Indian strings, actor, tree bark? “What’s in a name, Iron Mike?” Sleet, Snow? Wither the weather? Productive defense, products displayed; Curvy Cursive Calligraphic Conundrum; Shepherd’s pie... Hershey’s for dessert!

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Productive defense, products displayed

“The (word?) erupted in a collective (word?) after Pittsburgh Pirate right-fielder Roberto Clemente made a game-saving catch.”

“(word?) is one of several (word?) that can be found on supermarket shelves.”

Use only two different words to fill in the four mystery words in the two sentences above.

What are these words, and where do they belong?

Appetizer Menu

Skydivebuoyant Appetizer:

Indian strings, actor, tree bark?

1.🕺Think of a famous hoofer of the past. Spoonerize his name to phonetically describe a well-known household product many would describe as being wonderful. 

Who is this terpsichorean artist and what is the

product?

2. 🎥Complete the following sentence by filling in the blanks with the first and last names of a well-known English-speaking movie actor in order to phonetically obtain a double meaning:

How does one get to _____ _____?

3. 🧒👶What do a person who sometimes 

takes care of small children and a
tiny version of an Indian string instrument have in common?

4. 🌳 A recent National Public Radio Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle made me think of a tree and something that might be on this tree sometimes. What I am thinking about will fit nicely in the blank spaces below and become a hint to the NPR puzzle: 

“There is something that sometimes a ___ _____ __.”

What is the tree? 

What might be on this tree? 

What words fit in the blank spaces?

What is the hint?

MENU

Meteorologically Mysterious Hors d’Oeuvre

Sleet? Snow? Wither the weather?

Remove a “d” from the middle of a mystery word to spell a weather word. 

What is this mystery word with a “d” in the middle?

What is the weather word?

Ferrous-Fair Slice:

“What’s in a name, Iron Mike?”

Take a first name. 

Remove the first letter to name a food that is rich in iron.

If you instead remove its last letter you will
name a second iron-rich food.

What are this first name and two foods?

Riffing Off Shortz And Brooksby Slices:

Shepherd’s pie... Hershey’s for dessert!

Will Shortz’s April 16th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Jan Brooksby of Mesa, Arizona, reads:

Think of a common 8-letter word, in which the first three letters spell a word, and the fifth, sixth, and seventh letters also spell a word. These two little words mean the same thing. The fourth letter, when rotated 180°, becomes the eighth letter. What word is this?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Brooksby Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a puzzle-maker, in eleven letters. Interchange the eighth and tenth letters, the fifth and seventh letters and, finally, the first and fourth letters. 

The first five letters of the result spell a instrument commonly used in the bluegrass musical genre. The next three letters spell an object you often see in what the last three letters spell. One example of the “something you see” is a word in two bluegrass song titles that end with the same U.S. state and that begin with adjectives that begin with the letter “B.”

Who is this puzzle-maker?

What are the instrument, the object and where you see it? 

What are the two song titles?

Note: Entrees #2 through #8 were composed by our friend Ecoarchitect (Greg VanMechelen) whose “Econfusions” feature appears regularly on Puzzleria! We thank him.

ENTREE #2 

Consider the image pictured here. Guess what the missing word is in the speech bubble. Rotate its penultimate and last letters 180°. The result is the first line in a song recorded in the 1960s by the Leaves, the Standells, the Surfaris and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. What are the word in the blank and the word in the song?

ENTREE #3

Rotate the 1st and 3rd letters 180° in a very common 4-letter word, and the result will be another word which, when combined with the first, makes a 2-word admonition to children in the weeks before Christmas. What are the two words?

Note: The very common 4-letter word contains some punctuation which should be deleted during your “rotation process.”

ENTREE #4

Rotate two letters 180° in a word for a relative. 

Insert a space someplace, and the result is a 2-word expression that might describe that relative. 

Who is the relative, and what is the description?

ENTREE #5

Name a well-known political figure. 

Rotate two letters 180° and the result will be a word that describes where this politician stacks up. 

Who is the politician, and what is the descriptive word?

ENTREE #6

Take a 6-letter word that might describe a person; this word was also one of the two title characters in a famous 19th Century novel. 

