P! SLICES: OVER e4 + pi4
+ (pi.e)2 + phi11 SERVED
Welcome to our
May 27th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!
Our main puzzle
event this week is a missing-number enigma created by ron – master of the
mysterious, creative contributor and valued Puzzlerian! extraordinaire.
ron’s puzzle
appears immediately beneath our main MENU under the title “Seek And Ye
Shall Achieve Success Slice: Number is
missing in sequence, whence seeking is a must.” It a clever and tough, but
fair, challenge.
Also appearing
on our menus this week are these realtively “easy-as-pie-ce-of-cake” posers:
3 “Ripping/Riffing
Off Shortz” puzzles – an Hors d’Oeuvre, Appetizer and Slice;
1 pictorial
Hors d’Oeuvre;
2 Morsels – one
naming games, and the other remembering all who have served and those who still
serve;
1 “stumper” of
an Appetizer; and to top it all off,
1 Dessert that
asks you to fill in a dozen “pastries,” and then try baking up one of your own
from scratch.
Got the
puzzling itch yet? We’ll wager you do. So scratch ’n’ sniff our menus and enjoy
the wonderfully bewildering aromas that waft their way up through your
olfactory and on into your gray matter…
What matters
most, of course, is that you enjoy:
Hors d’Oeuvre
Menu
Every
Picture Tells A Story Hors d’Oeuvre
Free
admission, drinks cost extra
Write a
two-word, ten-letter caption for the image pictured here. Rearrange the letters
to form two words – in 3 and 7 letters – naming what an entertainer recently
freely admitted he/she once “took to.”
What is your caption? What did the entertainer admit to doing, or “taking to”?
Hint: One of
the words in the caption consists entirely of uppercase letters.
Ripping Off
Shortz Hors d’Oeuvre:
Professional
“pliers”
Will Shortz’s
May 22nd NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle reads:
Name a common
household item in 6 letters. Change the middle two letters to a P, and you’ll
get the 5-letter last name of a famous person who professionally used that
item. What’s the item, and who’s the person?
Puzzleria!’s “Ripping
Off Shortz Hors d’Oeuvre reads:
Name a
common agricultural profession item in 6 letters. Change the middle two letters
to a P, and you’ll get the 5-letter last name of a fictional person who plied
that profession. What’s the profession, and who’s the person?
Morsel Menu
News Output Morsel:
Names become
games
Take the surnames
of two persons who have very recently been in the news – surnames of 5 and 7 letters.
Replace one of
the letters in the 5-letter surname with the letter four places deeper in the
alphabet to spell out a well-known low-tech game.
Replace one of the letters in
the 7-letter surname with the letter five places deeper in the alphabet to
spell out a not-so-well-known higher-tech computer game.
Who are these
persons and what are these games?
Hint: Children
who play these games can improve certain skills:
The 5-letter
game can improve _ _ _ _ _ skills.
The 7-letter
game can improve _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ skills.
The words that
fill in the blanks begin with the same letter, and the 16 letters that belong
in the blanks can be rearranged to form the phrase:
“A most
theatric mom.”
Observing
Those Serving America Morsel:
Antiwar song
= military slang
An antiwar song
title is also a two-word slang title of a military occupation (“military occupation”
in the sense of “doing one’s duty,” that is, not in the sense of “invade, capture and settle in”).
Replace the
song title’s middle vowel with two different vowels, shift the existing space
elsewhere, and insert an additional space to form a three-word phrase that
describes what persons serving abroad in the U.S. military might do to keep in
touch with their families back home.
What is this
song title? What might military personnel do to keep in touch?
Appetizer
Menu
Name In The
News Appetizer
Ranting,
raving politics
Over the course
of the past year, a headline that could well have run in U.S. newspapers pretty
much every day was:
“Debased
ranters stump.”
Rearrange the 19
letters in those three words to spell out another 3-word headline that might well
appear in newspapers within the next week or so.
What is this
potential headline?
Riffing Off
Shortz Appetizer:
No Isle of
Man is an island nation
Place two
3-letter common household kitchen items next to each other without a space.
Remove the third letter of the result, and you’ll get the 5-letter name of an
island nation.
Place, again
without a space, something often contained within the first household item in
front of the surname of a personality who professionally used the second
household item. Replace a first-person pronoun from the middle of the result
with a P and you’ll get the same 5-letter nation.
Place, again
without a space, the same something often contained within the first household
item in front of another 3-letter household container. Insert two vowels in the
middle of this result to form the name of a resident of another island nation.
What are these
two island nations?
MENU
Seek And Ye
Shall Achieve Success Slice:
Number is
missing in sequence, whence seeking is a must
What is the
missing number in the following sequence?
