Highway 61 (and 169) Billboards revisited; "I'm so naïve-no-more”; "Hey! This isn't pumpkin pie!"; foXYZAftig siZABle psaLMNOtes; Chatter at the platter;

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{5 +} pi⁴ SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

‘Tis the Friday before the Thursday of Giving Thanks. I want to sincerely thank all followers of this blog for your continued support, clever contributions and puzzling interest.

A quick piece of doggerel, inspired by the moon:
Although the world in which we live is far from a utopia,
To take this Earth for granite is to suffer from myopia.
We sow on soil rich, not rock, and reap a cornucopia,
With rays to warm us, to refresh us though the sky a sieve is,
With nightlight too to  guide us: crescent, full, new, blue or gibbous...
We thank you God this autumn day for blessings that you give us.

We enjoyed Will Shortz’s Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle on NPR this past weekend. It read:

 

Think of a word that contains three consecutive letters of the alphabet together – like CANOPY, which contains NOP. Change these three letters to one new letter to make a synonym of the first word. What words are these?

Yes indeedy, so much did we enjoy it that we composed a pair of puzzle morsels that “piggyback” on Will’s consecutive-letter theme.

(Puzzeria! friend and regular puzzle contributor Mark Scott of Seattle, also known as skydiveboy, posted on Blaine’s blog Thursday two sets of words that were “close” to being an acceptable solution to Will Shortz’s NPR puzzle, but not close enough. One of those word pairs is the answer to first of my two piggyback puzzles, Morsel 1.) 

The alphabet we use in our morsels is “Puzzleria!’s Closed-Loop Circular Seamless Alphabet.” This allows for consecutive-letter skeins that start with X, Y or Z, say, and end with A, B or C, for example.

And so, we thankfully and thinkfully serve up this week’s menus of morsels, appetizers, slices and desserts.

Morsel Menu

Shortz Inspired Morsels:

foXYZAftig siZABle psaLMNOtes

Morsel 1:

Think of a noun that contains three consecutive letters of the alphabet together – like CANOPY, which contains NOP. Change these three letters to one new letter to form a second noun (which can also function as a verb). This second noun may well bring about the first noun, and indicate that the person performing the second noun cares for the recipient of the action.

What words are these?

Hint: A word in this puzzle (in one of the paragraphs immediately above) and the second noun share five consecutive letters in common.

Morsel 2:

Think of a noun, an occupation in the arts, that contains four consecutive letters of the alphabet together – like PSALMNOTES (which contains LMNO) if it were indeed a real word, perhaps meaning something like “comments scribbled in the margins of a Psalter.” Change the four letters of your noun to one new letter to form an adjective describing a quality it would behoove the person in this occupation NOT to possess.

What words are these?

Hint: the adjective is uncommon, and is chiefly British dialect, and probably archaic. A word in this puzzle (in one of the paragraphs immediately above) and the adjective share five consecutive letters in common. An unprefixed form of the word appears in the OED.

Hint: The “occupation in the arts” noun is very closely related to a phrase in the “Kiddies’ Table Dessert” puzzle at the bottom of this week’s blog.   

Appetizer Menu

Kirby And Bobby Appetizer:

Highway 61 (and 169) Billboards Revisited

The lead singer and front man of a Beatles-era pop-rock group was born in the same Minnesota city where a Rimbaud-loving folk-rock singer spent most of his formative years.

Within the span of only one year, the pop-rock group scored four top-ten hit songs in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The first three were top-five hits with titles that each included a different synonym for “female” as a noun. The title of the fourth hit will be helpful to you in solving the “Lyrical Slice” in the MENU immediately below.

 

What is the name of this group? What are the titles of their three top-five hits?

Hint: The Rimbaud-loving folk singer wrote and recorded nine songs with one of those three synonyms for female in their titles. One of those songs was a top-ten Billboard hit released about one year after the pop-rock group’s string of hits.

MENU

Lyrical Slice:

“I’m so naïve-no-more”

A title of a past popular song in the entertainment news this past week contains 11 letters. Rearrange those letters to form four words that – if you insert the words “I’m so” after the first two – might have been a suitable subtitle for the song, given the liberated and naïve-no-more attitude conveyed by the singer in the song’s lyrics, in particular in its refrain.

What is this song title? What might have been a suitable subtitle for the song?

Hint: The surname of a man in the news story echoes a part of what is likely the intended answer to Will Shortz’s NPR puzzle this past week. (See Puzzleria!’s introduction, above.)

Hint: The two words that follow “I’m so” are the title of the fourth top-ten hit song by the pop-rock group in the “Kirby And Bobby Appetizer” puzzle, under the “Appetizer Menu,” above.

Buffet Zone Slice:

Chatter at the platter

Name a kind of serving platter for cold food – in two words of six and four letters – that might be seen on a Thanksgiving Day buffet table. Both words end with the same three letters.

Copy the second and third letters of the first word consecutively somewhere into the second word to form a shorthand slang word for what people who mingle around and sample food from the platter might exclaim. The first four letters of that slang word form a shorthand word for where some of the food might have been purchased.

The platter is also often called by a name in which a different four-letter word is substituted for the second word. Saying the plural of this altered two-word name aloud sounds like an alliterative two-word phrase meaning “enjoyed sunbathing.”

What are these two two-word names for platters? What might the food samplers exclaim, and where might the food have been purchased?

Confusing (and probably regional-slang) hint:

A young’un from the Thanksgiving “kiddies’ table” might sample a chunk of pickled herring from the platter and exclaim:

“This tastes __ __ __ __!”

The first three letters of that missing four-letter adjective are the same three letters shared by the two words in the first platter mentioned earlier in the puzzle. It is an adjective with which I am familiar but it has been nigh impossible for me to track it down on the Internet. I think the four-letter adjective may be Minnesota and Wisconsin slang dialect. 

Adding a consonant to the beginning of that four-letter unusual adjective, however, forms an adjective it is more likely a kiddie might exclaim after plucking up and gulping down the chunk of pickled herring.

(If the kiddie’s name were Peter, we might say, “Peter plucked a toothpick-pierced piece of pickled piscari, like pike, perch or pickerel.”)

Dessert Menu

Kiddies’ Table Dessert:

“Hey! This isn’t pumpkin pie!”

A two-syllable brand-name pastry dessert that likely does not grace many Thanksgiving Day tables (except perhaps the “kiddies’ table”) celebrated a landmark anniversary a year ago. The pastry dessert is associated with a common kitchen appliance.

Take the singular form of the pastry and interchange the initial letters of (that is, “spoonerize”) the brand name’s syllables to form a two-word synonym for a bikini bra or for a leading man’s or leading lady’s role.

Spell the two words of this synonym backward to form two slang synonyms – one for the mouth, where the pastry is ingested, and the other for the belly, where the pastry is digested.

A term for the style of geometric images pictured above was coined the same year the brand-name pastry hit the shelves. Removing the initial letters of the two words in the singular form of the brand name yields the general collective term for such images.

A brand-name competitor of the pastry also hit the shelves in that same year. The first syllable of that competitor’s name is what people at the adults’ Thanksgiving Day table might do with wineglasses, and what little people at the kiddies’ table might do with plastic cups of sparkling juice.

 

What are the pastry dessert and its competitor, the “spoonerized” two-word synonym, and the collective term for the images?

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.