Picking palms and tea leaves; Nation-building with metal infrastructure; Clothe a rising star and put him in your pocket...; Captions Outrageous;

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER (876 + 54) SERVED

Welcome to our November 3rd edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

We are making up this week for last week’s dearth of Riffing-Off-Shortz Slices... “dearth,” as in “ZERO!” So, prepare yourselves for Puzzleria!’s “Greatest-Number-of-Riff-Offs Show on Earth”! Our Riffing-Off Shortz Slice features three sections of seven, nine and two puzzles, for a total of 18!

Also on our menus this week are:

⇓ One Appetizer that smacks of Magic 8-Balls;

⇓ One “stellar-fashion-statement” Slice; and

⇓ One Dessert that might leave the taste of rebus in your craw... or cranium.

Test your mettle as you taste all 21 of our puzzles. And, please enjoy.

Appetizer Menu

Kindly Calm Us And De-qualm Us Nostrodamus Appetizer:

Picking palms and tea leaves

Add a space within a word for a professional person whose job it is to predict outcomes of future events. 

Interchange the two letters after the space and capitalize one of them. The result resembles a two-word phrase for what a patron of the person’s services might become if the person does a good job.

What are the word for this professional person and the two-word phrase?

MENU

Easy As Piece Of Cake Slice:

Clothe a rising star and put him in your pocket...

A longtime American clothier has been known for a particular item of clothing that has been popularly known by its founder’s name. A rising star wore that item of clothing in a movie that inspired multitudes of teens to buy it. 

The manufacturer for a time even officially named the item after the star, although the item was still widely known by its more popular historical name.

What is this popular historical name? By what name was the star known? What interesting thing do these names have in common?

Riffing Off Shortz Slices:

Nation-building with metal infrastructure 

Will Shortz’s October 29th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle reads:

This week’s challenge sounds easy, but it's a little tricky. Name a well-known nationality. Drop a letter, and the remaining letters in order will name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

Puzzleria’s! Riffing Off Shortz Slices read:

ONE:

This riff-off of Will’s challenge sounds easy, and it is. Name the following seven well-known nationalities, in which you: 

1. Drop a letter, and the remaining letters in order will name a part of the body.

2. Drop an ancient Roman 51 and the remaining letters in order will name a “Spice.”

3. Drop the first name of a TV sitcom sewer worker or talking horse and the remaining letters in order will name a sound often heard on the hardwood when the shot is good.

4. Drop a letter, and the remaining letters in order will name a book where one can read the words of the archangel Gabriel.

5. Drop a letter, and the remaining letters in order will name a synonym for nerd.

6. Replace the title of a long-runng TV drama with a hyphen, and the remaining letters in order will name one of the foes of “Machine Gun” Kelly.

7. Drop a place where once there was no room (thereby prompting an al fresco Nativity) and the remaining letters in order will name a creature that possesses a body part spelled out by the first three letters of the original nationality.

TWO:

This second riff-off challenge sounds difficult, but if you solve one of its seven parts, the other six will topple easily, like dominoes. 

1. Some members of Congress want to repeal Obamacare; others want to protect it. Drop a letter from the 13 letters in REPEAL and PROTECT  and the remaining letters in reverse order might (depending on how you removed a letter) name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

2. The three men Don McLean admires most might be described as the Eternal Trio. Drop a letter from the words ETERNAL TRIO, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

3. A litter of kittens or puppies is pretty neat. But litter strewn about the countryside or on city streets is not at all neat. Drop a letter from the words LITTER and NEAT, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

4. Langston, a landlord in London, once leased one of his flats to a meter maid named Rita. She was the most comely bird to whom he had ever leased a flat; in other words, Rita was his ________ ______, a superlative adjective and noun of nine and six letters. Drop one letter from those two words, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

5. “Fake news” is trending lately in the... well, in the news. A synonym of “fake news” might be “untrue material.” Drop a letter from the words UNTRUE MATERIAL, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

6. The U.S. Treasury and U.S. Mint have long been circulting coins of various denominations (the Mercury head dime, for instance) that are made from various metals from the periodic table: including gold, silver, copper, nickel, zinc, iron, lead and manganese.Thus, one might say the U.S. Treasury and U.S. Mint circulate metal. Drop a letter from the words CIRCULATE METAL, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal that is not used in minting coins — yet still is one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

7. In the video shown here, a cow doing a ballet dance totters, then falls. Drop two letters from the words BALLET COW TOTTERS, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

8. Will Shakespeare’s Hamlet claims that, although he knows “a hawk from a handsaw” when the wind is southerly, he is otherwise a bit shaky in his mental perceptions. Shakespeare explores such themes of madness also in “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” and other tragedies. More recent authors have also mined dementia as “thematic gold”: Jean-Paul Sartre in “The Room,” Joseph Heller in “Catch-22,” Kurt Vonnegut in “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and Ken Kesey in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” for example.  One might call such works “mad literature.” 

Drop a letter from the words MAD LITERATURE, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. 

What is it?

9. Mr. Bringhome D. Bacon and Ms. Quite A. Tomato are wed, but after a few months the expiration date on their wedded bliss comes due. Sure, Mr. Bacon brings home plenty of bread, more than enough to maintain the lifestyle to which Ms. Bacon-Tomato had become accustomed. Still, some vital ingredient is missing, and all the Mayo in Minnesota cannot keep their their till-mold-do-us-slice sandwich from becoming unglued. So they divorce. 

A year passes. Mr. Bacon eventually figures out what the missing ingredient was. He visits Ms. Tomato and re-proposes punnily using two simple words of seven letters each. 

Drop a letter from these 14 letters, and the remaining letters can be arranged to name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What is it?

THREE:

This third riff-off challenge sounds easy, but it’s a little tricky. 

1. Name a well-known nationality ending with and N. Change the N to a different consonant. Drop a letter from this result, and the remaining letters in order will name a metal — one of the elements on the periodic table. What are this nationality and this metal?

2. Name a not-so-well-known island nation. Place a one-letter word to the left of it to form what would make a good two-word title for its national anthem (although the nation’s actual national anthem bears a different, longer title). Remove the space between words and drop a letter. The remaining letters in order (if you change the initial letter) will name a continent that is not one of the elements on the periodic table. What are this island nation, bogus two-word national anthem title and continent?

Dessert Menu

Playing Chinese Whispers (AKA Telephone) With Pictures Dessert:

Captions Outrageous

Write a caption for the first image pictured here, the one labeled #1 in blue. 

The caption contains two words of 2 and 5 letters.

Rearrange the letters in that first caption  to form a different caption for the second image pictured here, the one labeled #2 in blue. This caption contains two words of 3 and 4 letters.

Write a second, different caption for the second image pictured here, the one labeled #2 in blue. This caption has the same second word as the first #2 caption, but the first word this time contains 6, not 3, letters.

Finally, rearrange the ten letters in that longer caption  to form a caption for the third image pictured here, the one labeled #3 in blue. This caption contains three words of 1, 4 and 5 letters.

What are these four captions? 

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.