"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.

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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.