Mad bunnies, icicle boils and shoulder ooze; Din! Clangor! Wives! Pilgrim’s Evolutionary Progress; Circular turns spherical? It’s a Miracle! “Will be, or not Will be?” Objects in your mirror may appear… under construction; Just what makes “Brooms tick?”...a good clue? “Bro, flog a golf orb!” Gertrude Einstein

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{5 +} pi³ SERVED

Welcome to our March 25^th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! We invite you this week to join us on a pilgrimage. Not a holy pilgrimage, perhaps, but rather a wholly enjoyable labyrinthine journey led by puzzle maven and master Mark Scott of Seattle, also known by his blogosphere screen name skydiveboy.

Mark’s pilgrimage puzzle, which appears just below our main MENU, is titled “Pilgrim’s Evolutionary Progress.” It involves gorillas.

Other offerings this week include four “Ripping Off Shortz Slices;” a morsel marred by “mad bunnies;” An appetizer featuring links (no, not those tasty little smoky crock-pot sausage links, and not missing links either… that’s Mark’s bailiwick this week); and finally, for dessert, a gulp of “Gertrude Einstein.”

 

But, alas, Mark’s 500-pound “gorilla” in our puzzle room makes all our other challenges in this edition of Puzzleria! seem more like “chimp-change”!

So don you now your Superman’s cape. Get into pilgrimage-shape. Unravel our red-herring-tape. And… go ape:

Morsel Menu

 

Single-sided Spoon-feeding Morsel:

Mad bunnies, icicle boils and shoulder ooze

“Spoonerism” is an umbrella term that covers a variety of phonetic transpositions, such as “pack of lies” morphing into “lack of pies.” Or like “bad money” becoming “mad bunny” (which is not a good thing at all around Easter time!).

Let us now label a specific class of spoonerisms as “single-sided spoonerisms.” These spoonerisms are defined as pairs of words in which only one of the words begins with a consonant or consonant blend. For a few examples, single-side-spoonerizing “older shoes” results in “shoulder ooze,” and “bicycle oil” becomes a “icicle boil.”

 

Name what people who are making a circular argument do with the question at hand, in one word. Now name what curious people do with a question, in two words. Single-side-spoonerize the one word with the first of the two words to form something edible, in one word, and a receptacle in which this food is sometimes placed, in one word.

(Note: What’s important here is how these spoonerized words sound, not how they are spelled.)

What are the two things people do with a question? What are the food and its receptacle?    

         

Appetizer Menu

A Tiff In The Tabloids Appetizer:

Din! Clangor! Wives!

Tabloid newspapers such as the New York Post and New York Daily News are infamous for the headlines on their cover pages. The following four headlines may be possible candidates to grace the front pages of the tabloids’ Friday, March 25 editions:

“Din! Clangor! Wives!”

“Die, Raving Clowns!”

“Caviling Wonders”

“Clown Divas Reign”

Rearrange the letters in any of these four fake headlines to spell out an epithet that epitomizes the verbal back-and-forth donnybrook that might have inspired these headlines.

What is the epithet, who snarled it, and to whom was it snarled?

A Palindrome About Peg Appetizer:

“Bro, flog a golf orb!”

A fortnight ago we ran a puzzle titled “Palindromic Slice: Ice fishtailing.” It challenged Puzzlerians! to recognize the classic palindrome “Able was I ere I saw Elba” hidden within seven compound words.

The puzzle below also involves a palindrome, albeit not a classic one. (That’s the understatement of the year!)

I wrote the multi-limerick verse below many years ago, along with the related 13-word palindrome (indicated by blank spaces that solvers must fill in). Many of the words in the palindrome appear in the limerick, but not all of them. One of the words that does appear in the limerick appears twice in palindrome.

Hint: The palindrome includes a double-negative. Also, an adjective in the verse appears in the palindrome in one of its noun forms.

There once was a golf pro named Peg

Who shunned books but read every dogleg.

In her family she wore

The “jock” tag, less or more…

Hubby Ned had a head like an egg.

Ned read nothing but books night and day,

Never ever a sport did he play.

        But Ned’s gut got all churny

When Peg won a big tourney,

He feigned joy but inside he felt gray.

But green envy supplanted that gray

When Ned spied the sports headlines next day…

        In bold text: “Peg Wins Crown!”

       Now Ned really felt down,

So erased till he rubbed “Peg” away.

 

When just “... Wins Crown!” was all that Peg read

She suspected her vengeful spouse Ned…

        “Ned just might rub my name

Were he burdened with shame.”

Peg consulted her best friend, who said:

“__ __ __   __ __ __ __   __ __ __ __?

