Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! Time
is Marching onward (see the “Chron-illogical Slice” below).
This particular puzzle slice and
its illustrations may induce in you a sensation of déjà vu, as we ran a puzzle
similar to it last November. (Actually, we prefer using the term “dévujà”
because it sounds more French to us and is more fun to say.)
Speaking of “fun” and having something “to
say,” we cannot plug enough some of the other excellent blogs that we bookmake
and make our favorites. There are three in particular that we visit and post
comments on regularly:
Partial Ellipsis Of The Sun (PEOTS):
Scientific, terrific, magnific, courtesy of the prolific Word Woman. The world
of science and the world of words clashing delightfully.
Blainesville: A very popular forum for
puzzle-lovers, especially devotees of Will Shortz’s Weekend Edition Sunday
puzzles on National Public radio. (Check out commenter ron’s insightful
comments in Blaine’s Comments Section this past week about “Ten things that
will disappear in our lifetime,” and commenter jan’s addition of an eleventh
thing to the list.)
An Englishman Solves American Puzzles
(AESAP): Ross and Magdalen Beresford’s savvy take on puzzles, especially Will Shortz’s
weekly offering. AESAP followers are invited to predict roughly how many
correct puzzle entries NPR will receive each week. (We’ve never even come
close!) And Magdalen posts gorgeous photos tied to various themes.
We hope you Puzzlerians! will come more
than close to solving this week’s menu of puzzle slices:
MENU
Chronillogical Slice:
Six
Clocks Redux Deluxe Dévujà
Write down the following six times:
1:00, 1:05, 4:08, 4:14, 7:09 and 7:18. These times on a clock are
especially timely for most Europeans and North Americans during this season of the
year. Explain why.
Hint: Although this month of March begins with an M and this current MMillennium begins with two M’s, the solution to this puzzle does not involve any M (or Auntie Em!) whatsoever.
The six clock-face illustrations are merely a guide for visualizing the times listed. Consider only the gold hour hand and the green minute hand. Ignore the thin blue second hand.
Libretti Spaghetti Slice:
Soup
Opera?
Name a canned
convenience food, in three words. Replace the fourth letter in the first word
with two different letters. Keep the second word as it is. Replace the third
and fourth letters in the third word with one different letter.
The result is the
title of a groundbreaking 20th Century American opera, in three
words. What are this food and opera?
Sing Song Slice:
Perfect Pitch?
Name a popular singer from the present.
Remove six letters from the singer’s name that anagram into a role a baseball pitcher
sometime plays to his team’s detriment. Take the remaining letters, in the order they are in, and add a space to spell out a popular song from the past, in three words.
Who is this singer, what is this song, and what detrimental role does the baseball flinger sometimes play?
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.
My answer to the clock puzzle is so full of nonsense, I hesitate to publish it.
ReplyDeletePaul,
DeleteOf course we appreciate your restraint on this matter. As any regular follower of this blog is well aware, WE ALLOW NO NONSENSE ON PUZZLERIA!
Speaking (tongue-cheekedly) of no-nonsense, anyone remember this NPR puzzle of almost three years ago? (This was a year or so before the merger of Office Max with Office Depot. Now, I am no economics maven, but such a merger, it would seem, just cannot be good for competition and lower prices that may (or may not) be passed on to the consumer.)
I was reminded of the NPR puzzle yesterday when I patronized an Office Max. I was printing out some computer-generated photos and text for some posters I was making. I and my friend, who is an avid high school basketball fan, are attending tournament hoops games which are now ongoing in this neck of the north woods.
When I returned home to “cut and paste” the print-outs onto the posters, I realized I had printed out the word EIGHTH two times but had neglected to print out the word HEIGHT at all. (I needed the word EIGHTH because one of the best players on the team, whose first name begins with an H, is “the eighth… wonder of the hoops world.” I needed the word HEIGHT because he “has height, hops and heart.”
I guess you all know how I resolved this quandary.
Speaking (tongue-now-uncheeked) of quandaries, had Puzzleria! existed in July of 2012, when the Office Max puzzle hit the NPR airwaves, we would have posted the following piggyback puzzle on our blog:
Think of a well-known retail store chain in two words. Bisect the first word. Replace the last letter of the second word with two others. You now have three verbs. The first two verbs are slang for ways one might oust a leader. The third verb is a usually less-violent way one might oust a leader.
