Joseph Young's Puzzleria!: January 2016

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{5 +}pi³SERVED

Welcome to our January 29^th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

We feature a great original guest puzzle this week created by Mark Scott of Seattle, also known as skydiveboy, his cyberscreen name. Mark’s puzzle appears directly beneath our main MENU heading, and is titled “Where On Earth Slice: Herding the humans.” Thank you, Mark, for again sharing your creativity with us on Puzzleria!

Also on our menu this week are not one but two “Ripping Off…” puzzle slices – a puzzle “piggybacking” off of Will Shortz’s Sunday offering, as well as a puzzle ripping myself off! It is a puzzle I created and posted on the comments section of Blaine’s blog two years ago, roughly three months before I began this Puzzleria! blog.

I unearthed that puzzle – titled “Mona and Polly were syllabic… bisyllabic” – while researching NPR’s broadcast of the infamous “upside-down digital clock” puzzle. Will Shortz unveiled that truly elegant and challenging (IMO) puzzle two years ago next week. Many Blainesvillians had proposed plausible yet unsatisfying answers to it, and had therefore suspected there might be a more intricate solution we all were missing. We suspected correctly; but only a Blainsvillian screen-named Al posted what turned out to be Will’s ingenious intended answer.

Anyway, many Blainesvillians were experiencing a touch of déjà vu this week after Will stated on-air Sunday, “This may be one of the most challenging puzzles I’ve presented. It has a very elegant answer.”

Most Blainesvillians found the puzzle to be moderately challenging; some found it to be reasonably “elegant.” But many suspected we might be missing something, just like we all did (except for Al) two years ago. We will discover on Sunday if Will’s puzzle has an answer more challenging, clever and elegant than the answer we had discovered.

Also on this week’s menu are a “win-one-for-the-Gibber” morsel; two “in the news” appetizers; and a business-model-cum-art-model dessert.

All this week’s puzzles deserve your vote and devotion. No debate about it!

Morsel Menu

Debating Elephants Morsel:

Gibberish and gibes

I was dozing and drifing in and out a bit – about a dozen times – during the GOP debate last evening (January 28 in Des Moines). Near the end of the debate I was snapped out of mid-snore by a loud voice making a comment. I rubbed the sands of slumber from my eyes and the cobwebs of a dream from my subconscious and, because I am an obsessive note-taker, I groggily grabbed a pen and jotted down the comment.

Here is what I scrawled: Debater: “Let’s run on a clean flow, eh Rand?”

After the debate, as I perused my notes, I realized I was not sure which “debater” made the comment. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Donald Trump, who was playing hockey… or was it hooky? (But perhaps he had made a triumphant entrance while I had nodded off?)

The speaker could not be Ben Carson either. His voice had been lulling be to sleep, not rousing me to consciousness.

Nor could the speaker of the comment be Rand Paul because the “debater” was addressing “Rand.”

And, because of another word (a taunting, tweaking, trash-talking “gotcha” gibe word) that the speaker used in his comment, I eliminated as the speaker another of the seven debaters present. (The speaker’s gibe word indicated that the comment was directed not only at Rand Paul but also at a candidate who was on the same side of the issue as Paul.)

Then I realized something else: The 32 letters of the words I jotted could be rearranged to form five words that encapsulated the topic being discussed.

What are those five words? What was the “taunting, tweaking, trash-talking gotcha gibe word” that the speaker used? Which debater did I thus dismiss as the speaker of the comment?

Appetizer Menu

Cyberbricklaying Appetizer:

Intelligent Artifice

Rearrange the letters in the phrase “Mr. Ivy Kinsman” to form the first and last names of a pioneering person who was in the news this past week.

A peripherally related story includes in its headline a six-letter word and a two-letter word. The two-letter word is what remains after one removes from the six-letter word a “fun-to-say” word that has an anagram that is a kind of brick.

Who is the pioneering person? What are the two words in the headline? In what way are these two stories peripherally related?

Seventeen-Shot Revolver Appetizer:

Triclops’ third eye

Add a third “i” to the phrase “flashes his pistol” and rearrange the 17 letters to form two names – a pair of first and last names – that you might have read or heard in news reports this past week.

What are these two names?

