A birthday gift from a “birthday boy” Leisurely cuisine; Halve your cake and eat it for dessert! Anger management for obtuse anglers; Breaking unruly golden rules of engagement; Plant an egg, reap a chick

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Halve your cake and eat it for dessert!

“In a cakewalk I won a chocolate cake and ate it too... for dessert!”

How does that sentence pertain to the history of the Cadbury chocolate company?

Hint: The Cadbury chocolate company is nearly two centuries old.

Appetizer Menu

Cryptic Birthday Cake Appetizer:

A birthday gift from a “birthday boy” 

Nineteen-seventy, ‘twas a great year

With fine films to see, sweet songs to hear.

Born that year? The first Earth Day...

But a more mirthful birthday

Marks the birth of our friend whom we cheer!

‘Tis the birthday of Patrick J. Berry, 

Cruciverbalist extraordinary,

Who, on April 15,

Became into being 

Blessed with lexical skills luminary...

Patrick’s bright as his 53 candles,

Sets “word symphonies” finer than Handel’s:

“Puzzle-poems,” nearly lyrical,

Every one a true miracle...

Like those done by that guy who wore sandals!

So, let us now take Mr. Peabody and Sherman’s Wayback Machine back in history 53 years – back to April of 1970. 

We could, of course, set the “wayback time
setting” to April 22, 1970, the date of the first annual Earth Day celebration. But let us instead set it to a much better celebration that happened exactly a week earlier than that – to April 15, 1970, the day that Patrick J. Berry entered into this earthly realm... 

It was Patrick’s birthday!

What gift are we giving Patrick (his screen name is cranberry) to help him celebrate the 53rd anniversary of his birthday? 

Alas, no gift... just our gratitude! 

Instead, to celebrate his big day, Patrick is presenting joy to us! 

He has gift-wrapped-up this mysterious masterpiece – his 30th Cryptic Crossword Puzzle to appear on Puzzleria!

So now, let us all enjoy his generosity.

If you have missed any of Patrick’s previous 29 “cryptic crossword gifts,” here are their links:

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 28 29

For those who may be new to cryptic crossword puzzles, Patrick has compiled the following basic cryptic crossword puzzle instructions.

Regarding the Across and Down clues and
their format:

The number, or numbers, that appear in parentheses at the end of each clue indicate how many letters are in the answer.

Multiple numbers in parentheses indicate how letters are distributed in multiple-word answers. For example, (5) simply indicates a five-letter answer like “party,” (8,4) indicates an eight-letter and four-letter answer like “birthday card,” and (4-7) indicates a four-letter and seven-letter hyphenated answer like “gift-wrapped.” 

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.

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

Here are the clues to Patrick J. Berry’s Cryptic Crossword Birthday gift to us:

ACROSS

1. Those providing assistance, wrong to have such pep—wrong!(4,7)

9. All I need is to have cable(4)

10. Nearly hold off admitting head of record
company rejected music(7,4)

11. Knocks over box(4)

14. Be going back in hoop? It’s what happens in basketball(7)

16. Worked very hard, can almost die?(6)

17. City and State getting even somehow?(6)

18. Classic movie—better when we got it in HD(4,4,3,4)

19. Cat all right outside? Well, oddly not(6)

21. Some rude, not exactly mean(6)

22. Former lover was a model—naked!(7)

23. Minor celebrity on the radio(4)

26. Filmmaker makes a recluse go crazy with
latest offering(6,5)

27. Leading man, the
romantic part(4)

28. Good man gets plane to land at night, it should be easy to see(6,5)

DOWN

2. Fashion magazine articles in other languages?(4)

3. What keeps son quiet?(4)

4. One I’d tune out(6)

5. Typical crap to reach for in bag(3,3,3,6)

6. Sport feature not hard to find in newspaper(6)

7. Nursery rhyme character: Lad with inner demon, crooked smile(6,5)

8. Girl reportedly warned about clown(5,6)

12. Get far performing, in a sense, with such a fear?(5,6)

13. Fearing all’s lost, one may be lit...(6,5)

14. ...Frenchman having drunk driving charge due to this?(3,4)

15. Allowed to be part of act—or taken out?(7)

20. Exercise to cover up a little plumber’s crack?(6)

21. Walk out on the sand(6)

24. German auto maker’s endless scrutiny(4)

25. Has collapsed after bachelor party(4)

MENU

Jack Horner Hors d’Oeuvre:

Breaking unruly golden rules of engagement

Name a word that can precede the word “rule”
or follow the word “unruly.”

Trendy Job Title Slice:

Leisurely cuisine

Rearrange the letters of a trendy job title to spell two words associated with leisure. What are these two words?

or...

Rearrange the letters of that same trendy job title to spell a kitchen tool and something you might slowly pour into it. 

What are this kitchen tool and what is poured into it?

Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices:

Plant an egg, reap a chick

Will Shortz’s April 9th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minnesota, who conducts the blog “Puzzleria,” reads:

Name some things you might grow in a garden. Move the middle letter to the beginning. Phonetically the result sounds like part of the human body and an article of clothing that covers it. What words are these?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the cyberspace screen name of a puzzle-maker. 

Rearrange its ten letters to spell a two-word description of “Gilead,” in the form “___-___ ____ site.”

