

In any event, take aim at these slices:

 Menu

 

Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants Slice:

William Tell Ov-orchard archered

Your mission is to construct a target with X rings, each bearing a number.

During a shooting session, you must be able to shoot an arrow, or arrows, at the target to achieve any score from 1 to 100, but you are not allowed to shoot more than one arrow in a ring during a session. In other words, the maximum number of arrows you can shoot during a session is X.

What is the minimum number of rings needed on your target (that is, the minimum value of X), and what are the values of the numbers in the rings so that their sum is as small as possible?

CharacterMystic Slice:

Gold ‘N’ Silver

Take the name a female fictional character in two words. Add an N to the letters of her name. From this pool of twelve letters form a four-letter word. Again, from the original twelve-letter pool form a six-letter word, using one of the letters twice. Those two words form the nickname of a male fictional character. Insert an N within the name of the female’s companion to form the name of the male’s companion.

Who are these characters and companions?

Specialty Of The House Slice:

Diamonds & Rubies

Think of a five-letter proper noun that can be a first, middle or last name. One person with this name acted in a 1993 comedic movie and shared writing credits in a 1972 romantic-comedic movie. A second person film-edited a 1950 zany slapstick short movie about private eyes. A third acted in a quite popular TV sit-com. A fourth is a British composer who wrote a Seventeenth Century tenor solo.

A fifth is an author whose final resting place since the 1870s has been a cemetery with a name more associated with another author who was this fifth person’s contemporary. A sixth person, with a nickname of the five-letter proper noun, was a U.S. country singer. He was portrayed in a play and movie -- and had his songs covered/recorded -- by a Canadian country singer.

These three movies, sit-com, tenor solo, cemetery and Canadian singer have no formal connection with the Walt Disney Company, but their titles/names all do have a loose connection to Disney.

What is this loose Disney connection, and what is the five-letter proper noun?

(Hint: the sit-com actor’s name and a word in the sit-com title both begin with the same letter and end with the same letter.)

 

Sam Loyd (left)

Will Shortz (right)

Separated at Birth?

You decide!

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. Feel free also to post clever and subtle hints that do not give the puzzle answers away. 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 enjoy our weekly puzzle party, please tell your puzzle-loving and challenge-welcoming friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! Thank you.

Cellar of the Fatefully Discarded 

(Photo Gallery)

Boris Badenovs; "Poets" of Speech

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzle –ria! Mea maxima culpa for my tardiness this week. I had some computer/Internet challenges to overcome. But that is like a “My dog ate my homework” excuse.

Tardiness, as all good Puzzlerians! are aware, is smiled upon only in impolite society.

The answer to this past Sunday’s National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition puzzle offered by Dr. Will Shortz hit kind of close to home here at Joseph Young’s Puzzle –ria!

Will's puzzle read: “Name a well-known movie of the past — two words, seven letters in total. These seven letters can be rearranged to spell the name of an animal plus the sound it makes. What animal is it?”

The name of the animal and the sound it makes echo the surname of our Grecian puzzle slice chef Lego Lambda.

But so much for Weekend Edition Shortz. Because of my self-inflicted short week here at Puzzleria!, I am posting only two fresh slices this go-round. I hope they have not already appeared on NPR. On August 14, in the Puzzleria! comments section, jan, a faithful Puzzlerian! and all-around good guy, posted the following in regards to last week’s Sporty Easy As Pie Slice:

BTW, did you know that Will Shortz used that “San Marino”/ “Dan Marino” puzzle many years ago (before they had a website)?

That disappointed me, of course, but didn’t really surprise me. I know that I have created all my puzzles, originally and sans plagiarism. But I am not arrogant enough (and I can be pretty arrogant at times) to think that I am the only one who ever noticed, for example, that San Marino and Dan Marino differ by just one letter and, as a result, decided to make a puzzle out of it.

This realization hit me like a ton of brickbats three years ago. In January of 2011, I created the following puzzle:

“Think of a two-word phrase meaning to bother incessantly or to erode. Move the last two letters of the phrase to the beginning of the phrase and again divide the result into two words to produce the past tense of the same phrase. What are the phrases?”

One of the phrases was an entry in a New York Times crossword puzzle I had been solving. I had noticed the interesting anagrammatic quality of the phrase and its past tense and composed the puzzle above.