MENU

Where On Earth Slice:

Herding the humans

In every part of the Earth inhabited by people, we manage livestock. However there is one geographical place where – according to its name, humorously speaking – the exact opposite is true. The name of the place is a single-word homophone.

Name this well-known place if you can.

Hint: The single-word answer will sound like more than a single word.

Ripping Off Piscop And Shortz Slice:

Parsley sage puzzle players’ thyme

Will Shortz’s Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle on NPR this week was so so solid. It was not perhaps as challenging as Mr. Shortz claimed, but it is “elegant.” Will set the puzzle up by saying:

“This may be one of the most challenging puzzles I’ve presented. It has a very elegant answer. It is from listener Fred Piscop of Bellmore, N.Y.” The puzzle reads:

Take these three phrases:

Turkey breast

Ski slope

Cash drawer

What very unusual property do they have in common?

(Spoiler alert: The answer involves anagrams. You can find the answer in the comments section of Blaine’s blog.)

Lego Lambda’s “piggyback puzzle” that “rips off” the Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle on NPR this week is just so-so. It is not as challenging as Mr. Shortz’s offering, but it is indeed “inelegant.”

Our rip-off puzzle provides you with a letter or two from the first words of a handful of two-word phrases, or from the first half of a compound word. You must complete each phrase with two words, or each compound word with two second halves. These two complements – be they words or second halves of compound words – are anagrams of one another. The number in parentheses following each first word indicates the number of letters in each of the two anagrams. Clues are provided.

For example:

H _ _ F (4) Clue: Image reproduction involving tiny dots, and a circle with a stem on a staff

Answer: halftone and half note (H _ _ F = half; “tone” and “note” are anagrams)

1.) S _ _ (5) Clue: Shell selling site, and walrus

2.) W _ _ D (5) Clue: Titles of songs that are 45 and 50 years old

3.) M _ _ _ E (6) Clue: Roll credits with cast members, including each top-billing sharer

4.) S _ _ (4) Clue: “Bird”song, and colon-shift-9

5.) S _ _ _ _ Y (4) Clue: Church clothes, and NFL wagers

6.) C _ _ _ _ _ S (4) Clue: What happens during a cycle, and what you might need next

7.) H _ _ G (7) Clue: Crafts powered by thermal updrafts, and what one might do with “what you might need next” (see clue, above)

8.) B _ _ _ _ N (4) Clue: Boxer’s occupational hazard, and “chicken feed”

9.) E _ _ _ _ R (5) Clue: American nonprofit charitable organization, and where one might pick up Peeps or frilly bonnets

10.) W _ _ _ _ N (4) Clue: Boring blah buss, and barrel staves, perhaps?

11.) W _ _ _ E (5) Clue: Epitome of blandness, and Santa or Papa trademark

12.) A _ _ _ E (5) Clue: Type of vinegar, and kitchen appliance

13.) I _ _ _ _ N (5) Clue: “The mine of gems,” and North American craft

14.) F_ _ _ T O_ _H_ L_ _ M (6) Clue: unmentionables, and what the unmentionables are made of

15.) F_ _ _ H (5) Clue: Rooted in religion, and a rosary

16.) R _ _ (8) Clue: Description of a robin, and Gus Hall and Angela Davis during the 1980 presidential election… (Yeah, sure! Maybe on “Radio Free Russia”)

17.) W_ _ E (6) Clue: Where one’s white zinfandel is stored, and what might ensue if there is too much arsenic in one’s white zinfandel

18.) S _ _ _ N (6) Clue: Feature of a Hawthorne novel house, and a baker’s half-dozen (with lox, perhaps, thrown in)

19.) G _ _ _ _ _ Y (6) Clue: One who greets you in the check-out lane, and one who greets you in the parking lot on the way to your minivan

20.) B _ _ _ _ Y (4) Clue: Bar order, and result of the Battle of the Bulge

21.) D _ _ _ E (7) Clue: Choreographed performance, and the ensuing newspaper account about it

22.) O _ _ _ _ E (5) Clue: What results when it gets to be above 90 degrees, and Chrissy Snow, if Charlie would have hired her after she parted ways with Jack and Janet

