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 27^th 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 22^nd 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.