Boozers Dr. Boo and Mr. Lew; Plenty-great Number-28! Desktops filled with date delights! Scarf-faces hold up Capital One! Blessed are the peacemakers, not haymakers

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Boozers Dr. Boo and Mr. Lew

“Dr. Boo ordered rum from the bar.

Mr. Lew though sipped ale from a jar.”

How do the nouns in the first line of this couplet pertain to a Cape Canaveral countdown? 

How do the nouns in the second line of the couplet pertain to U.S. geography?

Appetizer Menu

Perfectly Cryptic Appetizer:

Plenty-great Number-28

We are pleased to present Cryptic Crossword #28 by Patrick J. Berry (also known as “cranberry,” his screen name).

The number 28 is the sum of its positive divisors, excluding the number itself: 1+2+4+7+14=28. 

A number such as that is called a “perfect number...”

And, a Cryptic Crossword such as this #28 by Patrick J. Berry is what we call a “perfect puzzle.”

And so, enjoy Cryptic perfection... compliments of Patrick! If you missed any of Patrick’s previous exercises in “Cryptomystification,” here are links to his previous 27 perfectly puzzling Cryptic Crosswords on Puzzleria!:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11  

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

For those who may be new to cryptic crossword puzzles, Patrick has compiled the following basic cryptic crossword puzzle instructions to help you get a foothold:

Regarding the Across and Down clues and
their format...

The number in parentheses at the end of each clue tells how many letters are in the answer.

Multiple numbers in parentheses indicate how letters are distributed in multiple-word answers. For example, (6) simply indicates a six-letter answer like “jalopy,” (5,3) indicates a five-and-three-letter answer like “cargo van,” and (5-5) indicates a five-and-five-letter hyphenated answer like “Rolls-Royce.”

(For further insight about how to decipher these numbered cryptic clues, see Patrick’s “Cryptic Crossword Tutorial” in this link to his November 17, 2017 cryptic crossword.

The Tutorial appears below the grid that contains the answers in that edition of Puzzleria!)

“Perfect may be the enemy of the good,” according to Voltaire, but according to Berry, “Perfect just may be the friend of the Cryptic!” 

Enjoy the perfection.

ACROSS

1. Most insolent fool interrupting short nap(8)

5. Happy to see SNL segment(6)

9. Enthusiasm rare in Birmingham, for example?(8)

10. Predicament for main sitcom character(6)

12. Cops heard visitors(7)

13. Strange way to describe a cop who’s not
working, perhaps?(7)

14. Singer’s simple hat, tag inside(5,7)

17. Heading off? Step on it, tardy jerk! Should be ready to go!(5-7)

22. My bad back—clutching both sides, start to reach back(7)

23. Where to find a lot of losers for miles around? Turn back, meathead!(3,4)

24. Spooner’s special light where the planes
take off and land?(6)

25. Serious problem for band with new sound?(8)

26. Kill crows(6)

27. Man on board taken in by similar con(4,4)

DOWN

1. A little story to get free with a painting(8)

2. Begins describing extremely likable actresses(8)

3. Middle Easterner has ex-Prime Minister scratching head(7)

4. Fine suit worn by performer(12)

6. Sad, upset over one with terrible flu(7)

7. Surprised doctors to be supported by British character(6)

8. Property in Northwest—a tenement?(6)

11. Singer’s torture involving B or E flat, somehow?(7,5)

15. Ugly American, personally(2,6)

16. Novel place to sleep used by a noblewoman(4,4)

18. Performing makes a gent so nervous(2,5)

19. Girl bringing tailless cat in—it could trigger one’s allergies(7)

20. Where one may find monks like hot stuff?(6)

21. One having some dork put on drag(6)

MENU

Unpacking Punches Slice:

Blessed are the peacemakers, not haymakers 

Replace two adjacent consonants in a compound word for violence with two other consonants. 

The result is a kind of punch often thrown during such violence. 

These four consonants appear, along with two vowels, in a surname associated with nonviolence. 

What are these words? 

What is the surname?