23.) H _ _ (4) Clue: Front-burner sitters, and wi-fi access site

24.) P _ _ _ _ T (7) Clue: Cheap seats sitters, and affliction necessitating continual poring over ingredient labels

25.) E _ _ _ Y (4) Clue: evidence of a bad fishing day, and a syndrome some parents experience

26.) B _ _ _ _ T (4) Clue: Standard sports car feature, and KFC purchase

27.) G _ _ _ N (4) Clue: King title, minus “The,” and a fruity redundancy

28.) B _ _ _ D (5) Clue: Blues singer Jefferson, and “drought song” band

29.) M _ _ _ E (4) Clue: Axle or scroll wheel, and “spring cheese” holder

30.) S _ _ M (5) Clue: Blues musician, and bread-loving Weight Watcher

31.) S _ _ _ H (5) Clue: Beginning of a MacLachlan title, and a rogue-goer

32.) E _ _ C (4) Clue: Monty Python trouper, and what some allege about Harris or Holder

33.) _ _ _ A(H) (5) Clue: Hall & Oates title, and “Ryan’s Daughter”

34.) M _ _ _ _ _ L/M _ _ _ _ _ _ L (4) Clue: Karate and Judo, and a badge worn, beneath the vest, by a guy named Dillon

Ripping Off Lego Lambda Slice:

Mona and Polly were syllabic… bisyllabic

Consider the following ten words:

Words

Serum

Unintended

Dire

Advertising

Actions

Dare

Unvarnished

Suffer

Whole

Five of the ten words that begin with a W, S, U, D and A can be paired with a certain monosyllabic word. The five other words beginning with a W, S, U, D and A can be paired with a certain polysyllabic word.

The two pairing words can be used to form the name of a former television show that is also the name of a U.S. city.

What is the television show? What are the ten pairings of words?

Dessert Menu

Autographic Artist Dessert:

Symbolisiness model poses as art

Name a well-known American company. Replace a symbol used in the name with one of the two letters the symbol stands for. Remove a space appearing in its name. The result is the signature that an opinionated and prolific artist used when signing his/her artwork.

What is the company? Who is the artist?

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.

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{4 +}pi⁴SERVED

Welcome to our January 22^nd edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

We are pleased and honored to welcome back patjberry as a guest puzzle contributor this week. His excellent original puzzle appears directly beneath our main MENU heading. It is titled “Sing Sing Song Song Slice: Mary and Polly were lovers…music lovers.”

Thank you, patjberry! (Hints are available from Patrick if you run into a solving roadblock.)

Also on this week’s menu are a second helping of “LegoLarceny” (Ripping Off Shortz Slice); a hop, skip and a jig of a rug-cutting morsel; two prime-time appetizers; and we top it all off with some capuchin monkey business for dessert. Enjoy!

Morsel Menu

Prest-O Epode Morsel:

Text is two-stepped

A word that means to have not two left feet but two right hands

Is what you’ll need to solve this puzzle’s curious demands.

First, take its first four letters, place the last before the first

To form no hand, instead a foot, a base for words well-versed…

Three-score-less-four such feet two-step across this text-tiled floor.

Remove the new fourth letter, then the word’s “caboose” restore.

Insert two spaces near the front to form three words at most

That sound like they could be a prestidigitator’s boast.

What is the “two-right-handed” word you began with? What is the “sleight-of-handed” boast you ended with? What “feet” did you use to two-step your way from beginning to end?

Hint: The final word in the boast has an alternative spelling.

Appetizer Menu

Not Ready For Prime Time Appetizer:

Kosher dilly-deli

“New largest prime number is found,” read some headlines this past week. What word does not belong in that sentence? In other words, what word is the “odd man out,” so to speak?

All six words in the sentence do, however, share a property that involves each word’s final letter. It is not an uncommon property, but tends to become less common the longer the word is. For example, words in this puzzle such as “sentence,” “property,” “become” and “uncommon” do not have the property, while “less,” “not,” “that” and “and” do. “Headlines” and “involves” have the property but “headline” and “involve” do not.

If we wrote “New biggest prime number is discovered,” all words would share the property except for “biggest.” (And, to be honest, although “largest” is kosher it does rely on an alternative spelling to be so.)

What is the “odd word out” in our headline? What property do all six words share?

