Buds & bauds; Autograph abridged; Middleton's tons o' middle names

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 2⁷ SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria, the “Marchruary” edition. 

No “colorful image-matching-and-captioning” puzzle slices this week, we promise. But we have cooked up a pretty plenty appetizing trio of puzzle slices for you as we bid farewell to February (“I’m bid 25 day bidder now 26 now 26 done 27 now 27, now 27 day bidder done, 28 days there, thank you, now 29, now 29, now 29 now 29 day bidder... Sold right there for 28 days! Must not be a leap year, dad gum it!”)

As usual, enjoy nibbling and noshing on these slices but please do not divulge your answers for about four days, at three o’clock Post Meridian Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, March the Third.

As you may be aware, “Tuesday March the Third” became the name of Tuesday Weld after she wed Frederick March III... What’s that? Mr. March was not a III? He was not even a Junior? And there is no record of his ever tying the knot with Ms. Weld? Okay, then, we guess we might be wrong about Mr. March being a “the Third,” and about Tuesday being a March. But we are certain of one thing: that we wish it were true.

We also wish you well during your march through this week’s menu:

Menu

Easy As Pie Slice:

Buds & bauds

Give a curtailed name for a ubiquitous modern mobile electronic device. Spell it backward and split it in two to form a synonym for “bud buddy.”

What are this device and synonym?

Easy As Poetry Slice:

Autograph abridged

Take the letters a certain poet/author might have used to sign an autograph if at a book signing and in a hurry, or if the signing session was experiencing particularly long lines of fawning fans. 

Remove any spaces and relocate the second letter to form a type of poem this poet might have penned.

Who is the poet? What is the type of poem?

Name Chain Slice:

Middleton’s tons o’ middle names

Tommy Hicks is a former light heavyweight boxer and native of Lockport, New York. We are not sure what his middle name is. (We can’t find it online, anyway). Perhaps he has more than one middle name, like “Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland” has.

If that is the case, the boxer Tommy Hicks’s full name might be something like, say, Tommy John Salley Struthers Martin Lawrence Taylor Hicks. If this were the case, each consecutive pair of names would form the first-name/surname of a reasonably famous person. (One criterion for “reasonably famous” might be “she/he has a Wikipedia page.”) The first-name/surname double-links in this “Tommy … Hicks” chain are a pitcher, a power forward, an actress and actor, a comedian, a linebacker and a singer:

Tommy John

John Salley

Sally Struthers

Strother Martin

Martin Lawrence

Lawrence Taylor

Taylor Hicks

(Notice that our “make-’em-up-as-we-go-along rules” for this puzzle do allow for homophones and/or for the addition or subtraction of an “s” at the end of a name. For example, Salley = Sally and Struthers = Strother are permitted, as would be William = Williams, Peter = Peters, etc.  Also, the names of fictional characters are allowed,)

So, “Tommy John Salley Struthers Martin Lawrence Taylor Hicks” has six middle names and seven first name/surname pairs within a “name-chain” of eight links (6-7-8).

In the real world, the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, has one middle name, Elizabeth, and a name-chain of three links. In the “Puzzlereal!” world, however, she has a dozen middle names and a name chain of fourteen links (12-13-14)! Among the somewhat obscure first-name/surname double-links in her name-chain are: a young actor, a two-time Super Bowl-winning Green Bay Packer receiver, a rock group front man, a Renaissance playwright/poet, a tool inventor, and a model.

Other challenges:

Jonathan Swift; (7 middle names; 8 first name/surname pairs; 9-links) (7-8-9); Among the somewhat obscure names: a college basketball coach, a novelist, a theologian, and a New Deal projects director  

Molly Bundy (11-12-13); Obscure: an English actor/movie producer, a National Public Radio regular, a Twentieth Century English playwright
(This chain begins with four actresses, then two actors.) 

Peter Pickett (10-11-12); Obscure: an ambassador, a Packer kicker, a drummer whose last name rhymes with the group he drummed for, a midwestern governor, a deadpan comedian

Billy Dole (4-5-6); Obscure: an actor on a classic sit-com, a country singer

Name the links in the five name-chains above.

Extra-credit challenge: Create a chain with its ends linked.

Our best effort to create such an endless chain includes the name of a pioneer in civil rights and sports who died just yesterday, February 26. Our chain has six links and six first-name/surname pairs:
Earl Lloyd
Lloyd Thomas
Thomas Edison (’nuff said)
Edison James
James George
George Earl ...

Every Friday at Joe’s Puzzleria! 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 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” please tell your friends about us. Thank you.

Caption (not-quite-so) Obvious; Yankee Noodle; Night Vision Vocation; Municipal Mystery Tour

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 5³ SERVED

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.







Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! for the week of February 20-26. 

Baby, it may be cold outside in your neck of the woods, so stop on in and thaw out your icy brain cells with multiple helpings of melt-in-your-gray-matter fresh puzzle slices. 

