Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzle –ria! Happy New Year and Happy Puzzling! Here’s hoping your sprinkles, dashes and dollops of tangy, sage and piquant holiday seasoning linger well into this new year.
We resolve to
see you all again in 2015, on January 2.
For some
reason, this week’s puzzle slices seem to possess a somewhat romantic flavor, a
full six months-plus before St. Valentine’s Day. (Sic! That should be “six-weeks-plus”... see Word Woman’s December 26, 7:15 AM comment/correction below, in the Comments Section)
Hope you “love”
’em. Here they are:
Menu
Specialty Of The House Slice:
Ars (Font) Poetica
Take the first word of a well-known and beloved poem. Print it in all-lowercase letters, and in a font such as Ar Cena, pictured at the right, or Ar Darling, pictured below it. (Or, use a font such as Segoe Print, Century Gothic or Levernim.)
Rotate the word’s second letter 180-degrees clockwise and its first letter 45 degrees counterclockwise to create a shorthand form of a nine-letter word.
The shorter word is often misunderstood and controversial, but unjustifiably so because it is a perfectly legitimate form of the longer word. This nine-letter word (or its shorthand counterpart) is the subject of the beloved poem.
What are the two forms of the word and what is the poem?
Waiter, I Didn’t Order This Slice:
The Name Game
The following four names are in the wrong order:
Bobby, Malcolm, Rog and Mick 
Put them in the correct order and explain what they signify.
Reflexive Rotational Slice:
When the mirror ball drops…
Name something that is commonplace every December 31 at the midnight hour. Change the last two letters to their mirror reflections, replace their rounded corners and curves with acute angles and straight lines, and move these two new letters to the left of the others.
Replace each letter with the one that appears 13 places after it (or before it) in the alphabet (ROT13). The result is timely. What is it?
Spoon-fed Slice:
The Sweetheart of Sigma Chiasmus
It is January 31, 1879. Oxford University dean the Rev. William Archibald Spooner has just returned from a fortnight away from home as a visiting guest-lecturer (lecturing on “Christmas, Chiasmus and the Cross”) at the University of London. He is now back at his Oxford home spending a quiet romantic New Year’s Eve evening alone with his wife Frances, billing, cooing, spooning, canoodling and, at the stroke of midnight, kissing.
After their smooch, Frances coos to William:
“I’m happy having you near.”
William coos back a six-word response which adds the letters in the word “awe” to his wife’s five-word declaration, but also subtracts from it two vowels that do not appear in “awe.”
What was the Rev. Spooner’s response?
One-Hundred-Eighty-Degree Slice:
Sun, moon, stars… fireworks!
A lad and a gal in North or South America have a yen for one another. They kiss beneath the moon and stars.
On an island half a world away there is sun (not rising, already risen) and a lad and gal who have yen in their pockets and a yen for one another. A half-a-day before the American couple kissed, this couple also kissed beneath the moon and stars.
Take the three letters in “sun” and add one each to the words “lad,” “gal” and “yen.”
Now rearrange each group of letters to form three new four-letter words that form a song title. What is this song title?
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.)
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
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 friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! Thank you.
