Joseph Young's Puzzleria!: October 2015

Friday, October 30, 2015

When pigs swim; Log roll call; Whopper-concocting Cockney; Trick 'n' treat..... 'n' toil 'n' trouble; The incredible edible legend; Swapping baseball cars

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{5 +}pi⁴SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

Lots o’ tricky treats for you to solve this week. Oh yes, kids, lots of very scary stuff!

We’ve got birling, incredible edible legends, Cockneys, the inscrutable Orient, two World Series Series stars, and – as a special Halloween treat – a world-class world capital puzzle served up for dessert by skydiveboy, aka Mark Scott from Seattle:

Morsel Menu

Forest Morsel:

Log roll call

Consider the following list of trees: plum, oak, apple, palm, lemon, pine, willow,…

Examples of trees that do not belong on that list are:

One whose wood is used to fashion model airplanes,

One that is a homophone of a common pronoun,

One that is a homophone of a Mediterranean isle,

One that Larry Bird called himself before becoming a Celtic,

One that is a part of a president’s nickname and is also a word in a nursery rhyme

One that is a part of a Donovan song title

One that is a fruit-bearing tree that traditionally also occasionally bears a particular game bird.

Name one other tree that belongs on the list and one other tree that does not belong. Explain your choices.

Extra credit: Name all seven trees on the list of trees that do not belong on the list.

Hint: Those of you who have been following the National Puzzle Rumblings this past week may well have an advantage in solving this puzzle.

Hint: One of the trees on the original list is often associated with certain islands. Those islands are at the crux of knowing which trees do and don’t belong on the list.

Sx/Appetizer Menu

Who’s In The News Appetizer:

The incredible edible legend

Name a newsmaker from this past week. Replace the first letter on the person’s surname with something edible, in three letters, to name a legendary figure.

Who are the newsmaker and legendary figure?

Hint: Replace the second half of the first name with the first half of the surname and reverse the middle two letters of the result, forming a word. Place the second half of the second name after the second half of the first name, forming a word.

The first word formed is sometimes followed by “tell.”

The second word formed is almost always followed by “Bator,” or else by “-Ude.”

Sports Page Appetizer:

Whopper-concocting Cockney

A sports-page story this past week contained two essential words, both uppercase. Rearrange the letters in those words to form a two-word description that pertains to both of the images pictured here.

In the case of one image, the description is spelled as if it were spoken by a speaker of Cockney who is either lying or has no idea of what he is talking about.

What are the sports story words? What is the description of the images?

Hallow Eastern News Appetizer:

Trick ‘n’ treat…‘n’ toil ‘n’ trouble!

The gist of an Eastern Hemisphere news story this past week could be summarized in a four-word headline of 5, 6, 3 and 8 letters. The first word is a nation and the last word is plural, but without an S.

Add an S and U to the 22 letters and rearrange these 24 letters to form the following four words you might see and/or hear as you go out Halloween trick-or-treating Saturday evening:

1.) Shadowy figures cackling out in a moonlit cornfield (7 letters)

2.) A container which they are stirring (8 letters)

3.) A small mollusk they are dropping into the container (5 letters)

4.) The plaintive cry of a distant werewolf (4 letters) {Best alliterative lyric ever: “...Little old lady got multilated late last night...”}

What is the four-word headline? What are the four Halloween words?

MENU

Fall Classic Auto Part Slice:

Swapping baseball cars

Name two former Major League Baseball players who between them have played on eight World Series Championship teams.

Put their surnames together, older player first. Remove the letter from the exact center along with the newly formed space. The resulting word is standard equipment on most cars and trucks.

Who are these star Fall Classic ballplayers and what is the car part?

Dessert Menu

Piece Of Napoleon-cake Dessert:

When pigs swim

(Puzzle courtesy of Mark Scott (skydiveboy) of Seattle, Washington):

Think of a word that describes a body of water. Now think of a word you might use to describe what pigs sometimes do.

