“We won’t give you the time of day... figure it out for yourself!” Terms of enduring endearment; Less becomes more, more or less; “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful... series” Sea creatures, iron horses, “Pachydermocrats”

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Terms of enduring endearment

Rearrange the first two-thirds of an adjective associated with young couples to spell an informal term for a young woman (especially in the United Kingdom).

Spell the last half of the adjective backward to spell a term for a young man. 

What is this “young-couplesque” adjective?

What are the terms for the young woman and man?

Appetizer Menu

Delightfully Puzzley Appetizer:

Sea creatures, iron horses, “Pachydermocrats”

1.🍄 Name a predatory creature you see at sea, in two words, whose name contains another sea creature. 

Drop three consecutive middle letters to get a
one-word “fungus among us Gophers in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

What is this two-word sea creature, and the creature contained within it?

What is the fungus?

Hint #1: A snorkler at sea who observes the two-word creature might then also observe, punnily, “That’s _ _____!”

Hint #2: The three consecutive middle letters removed from the two-word sea creature spell a seaman’s affirmative response.

2.🚂 Name a famous rock singer from the 1970’s. Drop the last two letters from the first name, and move its third letter 17 “ties” ahead, on-down the “alphabet track,” so to speak (so “A” would become “R,” For example.) 

Finally, “couple” a copy of that third letter to
the “caboose” of the singer’s surname.

The results of all this metallic, clanky, steamy “roundhouse-rail maneuvering” are botanical beauties of a particular genus, in two words.

Who is this singer?

What are these botanical beauties?

3.🌹 Name a world capital. Move its fifth letter up one step down on the “capitol-steps alphabet,” so to speak (so “A” would become “B,” for example.) 

Next, just as a senator might attach a rider to a bill, attach the first and last letters of this result, in order, to the end of the result.

The final result of all this “smoke-filled-room legislation” is a kind of flower.

What is this world capital?

What is the flower?

Hint: The name of the world capital’s nation is a homophone, not of a kind of a kind of flower but rather, of a kind of other rooted, growing and larger natural wonder. 

MENU

Here, There And Everywhere Slice:

Less becomes more, more or less

If you remove a “t” from the adverb “there” you get its antonym “here.”

Can you remove an interior vowel – and the
space it occupies – from an adjective to form what appears to be an antonym of the adjective?

What adjectival antonyms are these?

Riffing Off Shortz And Barkan Slices:

“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful... series”

Will Shortz’s May 23rd NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Roger Barkan of Savage, Maryland, reads:

Think of an eight-letter word in which the third and sixth letters are “A”. Remove the A’s. The
remaining six letters start a common series. What is it? And what comes next in that series?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Barkan Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the first name of a puzzle-maker and his hometown.  

Rearrange the letters to name a kind of motor
and where you might find a mechanic working on it. 

What is this motor and where might it be worked on?

Who is the puzzle-maker?

ENTREE #2

Think of products, in two words of four and nine letters, that you might use to make your team of bovine trained draft animals appear paler. 

Reverse the order of the words. 

Remove an “R” and two “X’s” and rearrange the remaining letters in each word to form the start a common radio or television series. 

What is it? 

And what comes next in that series?

ENTREE #3

Think of a five-letter word for a particular thing that grows. 

The third letter is “r”. Remove the “r”. 

The remaining four letters start a common series you experience at the dinner table or restaurant. 

What comes next in that series is a word that begins with “sw”.

What is the common series, and what comes next?

What is the particular thing that grows?

ENTREE #4

Take the first three words of a familiar series. 

Remove all but the first  two letters of each word, leaving six letters. 

Switch the third and fifth letters. Insert the first letter of the seventeenth word in the series beteen the last two letters. The result is a school subject.

What subject is it?

What is the familiar series?

ENTREE #5

Think of an eight-letter, two-word phrase that the World Wrestling Entertainment network (WWE) uses in promotional “WrestleMania” videos seen on YouTube and elsewhere. 

The two words begin with “L” and “T” and are
approximate rhymes (or “near rhymes”).

The second and seventh letters in this phrase are “i”. Remove the i’s. The remaining six letters start a common series. 

What is it? 

And what comes next in that series?

What is the two-word phrase?

Hint: The common series is associated with a very long-running soap opera. It is a series of words.

ENTREE #6

Take the first four words in a well-known series, one after the other without spaces.

Replace the 3rd letter with an “i”, the 6th and 7th letters with a space, and the 10th, 11th and 12th letters with a “w”. 

The result is a pair of of a pair of five-letter words:

1. The name of a periodical publication, with “The...” and

2. What an astonished reader might exclaim while reading an article in the publication.

What is the well-known series?

What are the first four words in the series?

What is the name of a periodical publication?

What might an astonished reader of the publication exclaim?