About seven months later, on the August 11, 2011 Weekend Edition Sunday broadcast, Will Shortz challenged us with essentially the same puzzle, (probably with more elegant wording). I had not sent my puzzle in to Will for consideration. Perhaps Will composed it himself after noticing the same thing I did in the Times crossword puzzle he had edited.

Many of the photos I have posted this week are sights of the Boston area, where I attended a wedding (not mine, but a wonderful young couple’s) last weekend. Beautiful city, friendly people. I did not take these photos, but copied them from the Internet.

Here are this week’s slices:

 Menu

Easy As Pie Slice:

Boris Badenovs

Take four consecutive letters of the alphabet. Between two of them place an A and a C. The result is a bad thing bad guys sometimes do.

Now take seven consecutive letters of the alphabet, but in reverse order. Remove three consecutive letters and put a single A in their place. The result is something that some people claim motivates some misguided bad guys to do what they do.

What are this bad thing and the alleged motivator?  

Literary Slice:

“Poets” of speech

Remove a common conjunction that appears in a renowned poet’s last name and replace it with a common article to form the middle name of another renowned poet. The poets are contemporaries. Name them. (Yes, they are a dead poets’ society of two. R.I.P., Robin Williams.)

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. Feel free also to post clever and subtle hints that do not give the puzzle answers away. 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 enjoy our weekly puzzle party, please tell your puzzle-loving and challenge-welcoming friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! Thank you.

Enos Slaughter; Fibo-not!-cci Series; Fishy Conduct

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzle –ria! Everything we say on this blog site is false. Any truth we might actually print is about as stretchy as the melty mozzarella atop our puzzle slices.

The second sentence in the above paragraph is an example of a verbal paradox. Sprinkled like peppercorns across this week’s post are examples of graphic paradoxes by Dutch painter Maurice Escher and various artists who practice the trompe l’oeil art of illusion.

I figure you just have to stand your ground when it comes to “not knowing art but knowing what you like.” But sometimes you just can’t trust your lyin’ eyes (a song I savored about the first two or three times I heard it, but thereafter couldn’t stomach!).

And when the Perjurious family patronizes Joseph Young’s Puzzle –ria!, as they did yesterday, you just can’t trust your lyin’ ears either. While some artists practice the trompe l’oeil art of illusion, a certain member of the Perjurious clan practices the trompe l’oreille art of delusion.

Pascal and Penelope Perjurious teach quantum physics and rocket surgery, respectively, at our local equivocational school, Hogwasham Technical College. (The Havisham Liberal Arts College is up the road a spell.) Anyway, the Perjuriouses are rearing their daughter, Prevarica, to be a holy terror, and a wholly terrible liar.

In truth, Prevarica’s parents are rearing her to be a wholly excellent, first-class liar! The proof of this truth lies in this week’s Con-number-umm Slice, below. Take it, along with the other slices this week, with a grain of salt... and perhaps a sprinkling of peppercorns: 

Menu

Sporty Easy As Pie Slice:

Enos Slaughter

Take the name of a country and replace one of the letters with a different letter to form the name of a professional athlete who is enshrined in his sport’s hall of fame. What is this country? Who is this athlete?

Con-number-umm Slice:

Fibo-Not!-cci Series

Pigtailed, mathematically precocious Prevarica Perjurious is fabulously familiar with the Fibonacci Series (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21,…, in which every number -- except the first two -- is the sum of the two numbers immediately preceding it). At school one day, Prevarica tells her less-than-precocious classmates, “Here is the famous Fibonacci Series: 1, 3, 4, 7, 12, 14, 15, 17… Can you tell me the next number?”

Fib? Oh, not she! But, as all perceptive Puzzlerians! are aware, Prevarica did of course fib. That series is no Fibonacci Series. But it is indeed a series, and has a next number. Can you tell Prevarica what that number is? 

Specialty Of The House Slice:

Fishy Conduct

 Name a kind of fish, in the plural. Move the first letter to the end of the word. At the beginning of the word replace that original first letter with the next letter in the alphabet. The result is something frowned upon in polite society. What are these words?

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. Feel free also to post clever and subtle hints that do not give the puzzle answers away. 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 enjoy our weekly puzzle party, please tell your puzzle-loving and challenge-welcoming friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! Thank you.