Put these two words together, in order, and phonetically you will name a capital city of a well-known country. What are these three?

Every Friday at Joseph Young’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 enjoy our weekly puzzle party, please tell your friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! Thank you.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Marzipawn fit for a king; The sound and the furioso; Poodle skirts and Woods supporters; Jesus was a Capricorn... what's your sign?; Stormin' namin' nounin' Norman; Science is golden... ray shows

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{5 +}pi⁴SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!, our October 23 edition.

Thanksgiving is still 34 days away (November 26), but we would like to take this time to thank all of you who have commented on and contributed to – and otherwise followed – our puzzle blog during the past 18 months. Without your contributions, interest and support, Puzzleria! is nothing – ZeroZipZilchleria!

One of our puzzles this week is prompted by a comment by charter Puzzlerian! David two weeks ago suggesting that I (okay, daring me to) make a puzzle out of the meerkat/monkey/llama zoo news story.

The puzzle I created was last week’s “Critters In The News Appetizer: IsosZOOles love triangle,” which involved men named “Boris,” including chess master Boris Spassky. This prompted a comment from skydiveboy, who knows his chess, about the legitimacy of a photo I ran of a guy I thought was Spassky.

Our exchange of comments reminded me of my own early infatuation with chess, and of the only chess puzzle I ever created, as a young’un. So, this past week I rummaged through my memory’s cobwebs, dredged up and dusted off my puzzle and recreated and packaged it as this week’s Dessert Menu puzzle: “Not The Whitest Piece On The Chessboard Dessert: Marzipawn fit for a king.”

I am probably not the first person to think up this particular chess puzzle, but I like to think I might be. Of course, I could Duck Duck Go or Google it to see but, because I want to continue basking in my ignorantly blissful afterglow, I shall not.

After all, I did not perform a computer-search on it when I created it. Of course, that was back when the most sophisticated electronic appliance I owned was a Realtone 6-transistor radio – booty from my birthday. (My Realtone had no search engine function… but it did have a good pop song search function.)

Six transistors had my radio. Six puzzles has this Puzzleria!:

One morsel, three weekly news-cycle appetizers, a specialty of the house slice… and marzipawn for dessert!

Morsel Menu

Emmy Morsel:

Stormin’ namin’ nounin’ Norman

Take a proper noun seen in today’s headlines. Take also the professional name (first and last) of a late Emmy-winning actor. Remove the final letter from the proper noun and insert it between the second and third letters of the final three letters of the actor’s name. Remove those four letters from the end of an actor’s name.

The letters remaining in the proper noun and in what’s left of the the actor’s name, when spoken aloud, sound the same. The four letters removed spell out a word very familiar to people, both late and living, surnamed Norman, Schwarzkopf, Battle, Sutherland, Price, and Farrell.

Hint: The first names associated with those surnames are not Greg, Norman, Kenny, Donald, David, and James T.

What is this proper noun and who is this actor?

Appetizer Menu

Safer Public In The News Appetizer:

Poodle skirts and Woods supporters

The following clues all have two-word answers that total 14 letters:

1. Those who fashion poodle skirts and bell-bottom jeans

2. Nickname of a Puritan named Williams?

3. What an extreme horror film make-up artist does to faces

4. Mightier motivation

5. Roy

6. Men, according to some

7. What an elementary school pupil perhaps does on an arithmetic test

8. Woods supporters

A public safety news story this past week might put a damper on Black Friday sales of certain items at stores like Toys R Us and Walmart. The story includes:

An 8-letter verb, and

A 6-letter plural noun.

The 14 letters in those two words can be rearranged to form the two words in each of the eight answers above.

What are the verb and noun in the story? What are the eight answers above?

Every Picture Tells A Story Appetizer:

Science is golden... ray shows

A science story from this past week included a nine-letter proper noun and eight-letter common noun.

The blanks in the phrase below represent a four-word, 17-letter description of the illustration pictured below in this puzzle. The letters in this description can be rearranged to form the letters in the science story words.

