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.