Now restore the original second word of the retail store chain and insert a letter in its third position to form a synonym for the leader you may have ousted.
What are these three verbs and one synonym?
LegoLotsaNonsense
I have LSS & SSS and I'll leave it to Paul to post the solution to the "clock puzzle." I am confused over why you say "six clocks" and then say "these four times."
ReplyDeleteRon,
DeleteGood work on the LSS and SSS, and on the CS also. Sorry about the “four times” wording, which is just plain wrong. It was bad editing on my part. I copied the text from the “Four Clocks Redux” puzzle I posted in early November and failed to change the “four times” to “six times.”
I changed it now to read:
“These times on a clock are especially timely for most Europeans and North Americans during this season of the year. Explain why.”
Thank you for calling my error to my attention. We not only allow no nonsense on Puzzleria!... we also allow no errors!
LegoShame(Clock)Faced
ron,
DeleteSorry about that uppercase “R” in ron. And thanks also to introducing me to the wonderful “Futility Closet” website.
I urge all Puzzlerians! to check Futility Closet out. There was a logic puzzle there recently that I will presume to repost in a separate subsequent comment below this one. (I hope that is okay with FC. By the way, is there a way to post comments directly onto FC, or can it be done only via social media such as Twitter or :- ) [|], which is an emoticon I devised to stand for "Facebook," not that I can believe it is original to me?)
LegoIntoTheCloset
The Futility Closet puzzle, titled “Lineup,” reads:
Delete“A group of children are standing outside a room. Each wears a hat that’s either red or blue, and each child can see the other children’s hats but not her own. At a signal they enter the room one by one and arrange themselves in a line partitioned by hat color. How do they manage this without communicating?”
FC provides a link to the solution. I have not yet clicked that link. Puzzlerians! (including me) are adherents to “the honor system” regarding such matters.
My solution appears below. It may or may not be valid, though I believe it to be. My only doubts arise over the exact meaning of the words “without communicating.”
I encourage Puzzlerians! to try solving this logic conundrum yourselves before clicking the FC solution link or reading my proposed solution.
Lego’s Solution:
I call this the “cozying-up solution.”
Ann enters the room. Then Bob enters the room and stands next to her.
Things begin happening, however, when Carla enters the room. If she sees two same-hued hats she stands to the side of Ann and Bob, leaving a gap. If Carla sees two different-hued hats she stands between Ann and Bob.
Don, Eli, Fern, Gary, Hank, Inez, Joe… (and even Ann and Bob had they not been the first two into the room) and all children in the puzzle would react in this same manner.
If Carla stands to the side of Ann and Bob, leaving a gap, Ann and Bob both realize that means they have same-hued hats. Bob sees Ann’s hat is blue, for example, so knows his is blue also. Likewise, Ann. If they see Carla is also wearing a blue hat they cozy up to her, leaving no gap. If they see Carla wearing a red hat they keep their distance. Ann and Bob cozying up to her is a cue to Carla that she too has a blue hat. Ann and Bob keeping their distance cues Carla that her hat must be red.
If after she enters the room Carla stands between Ann and Bob, then Ann and Bob both realize that means they must have different-hued hats. Bob sees Ann’s hat is blue, for example, so knows his is red. Likewise, Ann sees Bob’s hat is red so knows hers must be blue. If they see Carla also wears a blue hat only blue-hatted Ann cozies up to her, with Bob keeping his distance. If they see Carla wears a red hat only red-hatted Bob cozies up to her, with Ann keeping her distance. Carla realizes that the hue of the hat of the kid who cozied up to her must also be the hue of her hat.
So, when Don enters the room he is confronted either with three kids standing together with no gaps and all wearing the same-hued hat, or with two kids with same-hued hats standing together and a third kid with a different-hued hat standing off to the side.
If Don sees three hats of the same hue he stands on one end of the queue. If the queue cozies up to him that is his cue that his hat’s hue is the same as theirs. If they move away leaving a gap Don’s knows he has a hat of a different color.
If Don sees two hat hues he stands in the gap dividing the hues and waits to see which hue cozies up to him.