__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

__ __ __ __ __

__ __

Hint:

The common noun in the science story can be divided to form a two-word description of insulin or Lasix.

The first three letters of the proper noun in the science story name an Irish band formed a bit more than a decade ago.

The next three letters name a Minnesotan band formed a bit more than two decades ago.

The final four letters of the proper noun in the science story name a Pennsylvanian band formed a bit more than three decades ago.

What are the two words in the science story and the four-word description of the illustration?

Signs And Wonders Appetizer:

Jesus was a Capricorn... what’s your sign?

An international news story this past week may have included the following phrase:

__ __ __ __ __ __’__

__ __ __ __ __ __

__ __ __ __ __ __ __

All three words above are proper nouns. The first is possessive; the others are a man’s name.

The letters in those words can be rearranged to form three different words:

1. A nine-letter noun for what the person was during August, September and almost two-thirds of October.

2. A five-letter word for a Roman god associated with a certain month; the man would likely prefer not to be associated with this this god because it smacks of duplicity due to being depicted often with an unusual anatomical distinction.

3. A six-letter word for how the man’s future wife might have responded when he first asked her, “What’s your sign?” (Had she asked him the same question, the man would have answered the same as his younger brother who is still alive.)

What is the three-word news story phrase? What are the three words they morph into?

MENU

Specialty Of The House Slice:

The sound and the furioso

Name a word for the sound a certain musical instrument makes. Remove one letter to produce an attribute a player of the instrument ought to have.

What are the sound and the attribute?

Dessert Menu

Not The Whitest Piece On The Chessboard Dessert:

Marzipawn fit for a king

What is the shortest chess game possible? That is, what is the minimum number of moves needed for a checkmate to occur? What are these moves?

In my answer, Black checkmates White. (White always makes the opening move, of course.) Thus, my answer must be an even number of moves.

Also, my answer requires that White make a move (or moves) that are not in White’s best interest. In other words, White plays into Black’s hands.

(Here is a link to a helpful chessboard tool that allows you to move chess pieces around, and even to play matches... just don’t play with matches!)

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 Puzzleria! Thank you.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Portraits of d-d-d-debaters; IsosZOOles love triangle; Accessorizing, from hood to tow hitch; Is Kim Davis aware of this?! Topping the pizza... and opponents! Frosty, and bacteria-free!

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{4 +}5! SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!, our midpoint-of-October edition. Our “guest clicker” odometer has just rolled over from 49,999 to 50,000 “trials.”

(It may be time to change our Hoyle, according to our puzzle manufacturer’s – Lego Lambda’s – recommendations.)

To celebrate our roll-over, we are again rolling out this week a half-dozen puzzles: an unspeakable marceau morsel, three weekly news-cycle appetizers, a sporty slice (not spice!), and a drive-thru dessert. (If you are seeking a drive-through-desert, check out this week’s PEOTS blog.)

Morsel Marceau Menu

Legal Gender Bender Tender Morsel:

Is Kim Davis aware of this?!

For the first time in American history, women are now more likely than men to be bachelors.

How can this be?

Appetizer Menu

Democratic Demosthenic Appetizer:

Portraits of d-d-d-debaters

Participants in the Democratic presidential candidate debate October 13 in Nevada were Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders and Jim Webb.

Each of these five candidates has a one-to-one association with one of the five portraits pictured here. Two associations are pretty obvious, a third is less so, a fourth is rather tenuous, and a fifth is downright obscure.

Can you match the five candidates with their proper portraits, and explain how they are connected?

And now, for something not completely different: Consider the following song lyrics:

Jimmy was a soldier brave and bold,

Katy was a maid with hair of gold.

Like an act of fate,

Kate was standing at the gate,

Watching all the boys while on parade.

Kate smiled with a twinkle in her eye,

Jim said, m-m-m-meet ya by and by.

