“Let’s sing a long singalong song!” Silver bells? Silver bullion? Spooning out the Econfusions; Rodin, Rothko, Rouault, Roseland... Roget? “Who’s that burglar on my rooftop?”

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Schpuzzle of the Week:

“Who’s that burglar on my rooftop?”

Take the three-word name of the warehouse where Santa keeps toys he and his elves load onto his sleigh every Christmas Eve. 

Take rhymes of those three words that – when preceded by the word “the” – summarize a crime involving four individuals: three
occupants of a forest home and one blond burglar who broke-in-and-entered after the first three individuals vacated the premises. 

The last two words of this summary, when spoonerized, sound like the last two words of the toy warehouse. 

What are this warehouse and this crime summary?

Hint: A spoon was the “weapon” the burglar used in the commission of the crime.

Appetizer Menu

Der Bingle Jells Appetizer:

Spooning out the Econfusions

1. 🥄Think of a well-known actor, 3 letters first name, 6 letters last.  Spoonerize the first and last name and the result will be 2 common first names.  And both names can be used for
either boys or girls.

2. 🥣Think of a well-known actor, 5 letters in each the first and last name.  Spoonerize the first and last name, and the result will be what you hope the hero/ heroine does to the villain in a movie series that has run for several decades.

3. 🥄Think of a well-known actor, 4 letters first name, 5 letters last.  Spoonerize the first and last name and the result will be a body part and a term for a certain animal, both of which can be synonyms.

4. 🥣Think of a well-known actor, last name (7 letters) first, first name (4 letters) last.  Spoonerize the name and the result will be what you might want on the weekend.

5. 🥄Think of a place where adults might gather for fun.  Spoonerize the words and the result might describe a place where you could imagine small children might gather for fun.

6. 🥣Think of a body part (1 word with 2 syllables).  Spoonerize the words or parts, and the result will be something changed in evolution 20,000,000 years ago to us as a species, and in the first 30 days of gestation to us as individuals.

7. 🥄Name something frequently used in cooking.  The source of that substance is a two word phrase, which when spoonerized yields the name of a hard rock band formed 50 years ago.

8. 🥣Name a well-known song from that hard rock band. Spoonerize the words and the result will be two words that describe how Olympians travel on water, one in the summer, one in the winter.

9. Take the last name of a well-known movie star, two syllables. Spoonerize those syllables, and the result will be the two-word name of an animal that was once featured in a series of children’s stories. Who is the star, and what is the animal?

Hint: In regard to the category of animal, there is an ironic, though distant, return-relation to the star.

MENU

Ringing And Blinging Slice:

Silver bells? Silver bullion?

Name something silver that you see hanging around this time of year. 

Interchange the two vowels in this word and add a different vowel at the beginning to spell something else silver that you see lying around at any time of the year.

These things, respectively, hang from and lie on different objects that each begin with a “t”.

What are these two silver things that you see hanging from and lying on objects beginning with “t”?

Riffing Off Shortz And VanMechelen Slices:

Rodin, Rothko, Rouault, Roseland... Roget?

Will Shortz’s December 19th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Greg VanMechelen (a.k.a. “Ecoarchitect”) of Berkeley, California, reads:

Take the name of a well-known artist. The first name can be divided to form two common words that are synonyms. The last name can be anagrammed to form an antonym of those two words. Who is the artist, and what are the words?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And VanMechelen Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a puzzle-maker. 

The first four letters of his name are the same as the first four letters of a man who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and the last five letters of his name are the first name of this actor’s wife, a former fashion model.

The remaining letters in the puzzle-maker’s name can be rearranged to spell the two-letter postal codes of three states that border the Atlantic Ocean. 

Who is the puzzle-maker, the actor and his wife and the three Atlantic coastal states?

ENTREE #2

Take the first name of a well-known artist. Change the last letter to an “a” and move it between the fourth and fifth letters to spell a hot holiday beverage – one in which citrus fruit slices, cinnamon sticks and sugarplums often float.

Now remove the fifth-through-eighth letters  of the surname. The remaining letters sound like the five-letter category under which “sugarplums” fall. 

The removed letters anagram to spell a
synonym of “fall” that is also what the fruit slices, cinnamon sticks and sugarplums do not do when placed in the beverage.

Who is the artist and what is the beverage?

What is the category for “sugarplums”?

What is the synonym of “fall”?

ENTREE #3

Take the two-word name of a well-known artist in 15 letters. Add an “o” to the end.

Remove six of these 16 letters, three from each name, and rearrange them to spell a style of art this artist did not practice. 