__ __ __   __ __ __ __ __ ,   __ __ __!

__ __ __ __ __   __ __ __   __ __ __ __ __ __ __

__ __ __ __ __ __ __   __ __ __   __ __ __’ __

__ __ __ __ __ __.”

MENU

Seeking Healing And Miraclulous Enlightenment Slice:

Pilgrim’s Evolutionary Progress

Many different groups go on, or want to go on, pilgrimages.

Some of these are: The Ganges River; Mecca; Golden Temple; Our Lady of Guadalupe; Lourdes, France; Bahai Gardens; Vatican; Machu Picchu; Rumi’s Tomb; Konya, Turkey; Stonehenge and Catedral de Santiago de Compostela.

Gorillas have been thinking of establishing one for themselves. Can you discover where this proposed site is?

Hints: The answer is a homophone. The gorillas’ pilgrimage site is not in Africa, but it is an actual place of great beauty that is visited by millions.

Ripping Off Shortz Slices:

Will Shortz’s NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle this past week read:

Think of a common nine-letter word that contains five consecutive consonants. Take three consecutive consonants out of the five and replace them with vowels to form another common five-letter word. What is it?

Here are our “rip-off/riff-off” puzzles:

Objects in your mirror may appear… under construction

Think of a somewhat common ten-letter word that contains five consecutive consonants, like “thumbscrew,” for example. Write the word in lowercase letters. Invert the mirror image of the word’s fourth letter. Replace the fifth letter with a thing that begins with that letter. The result is a vehicle one might see at a construction site.

What is the ten-letter word? What is the vehicle?

Just what makes “Brooms tick?”...a good clue?

Think of a reasonably common ten-letter word that contains five consecutive consonants, like “thumbscrew,” for example. If the word were an answer in a New York Times Saturday crossword grid, puzzle editor Will Shortz might use “Broomstick?” as its clue.

What is this word?

“Will be, or not Will be?”

Think of a reasonably common nine-letter word that contains five consecutive consonants. Take three consecutive consonants out of the five and replace them with a three-letter word to form a new nine-letter word that is a synonym for “upsetting, disturbing, disagreeable.”

The six letters that remain if you remove the three-letter replacement word spell out a word meaning “the near future.” The three-letter replacement word (followed by “the”) means the absence of any future.

What are this three-letter word and this six-letter word? What are these two nine-letter words?

Circular turns spherical? It’s a Miracle!

Think of a reasonably common nine-letter word that contains five consecutive consonants. Double one of those consonants and remove the other four to form a six-letter word for a manipulation that can make a circular object appear spherical.

What are these two words?

Dessert Menu

Gardyloo! Dessert:

Gertrude Einstein

Name something you might see on a city sidewalk, in five letters. Name some other things you might see on a city sidewalk, in four letters. Both words are terms with which physics students are required to be familiar. Students of literature, however, are required to be familiar with them also.

What are these two words?

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.

Shall justice prevail? Belles’ lettres; There’s no frigate like stage fright; The prose and counselors of fiction; Stagestruck/Moonstruck; Using an equalizer to add some definition; Homophonophilia! Shouter? Shill? Sap? Necessity is the mother and brainchild reunion;

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{5 +} pi³ SERVED

Welcome to our March 18^th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

We are offering easier puzzles this week, except for perhaps the four ROSS puzzles (Ripping Off Shortz Slices)… and perhaps the “Wizard Haunts Oz Appetizer” (WHOA).

As for the others:

~ You already have a head-start on, and measure of familiarity with, the other Appetizer (RTTRA).

~ The first Slice (AMUS) concerns well-reported recent news to which you surely have been exposed.

~ The Cutting Edge Dessert (CED) is as easy as cutting a piece of cake or pie, and just as delicious.

~ Finally, the double-stuffed morsel puzzles are so solvable that even a child could unwrap and savor their flavors. Maybe that’s because they were created by children! In other words, these puzzles are easy kids stuff!

Enjoy our from-fluffy-to-chewy spectrum of conundrummery!

Morsel Menu

 

Juvenile Indelinquent Morsel:

Homophonophilia

The two “mini-sounds-alike” puzzles baked into this morsel were both the brainchildren of wee children. The first puzzle was created about 20 years ago by my nephews Joe and Aaron when they were ages 6 and 5 (with encouragement from their mother (and my sister), Mary Helen. The second puzzle was created by me when I was about age 8 or 9... That was a wee bit more than 20 years ago.