That night at eight,

Jim was at the garden gate,

Stuttering this song to K-K-K-Kate:

K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy,

You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore;

When the m-moon shines

Over the c-cowshed,

I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door…

Remove the final three letters from one of the words in these lyrics. Explain how the letters that remain pertain to the five debating candidates.

Critters In The News Appetizer:

IsosZOOles love triangle

Using the clues, fill in the blanks below to reveal words for five of God’s creatures:

__ __ __ __ __ __ (a rodent related to Jimmy and Phil)

__ __ __ (Babe’s relative)

__ __ __ (Bullwinkle’s relative)

__ __ __ (a slippery fish named Boris)

__ __ __ (Boris... Badenov, Godunov, Karloff, Becker, Yeltsin or Spassky, for examples)

(Hint: The first letters of four of those creatures above can be rearranged to form an award associated with the voice of Bullwinkle’s buddy Rocky (and Boris’ buddy Natasha). The first letter of the fifth creature word is a duplicate of one of the four letters in that award.)

Now rearrange the 18 letters in the above blanks to form three other of God’s creatures – creatures that figured into a news story originating in the United Kingdom this past week.

What are the three U.K. news story creatures and the five “blankety-blank” creatures?

Nyms In The News Appetizer:

Frosty, and bacteria-free!

The second half of a well-known hyphenated brand name consumable product is also an acronym that appeared this past week in a news story that has implications for a specific demographic group. The final letter in the acronym (and brand name) is a letter which stands for a word connoting variability.

Let us treat that letter itself as a variable, replacing it first with an “i” and then with a “d”. The “i” and the “d” are the initial letters in two adjectives that are antonyms of one another. These “variable” replacements would change the meaning of the original acronym – first for the good and then for the bad, respectively – regarding the demographic group’s interests.

Ironically, replacing the final letter in the brand name product with an “i” would probably be bad for sales of the product, while replacing the final letter with a “d” might boost sales.

What is this brand name and what does the acronym stand for? What are the antonyms beginning with an “i” and a “d”?

Hint: The second half of the producer’s brand name is also the second part of the brand name of one of its competitors.

MENU

Sporty Slice:

Topping the pizza… and opponents!

Name a food that is sometimes used as a pizza topping, a nine-letter plural word. Chop it into two parts (just as might be done in a pizzeria!). The second part names creatures that are also the nickname of a professional sports team. Replace that second part with the nickname of a second professional sports team representing the same city.

Rearrange the letters in the first part to form the initials of an annual serial sporting event in which the second professional team has competed seven times since 1972, including thrice in the past five years. The team has won the event thrice since 1972.

What is this pizza-topping food? What are the two professional teams and the annual event?

Dessert Menu

Dune Buggy Dessert:

Accessorizing, from hood to tow hitch

Name an accessory found on the very upper part of some car bodies. Replace the first three letters with a three-letter accessory sometimes worn by people on the very upper part of their human bodies. Insert the letter “l” between the sixth and seventh letters of this result and spell it backward, forming an accessory found on the lower part of most car bodies.

Remove from this accessory two consecutive letters to form a word describing something sometimes done to an object inserted into an accessory found on the dashboard of some cars.

Hint: The two consecutive letters you must remove from the lower accessory form a word.

Hint: The object inserted into the dashboard accessory is not carcinogenic... as far as we know.

What are these three car accessories?

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 Puzzleria! Thank you.

Friday, October 30, 2015

When pigs swim; Log roll call; Whopper-concocting Cockney; Trick 'n' treat..... 'n' toil 'n' trouble; The incredible edible legend; Swapping baseball cars

Friday, October 23, 2015

Marzipawn fit for a king; The sound and the furioso; Poodle skirts and Woods supporters; Jesus was a Capricorn... what's your sign?; Stormin' namin' nounin' Norman; Science is golden... ray shows

Friday, October 16, 2015

Portraits of d-d-d-debaters; IsosZOOles love triangle; Accessorizing, from hood to tow hitch; Is Kim Davis aware of this?! Topping the pizza... and opponents! Frosty, and bacteria-free!

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