Friday, May 27, 2016

No Isle of Man is an island nation; Free admission, drinks cost extra; Dancin’ n’ drinkin’ n’ detectin’; Number is missing in sequence, whence seeking is a must; Professional “pliers”; Ranting raving politics; Bon-mot-filled eclairs; Antiwar song = military slang; Names become games

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.

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.

Friday, May 20, 2016

That’s a horse of a certain color; Summer in the sultry city; Capturing creatures with captions; Call-out Shelter; What’s with Achilles’ tendentious ‘tude, Dude? Demons and Cherubs; A cast of four thous… and thespians all; Regaining full sail-ient; A stein of rum, a cob of corn, a pot of possum, and thou;

P! SLICES: OVER e4 + pi4 + (pi.e)2 + phi11 SERVED

Welcome to our May 20th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

This week our marquee feature is a gold medal puzzle about dramatic bronzed gods (and a goddess) playing parts up on the silver screen. The creator of this “mysterious cinematic mythology” is our friend Mark Scott of Seattle, also known by his cyber-screen name, skydiveboy.
 
Mark’s puzzle appears immediately beneath our main MENU under the title, “Silver Screen Slice: A cast of four thous… and thespians all.”

Also appearing on our menus this week are:
4 “Ripping/Riffing Off Mike” puzzles. (These four challenges “piggyback” off Blainesvillian Mike Hinterberg’s excellent NPR puzzle from this past Sunday.)
1 Grammytical Hors d’Oeuvre
1 Miraculous Morsel
1 Name-in-the-news Appetizer
1 Eat-no-lean Dessert

So, set your sights skyward, dive into our puzzle pool and, boy oh boy, please enjoy!


Hors d’Oeuvre Menu

Grammy Hors d’Oeuvre (Tasty Indulgence):
Demons and Cherubs

Name a Grammy-worthy and Grammy-honored artist. Alter the artist’s full name by replacing its middle letter (a consonant) with a vowel, and by inserting an “R” somewhere in the beginning of the name and an “I” somewhere in the end of the name.

The first two-thirds of the altered name now spell out a member of an organization of youths. The final third of the altered name now spells out one of the artist’s demons.
 
Now add an “E” to the end of the final third of the altered name, forming a word that a member of the youth organization might well aspire to be.

What is the artist’s name? What is the artist’s demon? What is the organization of youths? What might a member of that organization aspire to be?

Ripping Off Mike Hinterberg’s d’Oeuvre:
Summer in the sultry city

Will Shortz’s May15th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle was submitted by Mike Hinterberg (whose screen name is “mike_hinterberg”), a regular poster on the excellent Blainesville puzzle blog. Mike’s puzzle reads:

Name a creature in nine letters. The name contains a T. Drop the T, and the remaining letters can be rearranged to spell two related modes of transportation. What are they? 


Puzzleria!’s “Ripping Off Mike Hinterberg’s d’Oeuvre reads:

Name a creature in nine letters. The name contains a R. Drop the R, and the remaining letters can be rearranged to spell two welcome words on a sultry summer’s day. 

What are they?

Morsel Menu

Medical Miracle Morsel:
Regaining full sail-ient

“No salient part in pants.”

Rearrange the twenty letters in that five-word phrase – a phrase which describes an unfortunate physical predicament – to form a two-word solution to the predicament.

The solution has made news lately in “Health and Medical” sections of newspapers and websites.

What is this two-word solution?

Riffing Off Mike Morsel:
What’s with Achilles’ tendentious ‘tude, Dude?

Name a creature in nine letters. The name contains exactly one T. Drop the T, and the remaining letters can be rearranged to spell two words related to “The Iliad.” 

What are they? 

Appetizer Menu

Name In The News Appetizer
Call-out Shelter

Name a word that means better-sheltered. Name a two-word phrase that might describe a place providing better shelter.

Call out the two-word phrase and the single word, in that order, so that everyone may hear the name of a person who has recently been in the news.
 
Who is this person? What are the word and phrase related to “shelter”?

Hint: the two-word phrase is spelled differently from the person’s first name. The single word and person’s surname are spelled identically.


Ripping Off Mike Appetizer:
Capturing creatures with captions

Name a creature in ten letters. The name contains a J. Drop the J, and the remaining letters can be rearranged to spell a two-word caption referring to the image shown here. 

What is this caption? 