If it is not so cold outside, baby, in your neck of the beach, then just let the slices sit for a while after we serve them up, or box them up and take them home to enjoy. Cold puzzle slices rival cold Thanksgiving turkey slices for postprandial snacking. Yum!

We begin this week’s festivities with a bonus puzzle created by our free-fallin’ friend, gourmet French Puzzle Chef Monsieur Garcon du Parachutisme, also known as “skydiveboy” on the blogosphere.

This particular puzzle slice from our puzzle-meistering monsieur has a decidedly cosmopolitan flavor. Enjoy! 

Bonus Geography Slice:

Municipal Mystery Tour

Name a major world city. Rearrange its letters to form another major world city. 

Both cities are in the same country. 

What are these cities that are also anagrams of each other?


That scrumptious morsel ought to whet your mental appetite. Here are s’more of ’em:

MENU

Easy As Pie Slice:

Night Vision Vocation

Name a job “on the periphery of the entertainment industry” in which good night vision might be an asset. 

Add a letter to the beginning of this job to spell a word indicating what a person performing this job might have to become to deal with a particular problem. Add a different letter to the beginning of this new word to spell a word indicating what a person performing this job might have to become if the problem persists.

What are this job and the two words?

Call It Macaroni Slice:

Yankee Noodle

 “True patriots love having a ____ in the state.”

“True vegetarians loathe having a _____ on the plate.”

Fill in each of these blanks with words that are homophones and anagrams of each other. The final five words of each completed sentence will now describe hyphenated words that are spelled identically except for the final letter of each.

What are these two homophones and two hyphenated words?

Hint: The final letters of the hyphenated words are adjacent in the alphabet. The homophones and hyphenated words all have the same number of letters.

Seeing Double Slice:

Caption (not-quite-so) Obvious*

(*Not to be confused with “Captcha not-quite-so Obvious.”)

This puzzle poses, for your solving pleasure, “the case of the missing captions.” Pictured below are a dozen images. (For the purposes of this puzzle, regard the two calendar pages as a single image. Likewise, regard the two metallic representations of the eleventh letter of the alphabet as just one image.)

Each of these twelve images has a caption. But all twelve captions, alas, have “gone missing.” It is imperative, however, that those captions be found for they provide the key to unlocking how the dozen images should be paired up into a half-dozen “double-vision” twosomes.

List the six pairings of images, along with the captions of all twelve images.

(For your solving convenience, we have identified each image with a numeral from 1 to 12.)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

 12.












Every Friday at Joe’s Puzzleria! 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 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” please tell your friends about us. Thank you.

"Romathemantics!!"; Compound anatomy; "When come da Judge?" Linkin' logos; Romantic chemistry; Dehyphenated espressions

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 5³ SERVED

Welcome “Young lovers” (and puzzle-lovers of all ages) to this Saint Valentine’s Day edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! 


What’s that? You say Saint Valentine’s Day does not arrive until tomorrow, February 14? And that today is Friday, February 13, also known as Friday the Thirteenth? And, unluckier yet, that you are afflicted with triskaidekaphobia?

Well, we here at Puzzleria! suffer not from triskaidekaphobia. (Actually, we do confess to suffering a bit, however, from
“NeilSedakaphobia,” but have been able to control it with medication and by avoiding this or that. To be absolutely honest, though,  “that” was the first piece of 45-rpm vinyl we purchased, at age 11. So, our initial diagnosis was one instead of NeilSedakaphilia!)

Indeed, we Puzzlerians! revel in our triskaidekamania! As puzzle-slice preparers, all numbers are interesting and important to us. (When preparing puzzle-slice menus, we follow our recipes to the letter... or number, as it were.) And, the number 13 is no exception. Indeed, one might call us triskaidekaphiles.

And, like most of you, we are also Valentineophiles. That explains why we have baked lovin’ teaspoonfuls of love into this week’s six fresh puzzle slices... (except for the Box Office Bustblocker Slice, Dehyphenated espressions, which we rushed to upload this week because it is just the type of puzzle Will Shortz might spring on his NPR listeners any Sunday now.)

Please enjoy our heartfelt puzzles... and perhaps share them with the ones you love.

MENU

Crossword Style Slice:

Linkin’ logos

Link the answers of each set of crossword-style clues together  to form four words:

Set 1:

1. State of 8 “POTI”

2. Tragic Bias (not the Who song)

3. All but the final two letters of a tone-deaf person’s stumbling block

Set 2:

1. Word in a “mortal coil” synonym

2. Home of Phil, Rom and Rev

3. Ego

4. State of 5 Fts.

Set 3:

1. Santana song title word

2. A month-plus of Lean Non-Sundays

3. Word defining box or crowd

4. A mathematician might write a “lying heart” to the right of this number (See this week’s Doggerel Slice.)

Set 4:

1. “Smoking” a smokeless cigarette, minus the first half of a synonym for table tennis

2. Starting QB in two Super Bowls (first name)

3. Path taken at a fork in the road?

What words did you form from the verbal chains you linked together in each set? 