9, 22, 24, 12,
__, 4, 13
Ripping Off Shortz Slice:
Dancin’ n’
drinkin’ n’ detectin’
Name the plural form of a Latin line
dance, in 6 letters. Change the middle two letters to a P, and you’ll get the
5-letter last name of a musician who made music that might accompany line
dancing, and who used a compound-word stage name as his first name. 
Replace the
middle two letters of that compound stage name with two others to form the title of a
1970’s C&W novelty song sung by a performer with the initials C and W in
her/his name.
Remove the P in the 5-letter last name of the musician who made music that might accompany line dancing. In its place insert a 3-letter word to spell out the second word (in 7 letters) of two-word-named drinks mentioned in lyrics of a song sung by a singer whose last name is the same as that of a fictional detective. The 3-letter word you inserted is a synonym of the second half of the musician’s compound-word stage name.
Remove the P in the 5-letter last name of the musician who made music that might accompany line dancing. In its place insert a 3-letter word to spell out the second word (in 7 letters) of two-word-named drinks mentioned in lyrics of a song sung by a singer whose last name is the same as that of a fictional detective. The 3-letter word you inserted is a synonym of the second half of the musician’s compound-word stage name.
What is the
Latin line dance? Who is the musician with the stage name? What is the 1970’s
C&W novelty song? What were the drinks mentioned in the song by the singer
with the fictional-detective last name?
Dessert
Menu
Patissiere
Rempli Dessert:
Bon-mot-filled
eclairs
There are a
dozen incomplete paragraphs below, each which can be completed by filling in
the two blanks at the end of each paragraph with two words. (If you can solve just one of the
paragraphs, the others are sure to also topple like dominoes.)
After you have filled in the 24 blanks, can you add a
paragraph of your own with two blanks at the end that need filling in, thereby
producing an “oddly even” baker’s-dozen of “double-jelly-filled” eclairs/cannolis/cream
puffs?
1. Get thee to a
nunnery? Conventional wisdom suggests that a convent (nunnery) is a dwelling
that a religious community inhabits __ _____.
2. I did a
spring-cleaning in my utility room and den, loading my pick-up truck full of
metal recyclables: a fireplace grate, wire coat hangers, a discarded dryer
drum, fireplace screens, ironing boards, shovels, pokers, andirons __ _____.
3. Whenever I toss
together a big Waldorf salad for my dinner guests, the main ingredient I
feature may be raisins, celery, walnuts, bok choi, apples from my orchard, __
_____.
4. The Republican
National Committee ordered not just kilograms or pounds of Donald Trump
banners, placards, and campaign buttons, ___ ____.
5. In the
historical struggle to attain civil rights, the names Douglas, Lincoln, Parks,
Mandela and Meredith all deserve great credit, but perhaps no one is more
worthy of our thanking ____ _____.
6. In civil
lawsuits, it is decided whether a plaintiff be awarded compensation for
injuries __ _____.
7. After I totally
blanked on my history exam, my history teacher told me to see her as soon as
possible to discuss the possibility that I may flunk her course; but, since I
have a calculus final exam the very next period, I will have to deal with that
ominous aftermath ____ _____.
8. Public
Broadcasting Service NewsHour anchor Hari Sreenivasan substitutes for either of
the regular co-anchors Judy Woodruff or Gwen Ifill __ ___.
9. Payton,
Sanders, Simpson, Dorsett, Dickerson, Brown – all could elude linebackers,
break tackles, set up their blockers, cut on a dime and survey the entire
field, but none were as gifted as open-field assayers __ _____.
10. As the other
Chicago prohibition agents attending the May 1957 wake in Pennsylvania strolled
past the open casket, it was obvious to each one of them that their fellow
Untouchable was, even in death’s stillness, _____ ____.
11. On “Leave it to
Beaver,” Theodore seemed to be kind of a “mama’s boy,” doing whatever he could
to please his mother, June, while Wally seemed instead to put his best foot
forward ___ _____.
12. A Wall Street
stockbroker who is bullish on three-piece suits invests __ _____.
(Here is my own “baker’s-dozenth” paragraph. It is a “rip-off/riff-off” paragraph “piggybacking” off of Paragraph # 8, above:
13. Public Broadcasting Service NewsHour anchor Hari Sreenivasan (who is syntactically challenged... for the purposes of this paragraph anyway), when he substitutes for regular NewsHour co-anchor Gwen Ifill, announces to the PBS viewers, “Tonight, in for Gwen Ifill __ ____.”
Your effort, of course, need not “piggyback” off one of the 12 paragraphs above.)
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 Wednesdays 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.