Rotate the 1st, 3rd, and 4th letters 180° and the resulting old-timey word is one the curmudgeonly author used. What are the two words?

Bonus: If you rotate the first letter of the old-timey word around a different axis (that is, “flipping it,” so that “b”, for example, becomes “p” and not “q”) and then add a “hook” (like the lower end of a “j”) at the bottom, the result will be the word for an adult male anatine creature.

ENTREE #7

Name an informal term for articles of clothing in six letters. 

Rotate the first two letters 180°. 

The result describes people who have removed those articles of clothing. What are those articles of clothing, and what is the description?

ENTREE #8

Rotate the first and last letters 180° in the name of a country. The result will be the last name of two well-known actors, a father and daughter, as e.e. cummings might have written it.

Rotating two letters 180° in the name of a European ethnic group will result in the last name of the father’s wife, who is also the daughter’s mother. This wife/mother is also an actor. 

What is the country?

Who are the three actors? 

What is the ethnic group? 

Hint: All three actors have been nominated for Academy, Emmy and BAFTA Awards.  

ENTREE #9

Think of a “commonplace” seven-letter word that can be either a noun or adjective. Delete the first and last letters. The remaining five letters form a pair of antonyms.

What are this “commonplace” word and antonyms?

ENTREE #10

“Behead” a synonym of “honesty” to form a pair of conjunctions in alphabetical order that are often separated by a s/ash or virgu/e.

Now name a major U.S. West Coast city. Remove from it the three acronymic letters of an evangelical Christian television network originally founded nearly 50 years ago in South Carolina. What remains is the same pair of conjunctions, but in reverse alphabetical order.

What are the synonym of honesty, West Coast city and acronymic letters of the television network?

What are the pair of conjunctions (in whichever order you chose to give them)?

ENTREE #11

Think of a 7-letter synonym of “aperture.” Replace the first letter with a copy of the seventh letter.

The last three letters, in order, and the first four letters, in reverse, are nouns in the title of a short verse by an American poet.

What are this synonym and the two nouns in

the title of the verse?

Who is the poet?

Hint #1: In the synonym of “aperture,” double the letter to the immediate right of a postal abbreviation. Remove the postal abbreviation. The result is a workplace.

Hint #2: One of the nouns in the title of the verse is related to the surname of the poet.

ENTREE #12

Think of a 7-letter word for literary or artistic works having a theme or quality devoted to, or tending to arouse, sexual love or desire.

Remove two pairs of consecutive letters and anagram them to spell a 4-letter cereal grain.

The remaining letters can be anagrammed to spell a second cereal grain in its singular form.

What is this word for literary or artistic works?

What are the two cereal grains?

ENTREE #13

Take a five-syllable word for the notion that myths – as some might label the Easter narrative – are traditional accounts of historical persons and events. 

A common Easter tradition is to _______ a hard-boiled egg into a bowl of ___ to change its ___. 

The letters in those first and third blanks are an anagram of the five-syllable word. The word in the second blank is a homophone of what Jesus had to do to make Easter possible.

What are the five-syllable word and the three words in the blanks? 

ENTREE #14

Take two one-word synonyms of “heavy-hearted” or “in the dumps.”

Put these synonyms together in reverse alphabetical order to form a seven-letter noun that means “the inside scoop.”

Insert a hyphen within this noun to form an adjective that means “wretched” and “disgusting.”

Capitalize the initial letter of the noun that means “the inside scoop.” Rotate all but one of the other six letters 180°. Anagram these letters to get a two-word description of Patricia vis-à-vis Lance, Kevin, Grant, Delilah and Michele.

What are the synonyms of “heavy-hearted” and “in the dumps?”

What is the seven-letter synonym of “the inside scoop?”

What is the adjective that means “wretched” and “disgusting?”

What is the two-word description of Patricia?

Dessert Menu

Handwritten-On-The-Wall Dessert:

Curvy Cursive Calligraphic Conundrum

Name a kind of curvy cursive calligraphic flourish. 

Move the fourth letter to the end, replacing the last letter.

Double the third letter. 

Place at the end an interjection that indicates hesitation. 

The result is a word for college courses – one of which is calligraphy, for example. 

What are these two words?

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.