A confederacy of parliamentary dunces; String bean sproutings; Kicking butts and taking orders; Mother Nurtures Son; Car model pedicure

P! SLICES: OVER (65 + 432) SERVED

Welcome to our May 12^th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

We are serving up seven puzzles this week, three of which are Rip/Riff-offs of Will Shortz’s “medical procedure” NPR puzzle.

Also on our menus are:

1. A Mother’s Day Decree Hors d’Oeuvre,

2. A “Civil Butt-kicking” Appetizer (but not in the Union/Confederacy sense),

3. An Owlish Slice, and

4. A “We’ve-just-bean-stringing-you-along” Dessert.

Please enjoy our puzzles. 

Hors d’Oeuvre Menu

Anapestic Hors d’Oeuvre:

Mother Nurtures Son

Consider the doggerelish decree pictured here in blue (and also reprinted in the burgundy-colored text, below).

Now consider the final word of each of the four lines in the quatrain. Take the letters in just two of these four words and rearrange them to form a three-word headline from this past week’s news.

What is this headline?

You’re as soothing and healing

As spas, chicken soup or balm.

This Decree thus doth certify:

Thou art my Supermom!

(dedicated to my mother, Helen, who would have turned 100 this year)

Appetizer Menu

Civil Service Appetizer:

Kicking butts and taking orders

Name a two-syllable term (sometimes written as two words or hyphenated) for an assignment to which certain civil servants might be assigned. Remove one letter to form a two-syllable term (sometimes hyphenated) for an order these civil servants might make during this assignment.

What are these two terms?

Hint: An order the civil servants might make during their assignment might include a homophone of one of the words in the term for the assignment.

MENU 

Dixie Owlet Chicks Slice:

A confederacy of parliamentary dunces

Name a two-syllable American business associated with vehicles. 

Swapping the initial sounds of the syllables and pronouncing the result aloud sounds like a greeting you might hear from anthropomorphic owls south of the Mason-Dixon line.

What are the business and the greeting?

Ripping Off Shortz And Bergmann Slices:

Car model pedicure

Will Shortz’s May 7^th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, composed by Warren Bergmann, reads:

Name a familiar medical procedure in nine letters. You can rearrange these letters to name two people who might get this procedure. The answer consists of informal names for these people. Who are they?

Puzzleria’s three Riffing/Ripping Off Shortz And Bergmann Slices read:

ONE:

Name a familiar medical procedure in eleven letters. You can rearrange these letters to form two words:

1. People who proverbially might need this procedure (if a certain fairy tale actually would come true), in five letters, and

2. A member of a comedy troupe (not his name, but rather what every member of this troupe was sometimes called) who seems to need this procedure in his role as a character whose hyphenated surname sounds like one of those “really fabulous prizes” they dole out to winning contestants on TV quiz shows.

What is the procedure? What are the words for these people and for the member of the comedy troupe?

TWO:

Name a familiar medical procedure in two words and nine letters. Remove two consecutive letters. Rearrange the remaining letters to spell out what might have been the root cause necessitating the procedure, in two words of four and three letters.

What is this procedure and what might have been its root cause?

THREE:

Name a nursery rhyme title in three words. Change one of its vowels to a different vowel.

The second and third words of the result describe one who executes a particular medical procedure. The first and second words of the result describe the desired result of the procedure.

What is this nursery rhyme title?

Dessert Menu 

Cash Crop Capitalism Dessert

String bean sproutings

Name a country and a crop grown in that country. The result is a string of letters in which every other letter is a vowel.

Place the capital of the country between the country and crop. The result is still a string of letters in which every other letter is a vowel.

Removing the two beginning letters from this longer string results in a still-pretty-darn-long string of 14 letters in which every other letter is the same vowel.

What are this country, capital and crop?

Hint: The country and a piece of the crop’s produce have a somewhat similar shape.

  

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.