Riffing Off Shortz And Cohen Slices:

Scarf-faces hold up Capital One!

Will Shortz’s September 25th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Adam Cohen of Brooklyn, New York, reads:

Take the name of a large financial corporation in 10 letters. Drop the fourth and fifth letters. Move the sixth and seventh letters to the front. You’ll name a person associated with financial misdeeds. What is the company, and who is
the person?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Cohen Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the first name of the “The Father of Economics” followed by the surname of a living person who carried out financial misdeeds at the behest of his boss.

The result is the name of a puzzle-maker.

Who is this puzzle-maker?

Who are “The Father of Economics” and the living person who carried out financial misdeeds at the behest of his boss?

ENTREE #2

Name a person associated with serious criminal misdeeds. Rearrange the letters of the surname to spell a two-word description of “L’Arlesienne,” “Jeux d’enfants” or “Carmen.”

Place the third word in this person’s nickname in front of the first word in the nickname –eliminating the second word – to spell a judge from the Book of Judges.

Who is this criminally associated person?

What is the two-word description?

Who is the Book of Judges judge, and the person’s nickname?

ENTREE #3

Take the name of a large financial corporation in 10 letters. Move the seventh letter to the first position and the original sixth letter to the second-last position. Delete the original fourth and fifth letters.

The first five letters of this result spell the first name of an actor who starred in a TV series about a three-letter organization that gathers intelligence within the U.S.

The last three letters of this result, spelled backwards, name a three-letter organization
that gathers intelligence outside the U.S.

What is the financial corporation?

Who is the actor, and what was his TV series?

What is the three-letter organization that gathers intelligence outside the U.S.?

ENTREE #4

Take the name of a large financial holding company in 12 letters. 

Anagram these letters to spell a liquid asset, a fixed asset and a negative consequence of accumulating and operating assets such as heavy industrial equipment and smoke-stacky factories. 

What is this holding company?

What are the two assets and negative consequence?

Hint: the two assets are the surname of a country singing legend and a word that appears twice in the title of a song penned by a folk-singing legend.

ENTREE #5

Anagram the combined letters in the name of a large financial holding company to form a four-letter name associated with a swan and a six-
letter surname associated with silents.

What is this company

What are the two names?

ENTREE #6

Take the name of a large financial corporation in nine letters. Rearrange these letters to form two words that belong in the blank spaces in the following fictional sentence:

“The ‘plugged-in’ Beatles ___ blew one Blue _______ right out of Pepperland!”

What is the financial corporation? 

What words belong in the two blanks? 

ENTREE #7

Henrietta, in order to purchase a KFC franchise, successfully secured a loan from a retail mortgage lending company in 2001. 

Two decades later, every evening at closing time, the hands-on Henrietta hoists bags plump-full of picked-over-finger-lickin’ wings, thighs, drumsticks and breasts into her dumpster at the edge of the parking lot.

During this daily dumping ritual, Henrietta flashes back to the day she secured the loan. Why? Because a two-word term for her dumpster debris rhymes with the mortgage lending company.

What is her dumpster debris?

What was the company’s name?  

ENTREE #8

Name two female coungry singers: one born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1919, and the other born in “Mayberry,” North Carolina in 1945. Both scored big hits with recordings of different songs with “U.S.A.” in the title.

Place their surnames next to each other to form the name of a bank with offices in all but 13 U.S. states.

Who are these singers?

What is the bank?

ENTREE #9

Name an investment banking company. Use its 13 letters to spell:

★ a large 6-letter recreational vehicle that the  company might help finance, 

★ a 3-letter fuel for the vehicle, and 

★ a 4-letter amenity in the vehicle that most smaller vehicles do not offer.

What is the company?

What are the vehicle, fuel and amenity? 

Dessert Menu

“Marie Calendar” Dessert:

Desktops filled with date delights!

Describe – using an adjective and noun in five and six letters – the often inspirational printed words you might see on a desktop calendar when you flip to its new page each morning.

Anagram the combined letters of these two words to spell the four-word title of a novel.

