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.