Prime Time Appetizer:

Prime cuts

This number puzzle is inspired by discovery of the new largest prime number. Consider the following sequence of numbers:

11, 23, 29, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 67, 71, 73, 79,…

What are the next two numbers in the sequence?

MENU

Sing Sing Song Song Slice:

Mary and Polly were lovers…music lovers

Mary’s favorite song, which was recorded in the mid-1980s by a female singer with a one-word name, has a two-word title.

Polly’s favorite song, which was recorded in the late-1970s by a male singer with a more conventional two-word name, has a one-word title.

“Polly” is the ideal name for a follower and fan of her song’s singer, who is associated with a certain feathered creature that always reminds Polly of the singer. The second letter of the creature’s six letters is an “A”.

The names of Mary and the singer of her favorite song are connected “spiritually” by a six-letter word that always reminds Polly of the singer. The word begins with a “V”, which is also the first letter in the one-word title of a hit song the singer would record years later.

Add an “A” and “V” to the title of Mary’s favorite song’s title and rearrange the letters to form Polly’s favorite song’s title.

What are Mary’s and Polly’s favorite songs and their singers? What are the words that remind the women of the singers?

Hint: The female singer has been associated with a person much in the news lately.

Ripping Off Shortz Slice:

Two’s company, three’s a party!

Will Shortz’s Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle on NPR this week reads:

Think of a category in three letters in which the last two letters are the first two letters of something in the category. And the thing in the category has seven letters. Both names are common uncapitalized words. What are they?

An example of such a pair (but not with a three-letter category) is “vegetable: lettuce.”

Our rip-off puzzle gives you categories (actually some of them are more like simple clues) along with the number of letters in the answers, in {brackets}. In our version of Will Shortz’s puzzle, the last three letters of the category are the first three letters of something in the category. (For example, “Periodical” could yield “California Cattleman Magazine.”

In the final category/clue (# 26), the last four letters of the category are the first four letters of something in the category.

1. Television show: {5, 5} or {3, 1, 3, 4, 6}

2. First name of an author: {7}

3. Body part: {6}

4. Home building supply: {7}

5. “No-Name Equine” trio name: {7}

6. Japanese menu item: {7}

7. Bad habit: {6, 4, 5}

8. Congenital oral utensil: {6, 5}

9. Example of Greek prosody: {7 (with “The”)}

10. “Spacey British” politician: {3, 6}

11. Lady MacBeth’s shout: {3, 6, 4…}

12. Mode of travel: {10}

13. Wintertime wear: {8}

14. Molecular operation: {10}

15. The “Mortmere Master of English”: {11,9}

16. Entertainment that originated in Europe: {5}

17.Welcome guest who encounters unwelcome “guests” (cockroaches or other pests) at an apartment in New York: {5, 3}

18. Purchase at a spice store: {7}

19. Liverpool group lead singer {5}

20. Non-fiction writer: {6}

21. Sorority or fraternity people: {7}

22. Football star {4,9}

23. Basketball star {3,7}

24. Baseball star {4, 9} or {5, 9}

25a. Scoring play involving a hoop in basketball (first part of a hyphenated word): {5}

25b. Scoring play in basketball involving a hoop (second part of a hyphenated word): {3}

26. Term used in forecasting weather

Dessert Menu

Newsy Doozy Dessert:

Clothes capuchin monkey biz

Take the last names of two people who appeared in the same news story this past week. Rearrange these letters three times to form three different captions for the three images pictured here that do not involve clothed capuchin critters.

One caption has two words, each with the same odd number of letters. Another caption also has two words with even numbers of letters that differ by 2. A third caption has three words, two with the same odd number of letters and the third with an even number.

Who are these news makers? What are the three captions?

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.

Joseph Young's Puzzleria!

Friday, January 29, 2016

Herding the humans; Intelligent Artifice; Gibberish and gibes; Symbolisiness model poses as art; Parsley sage puzzle players’ thyme; Triclops’ third eye; Mona and Polly were syllabic… bisyllabic

Friday, January 22, 2016

Mary and Polly were lovers... music lovers; Clothes capuchin monkey biz; Two’s company, three’s a party! Text is two-stepped; Prime cuts; Kosher dilly-deli