What are these two words?

What is the four-word novel title?

Hint: The adjective and noun each contain three vowels – the same three vowels.

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.

Emergency, pilfery & governmental garments; “Boxcars on a plane!” “Splish-splash! Squish-squash!” Flora’s florid family relationships; She “skis the grids”

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Flora’s florid family relationships

Two of Flora’s relatives share a great mutual relationship. 

Take the two words for their relationships to Flora. 

Rearrange the combined letters of those two words to spell the name of a flower. 

What is this flower? 

What are the two relatives’ relationships to Flora?

Hint: The word for one of the two relatives’ relationships to Flora is, according to Merriam-Webster, “informal.”  

Appetizer Menu

PuzZarklin’ Appetizer:

Emergency, pilfery & governmental garments

Bad weather

1. ⛈Name something officials might use
during a particular weather emergency. 

Spoonerize it to name something, phonetically, that might be used to improve highway safety during said emergency.

Bad conduct

2. 😈Name something that might be stolen from an appliance store. 

Rearrange its letters to come up with what the thief might have to do to get a reduced sentence.

Hint: What the thief pilfered has two words and contains ten letters.

Good government threads

3. 🧵Take a ten-letter word that might be used
to describe a kind of senior civil servant. 

Rearrange its letters to get a garment typically associated within a different area of
government work.

Hint: The term and the garment both start and end with the same letter.

MENU

In-Flight Slice:

“Boxcars on a plane!”

Pour “boxcars” into an in-flight beverage to get what an aircraft might be doing on the ground. 

What might an aircraft be doing?

Riffing Off Shortz And Regan Slices:

“Splish-splash! Squish-squash!”

Will Shortz’s September 18th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Theodore Regan of Scituate, Massachusetts, reads:

If you squish the lowercase letters “r” and “n” together, they look like an “m.” Think of a word that ends in the consecutive letters “r-n.” Squish them together to get a homophone of a synonym of the first word. What words are these?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Regan Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the surname of a puzzle-maker that is the surname of a U.S. president if you place a duplicate of the fourth letter between the second and third letters.

But if you instead take the third, fourth, first, fifth, second and first letters of the puzzle-maker’s surname, in that order and in lowercase, it spells the surname of a vice-president who was born exactly 95 years before the day a certain president was assassinated. This vice-president died in Ulvalde, Texas, two weeks shy of the four-year anniversary of that assassination.

Who are this puzzle-maker, vice-president and two presidents?

Hint: If you squish the third and fourth letters of the vice-president’s surname together, the result is a five-letter word for a person – like, for instance, any Puzzlerian! – who enjoys challenging puzzles and competitions. 

ENTREE #2

If you squish the lowercase letters “r” and “n” together, they look like an “m.” Think of a surname shared by an actor and actress that ends in the consecutive letters “r-n.”

The actor is the grandson of a Governor of Utah who was also President Franklin Roosevelt’s first Secretary of War, the son of Adlai Stevenson’s law partner, and the great-nephew of poet Archibald MacLeish.... And, Eleanor Roosevelt was the babysitter of this actor!

Squish the last two letters of this surname together to get a short form of the political affiliation of the actor, actress and others who helped rear the actor.

Who are this actor and actress?

What is the short form of the political affiliation? 

ENTREE #3

Write in lowercase a synonym for a corrie loch (which is a proglacial mountain lake seen, for example, in Scotland).

Squish together the last two letters of this word. The result is a short form of something else seen in Scotland, or the name of a character in a poem by a famous Scotsman. 

What words are these?

ENTREE #4

Think of a heavenly body, in six letters. Squish together two that are consecutive to form what resembles one letter. Rearrage these five resulting letters to spell a paradisical archipelago of 36 Asian islands and islets.

What are this heavenly body and paradisical archipelago?

ENTREE #5

Name a part of a bird, in four lowercase letters. If you squish the first two letters together, the result resembles a word for a kind of bird. 

The longer form of this bird word is seven letters long, and begins with a four-letter male name.