Remove six other letters from the first name and rearrange them to spell a literary artist who coined a two-word term containing a fruit that, ironically (because it was he who coined it), contains very little iron.

The remaining letters, in order, spell an artsy Big Apple district.

Who is this artist?

What art-style didn’t he practice? 

Who is the literary artist, and what term did he coin?

What is the artsy Big Apple district?  

ENTREE #4

 Novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov once suggested that Salvador Dali was actually another artist’s twin brother who had been kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.

1. Take the name of this other artist, in 14 letters (six in the first name, eight in the surname).

2. Switch letter-11 and letter-1. 

3. Bracket the new letter-11 with spaces and single quotation marks (‘ ’). 

4. Replace letter-12 with duplicates of letter-7 and letter-8.

5. Delete letter-3.

6. Move the word formed by the first five letters to the end.

The result is the title of a 1967 song sung by a group whose name contains the name of an animal that was also contained in the name of an award that was bestowed upon the artist in 1939 by the Boy Scouts of America.

Who is this artist?

What is the song title?   

ENTREE #5

Take the name of a well-known artist. Replace the first consonant of the first name with a different consonant that sometimes makes the same sound as the consonant it replaces. The result is a plural word for a general category.

The first five letters of the surname spell a word that belongs in that category.

Replace the last two letters in the entire surname with an “a” and “f” and rearrange the result to spell the two-word title of a parody perpetrated by a Canadian comedy troupe. This title also belongs in the category.

Who is the artist?

What are the category and the two members of the category?

ENTREE #6

The twelve letters in the name of a well-known artist can be anagrammed to form two words related to his paintings (1. and 2.) and the first half of a word in the title of one of his paintings (3.): 

1. the four-letter focal point of many paintings by the artist, including two with titles that could be paraphrased as: “The Snack on the Lawn” and “former Pacific Northwest beer brand”;

2. the word missing from: “The first person mentioned in the Old Testament was not
painted by this artist; but the artist often depicted the first person mentioned in the New Testament, who was known as the ‘Second ____’ ”; and

3. the four letters missing from the title of the artist’s painting: “Dead ____ador” 

Who is the artist?

What are the two words and first half of the third word?

ENTREE #7

Take the name of a well-known artist. 

The last 25 percent of the name spells something you might need in order to to get a Christmas tree. 

The first 75 percent of the name can be anagrammed to spell what manufacturers of this “something” might
do to its business end to make it more effective and durable, by reheating and cooling it in oil. 

Who is the artist? 

What might you need to get a Christmas tree?

What might manufactures do to its business end?

ENTREE #8

Take the name of a well-known artist in 11 letters. Nine of the letters can be anagrammed to spell a two-word term for a large farm, especially in the western U.S., where people on vacation can ride horses and do other activities that cowboys typically do. 

The remaining two letters are the initials of a two-word island in the eastern U.S. where no such large cowboy farms exist.

Who is the artist?

What are the cowboy farm and the island?

ENTREE #9

Take the name of a well-known French artist in seven and four letters. Switch the penultimate letter of his first name with the penultimate letter of his surname. 

The first part can be anagrammed to spell a two-word term that consists of a slang term for a firearm and a 4-letter noun. 

The second part spells either a small wild pigeon or a peaceful person to whom the two-word term would likely not pertain.

Who is the artist?

What are the two-word term and peaceful person?

Hint: The 4-letter noun can be anagrammed to spell either a synonym of “yes” or a wily subterfuge.

ENTREE #10

Take the name of a well-known artist in six and five letters. A fellow artist one descibed him as “just an eye, but God, what an eye.”

The middle letter of his surname followed by the last three letters of his first name spell a word for a genre of artwork the artist did not explore.

The remaining letters can be anagrammed to spell what is depicted in one of the illustrations the artist in Entree #9 painted to help give visual impact to Tennyson’s poetic “Idylls of the King.”

Who is the artist?

What artistic genre did he not explore?

What is depicted in the illustration by Entree #9’s artist?

ENTREE #11

Take the name of a well-known French Dadaist sculptor, painter, and poet who was one of the leaders of the European avant-garde a century ago. 

Anagram the name of this artist to create an appropriate caption for the illustration pictured here.

Who is the artist, and what is the caption?

Hint: Your caption should consist of three words containing one, three and three letters.

Dessert Menu

Sing Along With Mitch Dessert:

“Let’s sing a long singalong song!”

Name a long singalong song. 

Take the final two words in this long song. 

The combined letters in those two words are an anagram of a word for what a singer of the song becomes in the process of singing it.

What are the final two words in the song? 

What does the singer become? 

What is the song?

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.