Puzzle # 1:

Name a TV star who has also appeared in movies. A veil of mystery shrouds whether the star is married but, if she were, the first part of her stage name would change slightly, resulting in one that sounds a little like the name of a U.S. state.

Who is the star and what is the state?

Puzzle # 2: 

Name a famous female singer from the past, first and last names. When you say her name aloud it sounds a little like the possessive form of a symbol that represents a national organization followed by the first name of a past prominent member of that organization.

Who is the singer? What is the symbol of the organization? Who is the prominent member of the organization?

         

Appetizer Menu

Ring Tin Tin Revisited Appetizer:

Using an equalizer to add some definition

We presented a puzzle in last week’s (March 11th) Puzzleria! that pondered the possibility of Peyton Manning receiving a tin Super Bowl ring befitting his somewhat lackluster Super Bowl performance. We titled it “Going For The PlaTINum Slice: Ring Tin Tin.”

 

Take the phrase “ring tin tin.” Remove one of the spaces. Insert an equal sign (=) within the remaining space. Add ten letters to the end of one of the sides of the equation to produce a true “equality” or definition.

What is your result?

Wizard Haunts Oz Appetizer:

Shall justice prevail?

From a New Hampshire county or college or village

Rainey, Kettle or Barker dislodge, ax and pillage.

Mark “E-8” in the nickname of Yanks’ #7

On your scorecard, like scrolls St. Pete keeps up in heaven.

The Tin Woodman’s a good man, except he lacks heart.

And the Cowardly Lion meows but lacks growls.

As for Scarecrow, gray matter’s his absentee part…

Now unalphabetize that part’s only two vowels.

If you reel in a needlefish, fishing from shore,

Hula girls will dole out a fresh lei you’ll adore…

Thus, to recap: a pachyderm-man, thick-skinned, swarthy

Tromps the road’s yellow bricks, followed closely by Dorothy.

The answer to this puzzle is the name of a person in the news this past week – first, middle and last names.

Embedded within the three quatrains of the over-the-rainbow verse above are several clues that will help you discover the name. But to throw you off the trail, we have also planted some red herrings into the verse. 

For example, one such red herring is the line “The Cowardly Lion meows but lacks growls,” which has nothing to do with the answer.

Who is this person? Which clue(s) did you use to find the answer?

MENU

All Mixed Up Slice:

Shouter? Shill? Sap?

The following list of words may have been used to describe a person who has been in the news lately:

Insulter

Shouter

Shill

Gangster

Rat

Sap

“Kept pay”

Rearrange (that is, mix up and then unmix into new words) the 41 letters in those descriptive words to form:

1. The first and last names of a person who spoke at a recent event;

2. A phrase the person spoke, and 

3. To whom the phrase referred.

What is your result?

Ripping Off Shortz Slices:

Will Shortz’s NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle this past week read:

Take the name of a well-known actress. Her first name starts with the three-letter abbreviation for a month. Replace this with the three-letter abbreviation of a different month, and you’ll get the name of a famous poet. Who are these two people?

We offer the following four “piggyback” puzzles that both “riff-off” and “rip-off” Shortz:

Belles’ lettres

Take the name of a not-so-well-known novelist. Her first name starts with the three-letter abbreviation of a month. Replace this with the three-letter abbreviation of a different month, and you’ll get the name of a somewhat famous late poet. Who are these two people?

There’s no frigate like stage fright

Take the first two names of a not-so-well-known actress who used a three-name stage name. Her first name starts with the three-letter abbreviation of a month. Replace this with the three-letter abbreviation of a different month, ignore the final third of the actress’s stage name, and you’ll get the name of a semi-famous late poet. Who are these two people?

Stagestruck/Moonstruck

Take the first and last names of a late actress. Her first name starts with the first three letters of a month. Replace this with the first three letters of a different month, and you’ll get a result – including both first and last names – that includes an interior string of three consecutive identical letters. Remove the identical letter in the middle to form the actress’s stage name. Who is this actress?

Hint: The actress’s middle name begins with the name of a month.

The prose and counselors of fiction

Take the first and last names of a character on a past popular legal drama on TV. The first name starts with the three-letter abbreviation of a month. The surname of the TV character is the name of a different month. Replace this abbreviation with the three-letter abbreviation of another different month, and you’ll get the first and last names of a title character in a novel.

Who are these two characters?

Hint: The actress who portrayed the TV character has the same first name as the character she portrayed.

Hint: The three-letter abbreviation of the month that is the surname of the two characters can replace the first three letters in either of the two characters’ first names to form a common first name for a girl. A close variation of that name appears in one of this week’s links.

