Burgs, states, intracity intercity transport, Einstein, silence of the? Oven-baked breadwinners; Botanical Branding; “If hell is hot, the Frozen Tundra must be...” Take a shot at shortening a long shot; “E. T. Phone Home?...” No, “Z. H. PhoneMe!”

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Oven-baked breadwinners

Remove consecutive letters from a currently hot euphemism for “employee.” 

The result is two words associated with heat. 

What are this euphemism and two words?

Appetizer Menu

Worldplaytime Appetizer:

Burgs, states, intracity intercity transport, Einstein, silence of the?

Big Brown Burg

1. ⛪Think of a small U.S. town that starts and ends with the same letter. Now drop these letters. Mildly rearrange the remainder to make the second words in two familiar phrases, one with “big” and one with “brown.” What are the town and the phrases?

Is this even possible?

2. 🌍This medium-sized central European city has only one vowel, but two syllables. What is the city?

“Does God play dice?”

3. 🎲Take two U.S. states, in alphabetical order.
Drop a word from each and group all the remaining letters together, reserving one space for later re-use. 

Change the resulting double letter to a single N. Move the last letter of the result to the fourth position. Finally, insert a diacritical mark and the one reserved space at the appropriate locations. 

The result is two unrelated words, one foreign, that could be considered antonyms, and which vaguely recall a famous quotation by Einstein.
 What are these two words?

What are the two states?

Intracity intercity transport

4. 🚕🚌Think of a form of transport used within
cities. This same term also is used for an institution that “transported” other individuals between cities. What is this term?

GGG – or not?  

5. 🙊Think of a health-related word with a silent G. Add four letters to get its adjectival form, in which the G is no longer silent. What are these words?

Letters name animals

6. 🦁🐈🐰Two common English words are homophones of animal names, but neither word shares any letters with the corresponding animals’ names. What are they?

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Flambé Field Hors d'Oeuvre:

“If hell is hot, the Frozen Tundra must be...”

“Pampas” is the name of something, in two words, situated upon a sports venue. 

This venue might be described as “paradisical.”  
Spoonerize those two words to get what sounds like two nouns associated with the word “paradisical.” 

What are these two words and two nouns?

Garden Of Madison Avenue Slice:

Botanical Branding 

Reverse the order of the middle two letters of a well-known brand name and remove the first three letters, leaving a flower. 

If you instead remove the 3rd, 4th and 8th letters of the original brand name, the remaining letters, in order, spell the first word of a two-word flower. 

Finally, if you replace the third letter of the original brand name with a “y” and then remove the first two and last two letters, you can rearrange the remaining letters to spell the second word of the two-word flower. 

What are this brand name and two flowers?  

Riffing Off Shortz And Becker Slices:

 “E. T. Phone Home?...” No, “Z. H. PhoneMe!”

Will Shortz’s April 30th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, a tough one created by Joe Becker of Palo Alto, California, reads:

The “zh” sound can be spelled in many different ways in English — like the “s” in MEASURE; like the “g” in BEIGE; like the “z” in AZURE; like the “j” in MAHARAJAH; and like the “x” in LUXURY as some people pronounce it. The “zh” sound can also be spelled as a “t” in one instance. We know of only one common word this is true of, not counting its derivatives. What word is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Becker Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Workers in the auto salvage profession may be required to operate a tow truck. Take a pair of one-word synonyms – of “profession” and “tow truck” – separated by a space.

Let A=1, B=2, etc. Take the difference between the numbers that correspond to the
first two letters of the “tow truck” synonym. 

Replace those two letters with the letter corresponding to their difference. 

Interchange the third and fourth letters of this altered result. The final result is the name of a puzzle-maker.

What are these two synonyms?

Who is the puzzle-maker?

ENTREE #2

Name the two-word hometown of a puzzle-maker. 

Take the first word. Move its first letter into the third position. The result is a brand-name food product often packaged in a plural word that rhymes with certain face cards. The second word in the hometown often precedes a homophone of that packaging.

Who is the puzzle-maker? What is the
hometown?

What is the brand-name food product?

What is the plural word that it is packaged in?

What are the face cards?

What is the homophone of that packaging?

ENTREE #3

Note:  Entree #3 (as are the other nine entrees  this week) is inspired by Will Shortz’s NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle created by Joe Becker of Palo Alto, California.

There are 44 phonemes, or “single distinctive sounds,” in the English language.

One of those 44 English phonemes sounds somewhat similar to how English speakers pronounce the letter J, but it is a bit “breathier.” It consists of two consonants and is therefore called a “consonant phoneme” or “consonant digraph.”

Two of the 26 letters in our Latin alphabet (A B C, etc.) comprise the common English representation of this particular phoneme. (The sum of their alphanumeric values is a number in the Fibonacci series.) 

When this phoneme sound  is heard in English words, however, there there is no one particular way to write it. Indeed, in English words in which this phoneme occurs, the letters S, G and occasionally J, and even others, might come into play.