ENTREE #7

Think of a six-letter word for what some people do on professional sporting events, and a five-letter word for a unit of weight. 

Remove two letters from each word, leaving two new words that start a seasonal series.

Rearrange the letters you removed to spell a general word for a team that may participate  in a professional sporting event.

What do some people do on professional
sporting events?

What is the unit of weight?

What is the word for a professional team?

What two words start a seasonal series series?

Dessert Menu

Idiomatic Dessert:

“We won’t give you the time of day... figure it out for yourself!”

Name a two-word idiom associated with a time of day. 

Homophones of the two words are common words that are the same parts of speech. 

What is this time period?

What are the words that are the same parts of speech?

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.

Two hues, two cities, one citizen; All hands on deck: red pips are drawn, players take warn! Removing an ? enhances the flow; Zinger-zongwriter zans zithers or zylophones; Is applause a back(ward)handed compliment?

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Two hues, two cities, one citizen

Take what you call any citizen of a certain large European island and two colors on a Pacific Island’s flag.

Rearrange the letters to name two capital
cities — one in Europe and one in the United States. 

What are these two cities, one citizen and two colors? 

Hint: A third color appears in one of the five answers.

Appetizer Menu

Divining Devils (Using Tarot?) Appetizer:

All hands on deck: 

red pips are drawn, 

players
take warn!

Throughout the 20th Century there was a two-word phrase commonly used in a popular card game in this country that, in retrospect, should have been taken as a warning of what we should have feared in our current century. 

Can you name the game and the phrase?

MENU

A Capella Slice:

Zinger-zongwriter zans zithers or zylophones

Take a word that describes many musical instruments, but not zithers or xylophones. 

Move the first four letters of this word so that they replace its final letter. 

The result is the last name of a living singer/songwriter. 

Who is it?

Riffing Off Shortz Slices:

Is applause a back(ward)handed compliment?

Will Shortz’s May 16th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle reads:

Name a popular singer — first and last names.
Change one letter to a “P” and read the result backward. You’ll get what many people do around this singer. Who is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a popular puzzle-maker — just the last name. 

Change one letter to a to a different letter, read the result backward, and add an apostrophe. 

You’ll get what many people might drink that
will likely impede their ability to solve the puzzle-maker’s puzzles. 

Who is it?

Hint: The puzzle-maker’s first name appears somewhere in the text of this puzzle.

ENTREE #2

Name a living actress who is a native of the Magnolia State — first and last names. 

Change one letter to a “P” and read the result backward. 

You’ll get what J. M. W. Turner, Jacques-Louis David and Paul Delaroche once decided to do. 

Who is this actress?

What did those three people once decide to do?

ENTREE #3

Name a popular singer — first and last names. Spell the result backward. 

Take the first seven letters and the 11th and 13th letters of this result and rearrange them to spell the phrase “her dirges,” which is how some people describe the singer’s songs. 

The letters that remain, in order, will spell a style of jazz (which is decidedly not dirgeful!) developed in the 1940s in the United States. 

Who is the singer?

What is the non-dirgeful style of jazz?

ENTREE #4

Each student in a 1960s-era geography class of 50 is assigned to sketch a image of one of the fifty United States which will then be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a U.S. map. 

The teacher, Pam Plat, strolls the classroom aisles assigning each student a different state to sketch. 

When she finally approaches the fiftieth
student, the other 49 are engaged in completing the topological task at hand. 

This student’s first name is also the surname of a child actor who was popular at that time, and they share a resemblance. 

Pam assigns the boy a Midwestern state. To Pam’s dismay, he responds negatively in three words of 4, 4 and 3 letters: “____ ____? ___!”

Spell those eleven letters backward to form two-word alliterative term that sounds like an “more economical-sounding” version of a similarly alliterative but “less economical-sounding” lodging option for weary travelers. These two alliterative lodging options begin with the same word, a capital city in Asia. 

The second word of the “less economical-sounding” lodging option is the surname of a celebrity whose first name is a European capital. The second word of the “more economical-sounding” lodging option is the first name of the the reluctant artist in Pam Plat’s class.

What was the reluctant student’s negative response to Pam Plat?

What are the two alliterative lodging options?

Note: The “less economical-sounding” lodging option actually existed. The “more economical-sounding” lodging option did not.

ENTREE #5

Oswald, a common laborer during the Dark Ages, is felling trees in the forest. 

One day, Oswald takes a noontime work break near a lake where a group of fellow female laborers are cleaning up after a morning of picking plants that will be used to make dyes for coloring clothes. 

Oswald, with a sharply focused eye, begins watching them from behind a tree until one of the bathers (with an eye similarly focused) spots him, screams, and calls the constabulary on her Saxonphone.

So, the jig is up! A constable shows up, hauls Oswald to the stocks, and locks him in. 