Poesy                                  Slice:

“Romathe                           mantics!!”

 Can two be one?               Yes,  that can be.

As long as you’ve        got less than three To

 palpitate in unison And swoon and moon and 

spoon as one, Then less can be much more 

than three, Unlimited, raised through

esprit De coeur to levels hitherto

Delimited to one or two.

Love’s upper bound? 

Infinity. And all 

you need is 

less than

 three

.

Easter Sunday may be 51 days away,  but we are already in an “egg planting” mood on this February 13, the eve of the feast of Saint Valentine. (“Saint” is a word, by the way, while “St.” is an abbreviation!) Why, it is not even yet Mardi Foi Gras, Mercredi des Cendres, or the feasts of Saint Joseph (March 19) and that other guy (March 17)!


And so, in typical Easter Bunny  and “one-twenty-fifth-of-fifty shades of red” fashion, we have planted not one but two somewhat differently colored “eggmoticons” within the above-hovering heart-shaped “South-Lawn-of-the-White-House” of a verse. But watch out for those darn drones and fanatical fence-hopping intruders bearing guns or knives! And remember, with two you get egg roll.

Can you find this pair of eggmoticons hidden within the above cordiform verse and “unroll” their meaning?

Holiday Slice:

Compound anatomy

Name a fictional character from children’s literature. Reverse the order of two adjacent letters and add a letter, forming a compound word. That word describes a three-letter word beginning with the same letter you added. It also describes a homonym of that three-letter word. (Homonyms are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. For example, “That Rocky Balboa sure is a brutal pugilist but I don’t think his girlfriend Adrienne could box her way out of a thin-cardboard box!”)

One of those homonyms might have once been the home of a friend of the fictional character. Letters in the name of that friend can be rearranged to form two body parts.

Spell the compound word backward, resulting in the name of a figure associated with a February holiday, followed by a body part. Remove the body part and replace the name of the figure with another name by which the figure is known. Form still another body part by adding to the figure’s name the same letter you added earlier to the fictional character’s name. A synonym of this body part is a compound word composed of two body parts, one which is the body part you removed earlier from the backward-spelled compound word.

What are the fictional character; the fictional character’s friend and the two body parts formed from the friend’s rearranged name; the compound word and the homonyms it describes; the name of the holiday figure; the removed body part; the other name the holiday figure is known by; the other body part; the compound-word synonym of that body part; and, finally, the two body parts that synonym is made up of?

(When you have completed solving your puzzle, please return your #2-lead pencils to the proctor and place your completed blue books face-down on my desk, next to the polished apple.) 

Friendly advice hint: There sure are lots of toppings on this puzzle slice! If I had to solve it (and I am sooo grateful I do not have to), I would start by figuring out either the identity of “the figure associated with a February holiday” or by what other name the figure is known, and work backward and forward from that.

Box Office Bustblocker Slice:

Dehyphenated espressions

Take the hyphenated word in the name of a film and television production company formed by an actor in the 1990s. Replace the hyphen with two Roman numeral letters and rearrange the result to form a new word. Form another new word by replacing the last letter of the last name of the actor with the letter preceding it in the alphabet.

The result is the two-word title of a popular and profitable movie (in which neither the actor nor the actor’s production company were involved). 

Name the movie and the actor.

Science Slice:

Romantic Chemistry

 Take a term from chemistry that means the capacity of an element’s atom, expressed as an integer, to combine with an atom of another element to form a molecule. [An example of this term is when two atoms of hydrogen (each with a “combining capacity” of 1) combine with one atom of oxygen (with a combining capacity of -2) to form a molecule of water.]

Remove from this chemical term the symbol for the element with an atomic number of 6, and replace it with an element that has a combining capacity of either 2 or 4. The result is a word that symbolizes chemistry of a romantic nature.

What is that word, the element you added and the term that means “combining capacity” on the molecular level?

Church History Slice:

“When come da judge?”

During a year in the middle of the sixth decade of the First Century, Saint Paul was in the midst of visiting and corresponding with Christian churches in Rome, Galatia, Thessalonica, Corinth and other communities.

One topic this “apostle formerly known as Saul” strove to clarify was the question of the final Judgment Day (as had been prophesied in Hebrew Scriptures) which was now reinterpreted by the early Christian community as what they believed would be the impending “second coming” of Christ. (See 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 and 5:1-11.)

Write this First Century year as a Roman citizen would have written it in the second half of the First Millennium. To the right of that write a synonym the modern church often uses for Judgment Day or the eschaton. Remove all spaces and punctuation, leaving a string of letters. 

A consonant occurs twice in the string. Remove them both. Move the letter on the far left end of the string to the third position in the string. Change a Roman numeral letter in the string to the letter following it in the alphabet.

The result is the name of at least three saints. (Well, martyrs formerly known as saints, anyway. If they were planets they’d be in the same boat as Pluto.) What are the former saints’ name, the year the Roman would write and the modern synonym for Judgment Day?  

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 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.