Although this phoneme does not occur at all in the Chinese language, it does occur in the Russian language. Indeed, one of the 20 consonants in the 33-letter modern Russian
alphabet is used in Russian words that have this sound of this phoneme. Russian has a letter for it! This consonant looks like the letter K attached back-to-back with its mirror image. Some say it resembles a beetle – the insect, not the Volkswagen.

Two English words associated with Russia contain this phoneme. One is a continent. The other is something Russia launched in 2022.

What are this continent and the thing that was launched?

What are the two letters of the phoneme from our alphabet?

What “beetlesque” Russian letter is used to make the sound of this phoneme?

What two letters in our Latin alphabet comprise the common English representation of this particular phoneme, and what Fibonacci number is the sum of their alphanumeric values?

ENTREE #4

Note: The following quintet of “mini-riffs” in Entree #4 was created by and bestowed upon us by our friend Greg VanMechelen, whose “Econfusions” is featured regularly on Puzzleria!

i. What letters don’t appear in the periodic table?

ii. No country starts with the letter X. What other letter does not start a sovereign country?

iii. Beekeeper is a well-known word that contains the letter E five times. There are at
least three common words that contain the same letter six times. Can you name them?

iv. DEFine is an example of a common word with three consecutive letters in alphabetical order. Can you name a common word with four consecutive letters in alphabetical order?

v. Can you name a common word with four consecutive letters in reverse alphabetical order (e.g. DCBA)?

ENTREE #5

Had Yury  wed Eva’s and Magda’s sister instead of Tonya and Marina, that sister would have had an alliterative three-part name, with each part beginning with the “zh” phoneme, as pronounced in the beginning of the word
“genre”. 

What is this alliterative name?

Who is Eva’s and Magda’s sister?

Who are Tonya and Marina?

ENTREE #6

Name a music album the U.S. Library of Congress selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or artistically significant.” The album’s title is a homophome of a large place on the map that has an “s” that is pronounced like a “zh”. In the album’s title, a different consonant is pronounced as a “zh”.

Add a consonant to the beginning of the album’s title to name a well-known peninsula. The consonant that was pronounced as a “zh” in the album’s title is pronounced only as an “h” in the name of the peninsula.

What is this album?

What is the place on the map that is its homophone?

What is the peninsula?

ENTREE #7

Delete the first two letters of a Mexican metropolis. 

🌵 Letters 1-2-3 of the 9-letter resultspell a fictional chararacter who aspired to be a lepidopterist.

🌶 Letters 3-4-5 are letters flanked by “chicken” and “king.”

🌵 Letters 5-6-7 spell the name of a Korean woman and also the title of an album that  featured a song titled “Peg.” 

🌶 Letters 7-8-9 spell a word often paired with “Parseghian”... and no, it is not a cheese.

What is the Mexican metropolis?

What are the four 3-letter words?

ENTREE #8

The “zh” sound can be spelled in many different ways in English — one of which is, simply, “zh!” Find the surnames of two 20th-Century Russians of note who can boast having both the “zh” sound as well as the “zh” spelling embedded within their surnames.

Who are these two Russians?

Hint: Remove the “zh” from the surname of one of the Russians. The remaining letters are an anagram of what the friends of an African-American civil rights leader, author, journalist, organic chemist, environmentalist and global entrepreneur might call him, for short (short, unlike that “resume!”).

Remove the “zh” from the surname of the other Russian. The remaining letters, if you duplicate one of the vowels, can be anagrammed to spell a pair of antonyms.

ENTREE #9

Conversion, amnesia, camouflage, majeure (French for “major”), equation, and luxury are six words pronounced using the “zh” phoneme: convers“zh”ion, amnes“zh”ia, camouflag“zh”e, maj“zh”eure, equat“zh”ion, and lux“zh”ury. All are relatively lengthy words.

Shorter examples are Asia, déjà (French for
“already”) and the Taj, in “Taj Mahal” (As“zh”ia, déj“zh”à and the Taj“zh”).

What is the shortest word you can find that contains two “zh” sounds?

Hint: The shortest example we can come up with is a proper name. 

ENTREE #10

Each of the eleven missing words in the following quatrain contains a “zh” phoneme.

Complete the poem.

Hint: The tenth and eleventh missing words are not exact rhymes, but are rather approximate rhymes.

Ensconced in laps of L____Y, the seats of earthly P______E,

We flaunt R___E, B___E and A___E  B____X – sparkling worldly T______E,

Enjoy M______S, sweet A______A, lives of ease and L_____E...

But feel no guilt! (Conveniently, we suffer from A_____A!)

Dessert Menu

Diminishment Dessert:

Take a shot at shortening a long shot

Take the first two syllables of a three-syllable phrase meaning “a quest where success is a long shot.” 

Change the vowel sound of the second
syllable to a shorter vowel sound – but of a different vowel – to get a phrase meaning “a shot in the dark.” 

What are these two phrases?

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.