Dessert Menu

Cutting Edge Dessert:

Necessity is the mother and brainchild reunion

The best inventions are often described glowingly as being “groundbreaking,” “trailblazing” or “cutting edge.” Many inventors claim that their brainchild is a “game-changer.”

Can you think of an invention created within the past century that has been a game-changer not only figuratively but also quite literally at times?

Hint: This invention is getting quite a workout during the present fortnight.

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.

That sheepskin is legit? Hogwash! Ring Tin Tin; Dates in the colander; Ice fishtailing; A, E, I, O, and sometimes U;

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{5 +} pi³ SERVED

Welcome to 3/11/16, our March 11^th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

No guest puzzlemeisters this week, alas, but we do have five taste-bud-tickling and brain-bending puzzles on our menus:

A Menagerie Morsel more mouth-watering than pheasant under glass; a Prime Time Appetizer that pits your wits against pitted colander dates; two “hard” slices – Philosophers’ Stone, and Going For The PlaTINum; and, at the bottom of our blog, to top it all off, a Vacation DesTINation Dessert.

Glass. Pits. Stone. PlaTINum… Pretty hard stuff. Just don’t break a wisdom tooth in your quest for the mysterious truth.

Morsel Menu

 

Menagerie Morsel:

That sheepskin is legit? Hogwash!

Consider the following seven compound words:

Crablegs*, hogwash, sheepskin, tigereye, foxfire, sawhorse, camelback

Explain why these seven words are in the order they are in.

Hint: “Sheepskin” and “foxfire” could switch places with one another. What’s more, “dogfight,” “fishtail” or “catfish” could be substituted for either “sheepskin” or “foxfire.” 

The five other words, however, must stay put.

 

(* Yes, we realize the lexicons-that-be proclaim “crab legs” to be two words. But the dictionaries are wrong! “Crablegs” ought to be just one compound word.)

Appetizer Menu

Prime Time Appetizer:

Dates in the colander

Write the 365 (366) days of the year as 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4…12/29, 12/30, 12/31. Those dates can be divided into two “colanders” – one of 173 dates and another of 192 (193) dates. 

If the number 1 is considered a prime number (even though it is NOT a prime number), the colanders contain 182 dates and 183 (184) dates.

How is the number of dates in each pair of colanders determined?

Hint: Your answer should probably include the words “prime” and “non-prime.” The word “pitted” won’t be necessary, however. 

 

MENU

Philosophers’ Stone Slice:

Ice fishtailing

Add a consonant to the end of a philosopher’s surname. Place the result after a word for something that anglers (like Andy and Opie Taylor, for example) may want to do to a fish, thereby forming a one-word synonym for “having no _____.”

Add the same consonant to the end of the same philosopher’s surname. Place the result before a word for something inexperienced motorists may want to do (but would be better off not doing) when they begin fishtailing in icy or snowy road conditions, thereby forming a two-word phrase that would generally result in “having no ability to _____.”

The same word goes into both blanks. What is that word? What are the one-word synonym and the two-word phrase?

Going For the PlaTINum Slice:

Ring Tin Tin

For half a century the National Football League has been awarding Super Bowl rings to the victors of their annual championship game. These rings are typically fashioned from gold, with diamonds inset. The Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl XLV ring was made of platinum.

 

Denver Broncos players will receive a ring for winning Super Bowl 50 (or the “Super BowL,” as I like to call it) earlier this colander year… oops, that should be, calendar year. 

The Broncos’ Super Bowl championship ring will likely be made of gold. But rumor has it that the NFL may present one tin ring this year to a particular Bronco player whose Super Bowl performance was less-than-stellar.

 

Rearrange the 20 letters printed in the scarlet italic text to form a three-word headline that sat atop a sports news story that broke this past week.

What is this headline?

Dessert Menu

Vacation Destination Dessert:

A, E, I, O, and sometimes U

Think of four 6-letter nouns that share their first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth letters in common. The third letters of the words are A, E, I and O.

Replace the fourth, fifth and sixth letters of the four nouns with the same single letter. In the word containing the O, also replace the first letter with a consonant digraph. These replacements form three new 4-letter nouns and one new 5-letter noun that are homophones, respectively, of the four 6-letter originals. 

 

The new homophone nouns are (in alphabetical order): A plant; a type of bending; a cable/satellite TV network (an uppercase word); and a flower. 

Form a fifth noun that has the same first, second and fourth letters as the 4-letter nouns containing the A, E and I, and insert a U as its third letter. This 4-letter noun can mean “a material that promotes fusion.”

What are the four 6-letter nouns, the four new homophone nouns, and the noun for the material that promotes fusion?

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.