Eli and subsequent entrants fill the gap that divides the red from the blue hats, then wait for one side to move away while the other side cozies up. Or, if all in the room stand in a gapless line with same-hued hats, the new room entrant stands at one end and waits to see if the queue cozies up or moves away from him or her.
End of Lego’s solution.
I wish I was better at creating great logic puzzles of this ilk. I do enjoy trying to solve them. In this “solution” I just posted, my fear is that I broke the puzzle’s “no communication” stipulation by requiring all kids to have an understanding about what “cozying up” and “leaving gaps,” etc. means.
I realize that, in characteristic LegoLambda fashion, my solution is a tad on the long-winded side. But, even so, You can see why Will Shortz so seldom purveys logic puzzles on NPR. The entries would read like answers on an essay test. They would take hours to comb through.
Now I think I shall click on the solution give on the Futility Closet site.
LegoLogicLover
The Futility Closet's elegant, short-winded solution to their "Lineup" puzzle (see the beginning of our March 7, 10:38 PM post):
Delete"The first child stands in the center of the room, and the second stands at her side. Thereafter each entering child follows a rule: If she sees that the line of children are all wearing hats of the same color, then she stands at one end of the line. If they’re wearing both red and blue hats, then she inserts herself at the break between the two colors.
(Thanks, Matan.)"
This is an excellent example of me (in my previous "lego's solution" post) making a solution sound much more difficult than it actually is. As I may have mentioned before, "I do not enjoy being edited, but I do need an editor!"
LegoTheInelegant
The Futility Closet's elegant, short-winded solution to their "Lineup" puzzle (see the beginning of our March 7, 10:38 PM post):
Delete"The first child stands in the center of the room, and the second stands at her side. Thereafter each entering child follows a rule: If she sees that the line of children are all wearing hats of the same color, then she stands at one end of the line. If they’re wearing both red and blue hats, then she inserts herself at the break between the two colors.
(Thanks, Matan.)"
This is an excellent example of me (in my previous "lego's solution" post) making a solution sound much more difficult than it actually is. As I may have mentioned before, "I do not enjoy being edited, but I do need an editor!"
LegoTheInelegant
LSS:
ReplyDeleteCampbell's PORK AND BEANS>>>PORGY AND BESS.
SSS:
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE>>>JUST IN TIME>>>BALKER (someone who commits BALKS).
If you remove “BALKER” from ROBERTA FLACK, you are left with the letters, ROTFAC, which anagram to FACTOR, and the song: “Age ain't a Factor.”
I leave CS to Paul.
ron,
DeletePerfect! Those puzzles were not that easy.
Thanks for bringing Ms. Flack into the mix. She was definitely a factor in the 1970s. Coincidentally, one of next week's puzzle slices involves words in song titles.
LegoTheFirstTimeEverISawClockFace...
If:
ReplyDelete0 = [space]
1 = A
2 = B
.
.
.
26 = Z
Then:
1:00 yields A, [space]
1:05 yields A, E
4:08 yields D, H
4:14 yields D, N
7:09 yields G, I
7:18 yields G, R
and A AEDHDNGIGR anagrams to plenty o' nuttin'...except maybe GDRING AHEAD, which can be made sensible by writing SP (for spelling error) over the GD.
Obviously, that answer is full of beans.
Actually:
1 = {A,M,Y}
2 = {B,N,Z}
3 = {C,O}
etc. -- in particular, 4 ={D,P} and 7 = {G,S}, so the clock hands may be interpreted as SPRING AHEAD.
A balker is also somebody who determines which way the fish are moving; the definition I read specifically mentions herring, but doesn't say anything about porgy.
Paul, well-read and . . .well, red, both.
DeleteBALKER vs BALKER. I can't find anything about fish and who moves them.
Deleteron,
DeleteReel in these definitions.
LegoMuscleShoals//Herringbone
Here's my source: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/balker
DeleteProbably a misuse of the word "determines" on my part.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletePaul,
DeleteYes, I agree with what Word Woman said. You are very capable of slicing down the tallest puzzle tree in the forest with.... a herring! (Well, she said something like that anyway.)
I am jess puddin' and puzzlin' pi. I kiss the squirrels and make them fly. You are the bess. You are the bess. (jess channelin' my zekecreekness)
As for the CS, you and I both arrived at the same correct answer, SPRING AHEAD; we just arrived at it by different means, all of them kind of tortured (my means included! see official answers below).