The next morning’s Anglo-Saxon Sentinel’s front-page features a three-word headline (in 4, 6, and 4 letters) and three-word subheading (in 5, 4, and 5 letters). The headline describes Oswald’s offense; the subheading describes Oswald’s acuity of eyesight during the offense.

The subheadline contains six vowels, all the same. If you change one of those vowels to a different vowel and spell the result backward you will form the headline.

What are the headline and subheadline in the Anglo-Saxon Sentinel?

ENTREE #6

You are an undergraduate at the University of Winnipeg majoring in neuroscience. You are putting the final touches on your term paper titled “The ABC’s of Aspiration Biopsy Cytology.” Upon completion you sigh with relief, then access the campus computer-system drive that is your personal network storage space on campus. It is a cyber-place where students can save and access their files from any campus computer.

And so, you save the document file to the storage drive, then sign off. Alas, later when you attempt to access your document on the campus home directory (to do some eleventh-hour proofreading) it is nowhere to be found!

You visit the campus IT specialist and explain your plight. She begins troubleshooting, first checking if any department files on the O Drive have been compromised. They have not. She sighs with relief.

(The O Drive stores only department and administrative files, and is accessible only to faculty and administration. The drive which is accessible to students is known by a letter that is relatively close to O in the alphabet. That is the drive you saved your term paper to, but now cannot access.)

The specialist next turns her attention to the student drive you cannot access. She cannot access it either!

You plead, “There must be some kind of recovery software you can try! Can you do that, please?” 

The IT specialist, however, instead replies with a proposal that involves using a computer forensic program that will copy, and then inspect, the suspect drive.

Her reply consists of four words of 2, 3, 5 and 1 letters. The 3-letter word contains an apostrophe.

Spell these eleven letters in reverse to spell an indeterminate hyphenated word that merely approximates the trillions of bytes the University of Winnipeg’s two storage drives contain.

What four-word solution did the IT specialist propose as a counter to your recovery-software suggestion?

What is the 11-letter hyphenated word?

ENTREE #7

Take an album title by Kendrick Lamar followed by a novel title by Stephen King. The result is an informal, impolite two-word expression that is used to express anger or annoyance. 

Change one letter to an “n” and read the result backward. You’ll get a heartless character from a classic movie.

Who is this character?

What is the impolite expression?

ENTREE #8

Name a rule (in three words that total ten letters) that some casinos impose for Single Deck Blackjack (the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tampa, for example).

Change one letter in the rule to an “a” and read the result backward. The result is something Nikola Tesla might have been tempted to do, in two words (had he been homicidal and had access to a knife). 

What is the casino rule?

What might Tesla have been tempted to do?

ENTREE #9

Take a two-word idiom that, in its plural form, is a synonym of “smooth sailings.” 

Read the result backward. You’ll get an adjective that could describe many healthy, fit, stylish and elegant actresses who have been labeled as “sex symbols” and “scream queens”... followed by the first name of one such actress. 

What is the idiom?

What is the adjective and who is the actress?

ENTREE #10

Name two words that may have appeared in a 1994 review for the fourteenth and final album by a successful but aging progressive rock supergroup. The album was “contractually obligated” and, likely as a result, received many less-than-stellar reviews.

One of the two words in this particular review
was an abbreviated name the group was sometimes called — a 3-letter acronym of its members’ names. The other word is the final one in the opening sentence of the review: “This album made me fall ______.” 

Place a three-letter synonym of “to criticize severely” between those two words (which is a synonym of what most reviewers of the album chose to do to it).

Spell those three words backward to form three new words for what a baker may do when she begins a pie-making process.

What are the two words in the review and the three-letter synonym that you placed between them?

What may a baker do when she begins a pie-making process  

Hint: The initials of the four words in the album title can be arranged to spell “hits,” which (in fairness) describes some of the supergroup’s earlier albums.

Dessert Menu

Flower And Flowee Dessert:

Removing an “?” enhances the flow

Name something that flows. 

Remove an interior letter to name what it flows through. 

What flows?

What does it flow through?

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.

Proverbial wisdom meets fashion sense; Celebrations, siblings and other sibilance; Illegibility leads to ineligibility in the field of calligraphy; “All hands on deck?” Historically neighborly baroque eye chart

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Proverbial wisdom meets fashion sense

Take the first four words of a proverb. 

The initial letters of the first three words, in order, form a new word. 

Place this new word after the fourth word to name something you might wear, in two words. 

What might you wear? 

What is the proverb?

Appetizer Menu

Worldplayful Appetizer:

Historically neighborly baroque eye chart

Neighbors

🌍1. Take the informal name of one country in two words. Insert the demonym (or adjectival form) for a neighboring country between these two words to obtain the full legal name of the neighboring country in three words. What are the two countries?