MENU

Silver Screen Slice:
A cast of four thous… and thespians all

Take the first names of two actors, past and present, who share the same six-letter last name. Add an E and rearrange the result to get the last names of an actress of the past and an actor of the present.

Who are these four famous movie stars?

Flying Fish Riffing Off Mike Slice:
That’s a horse of a certain color
 
Name a creature in nine letters. The name contains a G. Drop the G, and the remaining eight letters can be rearranged to spell two different creatures: a fish and a horse of a certain color. What are they?

Name the same nine-letter creature, restoring its G. The name also contains a U. Drop the U, and the remaining eight letters can be rearranged to spell two different creatures: a flying insect and the same horse of a certain color as before (in the first half of this puzzle slice). 

What are they?

Dessert Menu

Mrs. Sprat’s Dietary Dessert:
A stein of rum, a cob of corn, a pot of possum, and thou

Ron, Agnes, Ruth and Eric are slim, so dine on a plum, corn on the cob, oxen, possum in a pot, sea brine (ick!), gin or rum in a stein, and thou. Mercy, my God!

All 35 words in the paragraph above share something somewhat unusual in common.

What is it?

Hint: Exactly three words in the puzzle’s title, “A stein of rum, a cob of corn, a pot of possum, and thou,” do not share the “something unusual in common.”


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.

Friday, May 13, 2016

Pastry from the Yreka Bakery; Superatomic wanderers; What does the fox… sayfguard?; The potable calling the kettle “dark-colored”; Psychic powerhouse; Canon shot?; “Page turners” & “Turn pagers off”; An utterly united state; Pick ’n’ grip ’n’ grin?

P! SLICES: OVER e4 + pi4 + (pi.e)2 + phi11 SERVED

Welcome to our May 13 edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! Tricky puzzles this week. Hope you’re all feeling lucky.

We welcome this week a few new contributors to our Puzzleria! blog – Chuck from St. Louis, and SuperZee. Both come to us by way of Blaine’s blog, where they comment regularly.

Chuck and SuperZee join skydiveboy, ron and patjberry as, we hope, more-than-less regular enshrined members of our Mt. Puzzlympus of labyrinth-crafting gods. They are hence permanently sculpted into our Mt. Rushmore as leaders of the bafflers-in-the-belfry world.

SuperZee posted what we recognized as a framework for a “Ripping Off Shortz” puzzle on Blaine’s blog this past Sunday (see the comment at “SuperZee Sun May 08, 12:58:00 PM PDT”).


We tacked a few planks onto SuperZee’s framework, and the result is this week’s “Ripping Off SuperZee Appetizer: What does the fox… sayfguard?”

Chuck from St. Louis contributes an elegant and educational (it was educational for me, anyway) challenge titled “Handel Bars Slice: Pick ’n’ grip ’n’ grin?” It appears immediately beneath our main MENU.
New blood. No sweat. Two years and 96 tears of labyrinthine lachrymality. 

’Tis now time to match wits with the Puzzlerian! My?terion. (Just be sure to shed some beads of mental enjoyment in the course of your puzzle-solving process!) 

Hors d’Oeuvre Menu

Reaping What Thou Hast Sown Hors d’Oeuvre:
Canon shot?

The Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law is a vast “legal field” filled with dogmas – called “canons” – sown by church councils over the centuries. But recent news from the Vatican has raised the future possibility of “a canon mowed.”

Rearrange the 11 letters in “a canon mowed” to describe, in two words, one potential fruit of such a harvest.  

Ripping Off Shortz Hors d’Oeuvre:
Psychic powerhouse

Will Shortz’s May 8 Mother’s Day National Public Radio Sunday puzzle read:
Name something in 11 letters that’s a common household item. You can rearrange the first six letters to form a synonym of a word spelled by the middle three letters. What is the item, and what are the words?

Here is our Ripping Off Shortz Hors d’Oeuvre (ROSHO):

Name some common household items found in the kitchen, an 11-letter plural word. Form an adjective with its third, fifth, tenth and first letters, in that order. Place the last six letters of the household items after this adjective, forming a two-word phrase describing what a self-proclaimed psychic often did to prove he/she had a particular paranormal power. That power is spelled-out by the middle three letters of the 11-letter word.

What are these household items? Who is the pseudo-psychic, what did he/she do to “prove” her/his paranormal power, and what was the power?