LegoGeorgieJessHell!
Paul,
DeleteI am very impressed now that I have taken more time to pour over... (Darn! that gin and tonic will probably wreak havoc on my keyboard!)... I mean, pore over this section of your comment:
Actually:
1 = {A,M,Y}
2 = {B,N,Z}
3 = {C,O}
etc. -- in particular, 4 ={D,P} and 7 = {G,S}, so the clock hands may be interpreted as SPRING AHEAD....
I'm impressed because I can see that you actually solved the puzzle in exactly the manner in which I created it. You moved two (of the 11) letters twelve places ahead (Spring ahead!) in the alphabet. My strategy was "military"; yours was logical.
Congratulations for solving a pretty tough puzzle. And to ron also who, I believe, also solved it. And to anyone else out there who cracked this tough-as-nails nut...
LegoGeneralEisenHours
This week’s puzzle answers, for the record:
ReplyDeleteChronillogical Slice:
Six Clocks Redux Deluxe Dévujà
Write down the following six times: 1:00, 1:05, 4:08, 4:14, 7:09 and 7:18. These times on a clock are especially timely for most Europeans and North Americans during this season of the year. Explain why.
Hint: The solution to this puzzle does not involve any M whatsoever.
Answer:
The six times can be converted to spell out the words SPRING AHEAD, the mnemonic device some people use to remember which way to reset their clocks when shifting from standard to daylight saving time.
You must decide however which of the times are a.m. and which are p.m., because all times must be converted to time in the 24-hour format, also known as military time.
Rank the letters of the alphabet from 1 to 26, A through Z: A = 1, B = 2, C = 3,… Z = 26.
Consider, for example, the time 10:25. If it is 10:25 a.m., is written as 10:25; if it is 10:25 p.m. it is written as 22:25.
10:25 = 10, 25 = J, Y
22:25 = 22, 25 = V, Y
In our puzzle, all times are a.m. except one of the 4th-hour times and one of the 7th-hour times, solver’s choice. (The puzzle would have involved an M {see hint} had one of the 1 o’clock times been p.m.)
1:05 (a.m.) = 1, 5 = A, E
1:00 (a.m.) = 1, 0 = A, (no letter)
4:08 (p.m.) = 16:08 = 16, 8 = P, H
4:14 (a.m.) = 4, 14 = D, N
7:09 (p.m.) = 19:09 = 19, 9 = S, I
7:18 (a.m.) = 7, 18 = G, R
AEAPHDNSIGR can be arranged to form SPRING AHEAD
Libretti Spaghetti Slice:
Soup Opera?
Name a canned convenience food, in three words. Replace the fourth letter in the first word with two different letters. Keep the second word as it is. Replace the third and fourth letters in the third word with one different letter.
The result is the title of a groundbreaking 20th Century American opera, in three words. What are this food and opera?
Answer:
Pork and Beans; “Porgy and Bess”
Sing Song Slice:
Perfect Pitch?
Name a popular singer from the present. Remove six letters from the singer’s name that anagram into a role a baseball pitcher sometime plays to his team’s detriment.
Take the remaining letters, in the order they are in, and add a space to spell out a popular song from the past, in three words.
Who is this singer, what is this song, and what detrimental role does the baseball flinger sometimes play?
Answer:
Justin Timberlake; “Just in Time”; balker
Lego…
Puzzlerians!
ReplyDeleteTwo more loose ends:
In my March 7 at 8:29 AM comment I posed this puzzle:
Think of a well-known retail store chain in two words. Bisect the first word. Replace the last letter of the second word with two others. You now have three verbs. The first two verbs are slang for ways one might oust a leader. The third verb is a usually less-violent way one might oust a leader.
Now restore the original second word of the retail store chain and insert a letter in its third position to form a synonym for the leader you may have ousted.
What are these three verbs and one synonym?
The chain is OFFICE DEPOT >>
OFF + ICE + DEPOSE >>
DESPOT
I resolved the quandary of how to change one “EIGHTH” into a “HEIGHT” by cutting the last letter on EIGHTH and pasting it onto the beginning of EIGHT.
LegoWhereTheH!