A historic woman

👩2. Think of a historic woman. Her name consists of the postal abbreviation for a US territory, followed by US postal abbreviations for three states. Who is she?

Third down in B? major

🎸🏈3. A baroque musical instrument in two syllables sounds like a quarterback’s misfortune, followed by a non-vulgar term for what part he might land on as a result thereof. 

What is the musical instrument?

Eye chart

🥩👁4. Think of a term for a capital letter, in nine letters. 

Extract a French word often used in meat dishes. Replace the end to sound like a pirate. The result sounds like the first word in an eye disease. What are the original term, French word, and eye disease?

MENU

Bookish Slice:

Celebrations, siblings and other sibilance

Name a book and a city in the book that was the site of a celebration. 

Remove one letter and rearrange the remaining letters to name two siblings who appear earlier in the book.

What are these four names?

Riffing Off Shortz And Dale Slices:

Illegibility leads to ineligibility in the field of calligraphy

Will Shortz’s May 9th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Jim Dale of Plano, Texas, reads:

Think of a word with six syllables that’s spelled with only 11 letters — and the four middle
syllables have the same vowel. What word is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Dale Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a kind of business, in four letters, where one can buy cooked meats and prepared salads, and a kind of sweet condiment, in three letters, one might might purchase there. 

Rearrange these combined letters to spell the name of a puzzle-maker.

Now name brewed beverages, a kind of food fish and what you might use to heat up the fish in words of four, three and three letters. 

Rearrange these combined letters to spell the hometown and state of this puzzle-maker.

What are this business and condiment?

Who is the puzzle-maker?

What are the beverages, kind of fish and what might you use to heat up the fish?

What is the puzzle-maker’s hometown?

ENTREE #2

Think of an adjective with four syllables that’s spelled with 10 letters. 

The four syllables have the same vowel. The other letters are six different consonants. 

The adjective is associated with the
philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

What adjective is it?

Extra credit: An eight-letter culinary dish with “intestinal fortitude” contains the same six consonants and the same two vowels.

What is this dish.  

ENTREE #3

Think of an adverb for how ascetic monks approach nourishment, with five syllables and 12 letters. 

This adverb contains, in alphabetical order, the six vowels, including  “y”, and five different consonants, one used twice.

Rearrange those six consonants and one of the vowels, used twice, to spell an eight-letter verb meaning “assaults violently or attacks verbally.”  

What are this adverb and verb?

ENTREE #4

Think of two 4-syllable 10-letter words that end with the same five letters. These five letters can be arranged to form a two-word phrase (a pronoun and verb) a comedian like Don Rickles might have used to characterize his brand of humor  (which involved pointed, witty ridicule and razor-sharp repartee). 

Both10-letter words contain four of the same vowel, one in each syllable. 

The first five letters of one word can precede “disobedience.”

The first five letters of the other word is either a “four” or a “forefinger.”

What are these two 10-letter words?

What might Don Don Rickles have said?

ENTREE #5

Think of a noun with three syllables that’s spelled with 10 letters — three of the same vowel, four of the same consonant, and three other consonants. 

The noun characterizes: 

1. the oeuvres of Pablo, Paul, Piet and Wassily;.

2. inflated, involved, and often deliberately ambiguous language, or

3. verve, vigor, vim, vinegar and vitality.

Take one of the three vowels, one of the four same consonants and the other three consonants. Add an “o” to the mix and rearrange the result to spell the name of a composer.

What noun is it?

Who is the composer? 

ENTREE #6

Take a six-letter plural noun for Dapple, Rocinante and the sites of a temple and of a sermon. 

Double a consonant, quadruple a vowel and rearrange the result to spell an adjective that describes many sermons. 

The adjective contains the same vowel in each of its four syllables.

What is the plural noun?

What is the adjective?

ENTREE #7

Take a Mexican city and an African country side-by-side. 

Remove the second letter and third-last letter of this result, leaving a string of nineteen letters in which every even-number-positioned letter is the same.

What are this country and city?

ENTREE #8

Name the titles of two annual Billboard Top 100 single records that were recorded twenty years apart. The earlier “45-rpm pearl” placed #7 on the charts and the latter platter placed #9. 

If you ignore the “The” in the #7 single, the rest of its title contains the same vowel in each of its four
syllables.

The latter title contains the same vowel in each of its five syllables.

What are these 45-single record titles?

ENTREE #9

Name something that has locks, in two words.

Every other letter in these words is the same vowel, and there are five of them.

What is this thing with locks?

Dessert Menu

Four-Of-Fifty-Two Dessert:

“All hands on deck?”

Categorize “rollerball,” “fiber” and “nib,” in two words. 

Spoonerize the two words to get what is seen
on each of four particular cards in a standard deck. 

What is seen?

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.