Morsel Menu

Books Office Morsel:
“Page turners” & “Turn pagers off”

Name things that books and movies might have, in nine letters. The singular form of the word contains two consecutive letters that form a common English pronoun. 

Remove the pronoun to form an adjective that often modifies “hints” or “clues” ... but not a hint, for example, like the unnuanced straightforward hint presented in the previous sentence (about the common pronoun formed by consecutive letters).


What are these things that some books and movies have? What is the adjective?



Riffing Off Shortz Morsel:
Pastry from the Yreka Bakery

Name something – in 12 letters and two words – that is a common household kitchen item.

Select the first and fourth letters from the first word. They spell a two-letter English word whose French translation is the four-letter French word formed by selecting the first, fifth, sixth letters from the second word and adding an “e” to the end.

Take the second word’s unselected three letters and spell them backward to form the second name of a woman associated with pastry. Take the first word’s unselected four letters and spell them backward (if you want to… it’s up to you) to form the first name of a man associated with pastry.

What is the household kitchen item? What are the English word and its French translation? Who are the woman and man associated with pastries?

Appetizer Menu

Ripping Off SuperZee Appetizer

(The following puzzle is SuperZee’s idea.)
Name something in 11 letters that is seen commonly in one particular room of households.

The middle three letters spell out the name of a critter.
Replace the third letter of the 11-letter household item with a duplicate of the fourth letter. Take the first seven letters and rearrange them to form a synonym of the 3-letter critter.

What is this thing seen in households? What are the two words for the critter?

I Do Espouse Appetizer:
An utterly united state

Name something you might find on a table at a wedding reception. Change its first letter to its “alphanumeric 27-sum complement” (see chart below) and spell it backward.

Divide the result into three words – one of them a contraction – forming a phrase the bride might have uttered a time or two or more in her life. 

This phrase is also a part of the title of a 1960s-era pop song that the groom should now probably stop uttering.

What might you find on the reception table? 
What might the bride have uttered? 
What ought the groom stop uttering?  

 

MENU

Handel Bars Slice:
Pick ’n’ grip ’n’ grin?

Name a musical instrument. Remove a letter and rearrange the remaining letters to reveal which hand has a firmer grip on the instrument.

What is this instrument?




Riffing Off Shortz Slice:
The potable calling the kettle”dark-colored”

Name something in 10 letters that’s a common household item associated with a dark-colored potable. You can rearrange the outside six letters to form another dark-colored potable. That potable is roughly the same dark color as a potable spelled out by the middle four letters.

Rearrange all letters in the 10-letter word to form a two-word synonym of a dark-colored “inferior wine” (like the stuff they were serving at the Cana wedding until J.C. did his miraculous stuff).

What is the household item associated with a dark-colored potable? What is this dark-colored potable? What are the other three dark-colored potables, including the two-word synonym for “inferior wine”?

Hint 1: You can rearrange the 10 letters of the household item to form three words:
1. a 3-letter container for the potable associated with the household item
2. a 3-letter name for one of the other dark-colored potables, the one that was formed by rearranging the outside six letters of the household item
3. Andrea, Sharon, Caroline or Jim (a 4-letter capitalized word)

Hint 2: Change the fourth letter of the word spelled out by the middle four letters to form the first name of a composer and songwriter whose last name is the potable formed by the six rearranged outside letters.

Hint 3: Replace the final letter of the two-word synonym for “inferior wine” with the next letter in the alphabet to form an informal name for a contemplative order of Franciscan nuns. 

Dessert Menu

Microscopic/Telescopic Dessert:
Superatomic wanderers

Particle physics research often involves creating models, making calculations, solving derivatives and plotting graphs that include “lepton axes.” 

This realm of the subatomic is like an “infinitesimal inner space” populated by nuclei orbited by spinning protons, neutrons, electrons, leptons, muons and neutrinos – animated by forces not of gravity but of electromagnetism.

On a scale vaster than the subatomic (and vaster even than atomic subs), heavenly bodies guided by gravity spin as they orbit about countless stellar “nuclei.” Recent science news reports have documented the fruits of telescopic research probing this vast outer space, tracking and identifying a number of such heavenly bodies. This research has implications for the potential of extraterrestrial life, perhaps even for human life which really would be out-of-this-world.

Rearrange the 10 letters in “lepton axes” to form the word astronomers use to name such heavenly bodies. What is this word?


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.