What are this bird part and both forms of this bird word?

ENTREE #6

Write the surname of a famous 19th-Century American statesman, in seven lowercase letters. 

Squish together the last two letters to form one new letter. Rearrange this six-letter result to spell the surname of a 19th-Century Scottish biographer who visited the U.S. in the year the statesman died, dramatically.

Who are this statesman and biographer?

ENTREE #7

Take something – a hyphenated ten-letter word – that a college student might “pull” the evening before a final exam. Remove the hyphen. Squish together the two letters that flanked the hyphen to form a new letter.

The the first two and last three letters of the nine-letter result spell a homophone of a nounfor a “raised structure on which sacrifices are offered or incense is burned in worship.” The remaining four letters spell an adjective that describes the noun.

What might a college student “pull” the evening before a final exam?

What are the noun and its homophone for a “raised sacrificial structure?”

What is the adjective describing this noun?

ENTREE #8

Write the word for the sound a non-swimming bird makes, in five lowercase letters. 

Squish together its first two letters so they look like a new letter. The result is a word for a swimming bird.

Rotate the first letter in the word for this swimming bird 180-degrees around its x-axis, then add a vowel in the middle of the result, forming a five-letter word for the sound swimming bird makes.

What are these non-swimming and swimming birds?

What are the sounds they make?

ENTREE #9

Bob and Ray (Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding) were an American comedy duo whose career spanned five decades on radio and television. Another comedy duo on radio also has first names of three letters each. Four of the six letters are the same as the letters in “Bob” and “Ray”

But this other duo was also known by their “stage names,” which each  contained five letters. 

If you spell these stage names in lowercase letters and squish the first two letters of each together, the result is:

* the first name of an NFL Hall of Fame linebacker who played his home games in the city of his birth, and

* four letters that sound like the three-letter first name of a perhaps-future NFL Hall of Fame quarterback.

What are the names and “stage names” of the radio duo?

Who are this linebacker and quarterback?

ENTREE #10

In 1985, 70-year-old-mafioso Paul Castellano — the apparent successor of recently deceased Gambino boss Aniello Dellacroce — was gunned down in front of Sparks’ Steak House, a popular hangout for major criminals. “The Dapper Don,” also nicknamed “The Teflon Don,” who had  been watching from a car at a
safe distance, had one of his men drive him by the scene to make sure his deadly orders had been carried out. In 1985, following evidence of his involvement in intimidation of witnesses, “The Dapper Don’s” bail was withdrawn and he was placed in jail while awaiting a trial.  

During this trial, the jury began to fear for their own safety. And so, in March of 1987, they chose to _____ ____ and his codefendants of all charges including loansharking, illegal gambling, murder and armed hijackings. 

(The word belonging in the second blank is “The Dapper Don’s” real first name, in four letters. The word in the first blank is a five-letter verb)

Squish together the first two lowercase letters of the verb, forming a new letter. Capitalize that letter. The result is a pair of four-letter words that describe the kind letter written to a man by his wife or romantic partner to inform him that their relationship is over, usually because his partner has found another lover.

What words belong in the blanks?

What is the letter no man wants to get?

ENTREE #11

Take a word for something a person might spin, in four lowercase letters. If you squish the last two letters together, the result is a moist sweet tuber, the “inner-tuber” of which is usually orangish. Add a French word for a body of water to the end to spell a verb for how the person might spin what he is spinning — in a voluble, loud and seemingly endless manner.

What might a person spin?

What is the tuber?

What is the verb?

ENTREE #12

A printed word that is associated with the printing process, if not applied to itself, would look like a word that a reader would pronounce as an informal, one-syllable term that might precede “lab”.

What are this word and informal term?

Dessert Menu

Spoon-feeding You A Spoonerism Dessert:

She “skis the grids”

Name a three-word idiom that means to make something easier – like to “grease the skids,” for example. 

Spoonerize the first and third words of this idiom to spell what sounds like what someone might do to ease a financial burden. 

What is this idiom?

What might someone do to ease a financial burden?

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.