What is this screen name? What is the description?

Note: The hyphenated first word in the description is counted as just one word.

ENTREE #2

Name something grown in a garden. A number of consecutive letters in the word, in reverse, spell something sweet. 

Replace four consecutive letters in the original
word with a synonym of “insipid” to spell a second sweet thing. 

What is grown in the garden? 

What are the two sweet things?

ENTREE #3

Name some things you might grow in a garden, in two words containing fourteen letters. 

Rearrange these combined letters to form a
possible caption for the image pictured here. 

What garden things are these? What is the caption?

ENTREE #4

Name some things you might grow in a garden in two words of eight and seven letters. Remove a total of three consonants from the beginnings of those words, resulting in what sounds like an alliterative description of the following National Basketball Association championship series contests:

🏀Boston Celtics 128, Minneapolis Lakers 108, April 5, 1959; 

🏀Boston Celtics 129, St. Louis Hawks 95,
April 2, 1961;

🏀Boston Celtics 129, Los Angeles Lakers 96, April 25, 1965;

The description consists of an eight-letter apostrophized possessive proper noun followed by a five letter plural common noun.

What are these things you might grow in a garden?

What is the alliterative description of the National Basketball Association contests?

Hint: Add a “u” to the three consonants you removed from the garden things and rearrange to spell places (like that place “where everybody knows your name”) – places where basketball fans may congregate to cheer on their team.

ENTREE #5

Name something you may see high in the sky as an aircraft flies by. Rearrange its letters to spell a well-known Spanish word for an annual herb grown in a garden, one whose leaves are used as a flavoring or garnish.

What may you see high in the sky?

What is the “Spanish herb?” 

ENTREE #6

Many major league ballplayers in the twilight of their playing days often extend their careers by agreeing to make sacrifices that may help the team. 

For example, the Detroit Tigers management deemed it best to move their good-fielding (but no-longer-as-effective-hitting) infielder Dick _________ _____ in the line-up in order to take advantage of his glovework on the field while minimizing his increasingly less productive plate appearances).

Take the fourteen missing letters in the two blanks. Remove the first, eighth and ninth letters and the space. The result is a garden vegetable.

Who is this ballplayer?

What is the garden vegetable?

ENTREE #7

One thing in a garden contains seven letters.

The first three letters of this garden thing spell a word associated with a sport that is usually followed by the numbers 3, 4 or 5. 

The remaining letters, spelled backward, form a word that would normally be preceded by 18 in a description of the place this sport is played (or preceded by 10 in the description of a popular indoor sport).

What is grown in a garden?

What are the words followed by 3, 4 or 5 and preceded by 18 or 10?

Hint: The three answers are alliterative. 

ENTREE #8

Name one nine-letter thing you might grow in a garden.

1. Anagram two pairs of consecutive letters in this word to spell a four-letter thing grown in gardens. Anagram the remaining five letters to spell a set of moral principles.

2. If you instead anagram the last two letters and two of the first three letters of the nine-letter thing, you can spell a four-letter thing grown in Asian forests. Anagram the remaining five letters to spell “mythological blood.”

3. Finally, if you choose to anagram the first letter and a pair of consecutive letters of the nine-letter thing, you can spell a three-letter thing that grows, and holds its ground, in forests. Anagram the remaining six letters to spell how many times in this puzzle that we have now anagrammed the original nine-letter thing you might grow in a garden.

What are these two things grown in gardens and two things grown in forests?

What are the set of moral principles and “mythological blood?” 

How many times in this puzzle have you have anagrammed the nine-letter thing you grow in a garden? 

ENTREE #9

“If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye

It's no secret you feel better if you ___.”

The word in the blank is the title of a “semi-hit single” recording released in April of 1961 by a singer whose first name is an anagram of the six letters in two places where people may have heard the song: in a “bar” or in a “den.”

Take the letters of the song title and the surname of the singer. 

Rearrange them to spell something you might grow in a garden.

What are the song title and singer’s surname?

What might you grow in your garden?

ENTREE #10

Name a food you grow in your garden that you might chop up before you serve it. One thing you might serve it on has a circumference of just a bit more than 25 inches.

Chop off the top half of the food’s final lowercase letter, invert the result and place it between the previous two letters in the word. The result is a measureable geometrical term, like the circumference of what you might serve the food on. The length of this measurement, given the 25-inch-circumference of what you serve food on, would be about four inches. 

Remove two letters from the garden-grown food. The result is the one thing you might serve it on.

What are the food and what you might serve it on?

What is the geometical term?

ENTREE #11

Consider the two frames of the image pictured here. 

Write a caption for the frame on the left, in the form “____ of ____.” (The image in this frame is associated with Botswana.)

The third word in your caption denotes parts of the human body, and the first word in your caption is an article of clothing that covers those body parts.

Delete the preposition in your caption. Now replace the final letter in the second blank with the letter six places later in the alphabet to form a new word. Place that new word in front of the word in the first blank to form a  two-word caption for the frame on the right.

What is your original three-word caption?

What is your two-word caption?

Dessert Menu

Geometric Rage Dessert:

Anger management for obtuse anglers

Spoonerize a two-word description of an angler to get what sounds like a description of a person who may express anger around literature or libraries. 

What are these descriptions? 

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.