Strangers Bound North by Northwest on a South by Southeast Train; An era ere Happy Chandler was MLB Commissioner; An idiom becomes antonymical; Candy-brand transformation; Carbon-based black viscous coffee? Wait! Wait! Great Scott!

  PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

An era ere Happy Chandler was MLB Commissioner

A pitcher’s first name sounds like a sad word. 

Change the initial of an outfielder's surname to the initial of that sad word to form what sounds like a second sad word. 

Add a letter in the middle of the pitcher’s first name to spell a third sad word. 

Name these ballplayers and three sad words.

Hint: The letter you add to the pitcher’s first name is the letter in the alphabet that is to the left of the first letter in either of the first two sad words.

Appetizer Menu

“The Unusual Suspects” Appetizer:

Strangers Bound North by Northwest on a South by Southeast Train

Note: This word puzzle, cloaked in mystery, was created and submitted by a Puzzleria! habitue. Clues and hints to the puzzle solution can be found at every twist and turn in the following story:

It was a stormy and dark night when Edd Coe received a package containing a note and other items. The note read: 

“Capture the flag. Pen the poem again. Recite
the characters by the symbols.” 

Other items included: a mirror; a compass with the needle fixed to point only to “South”; an Edinburgh, Scotland, street map; and a July 7, 1930, issue of “Enigmatologist’s Fortnightly” newsletter. Clipped to the newsletter was a business card from an establishment on Badestan Str, Cairo, Egypt. On the back of the card was written: 

      3 4 26 / 16 21 22 26 / 6 12 / 14 13 24 2 18 /

      21 11 10 17 8 // 23 10 / 11 24 12 4

There was nothing else in the package.

Edd Coe realized that the numbers were a coded message and that clues necessary to find the key to the code and read the message were in the package. Edd Coe methodically deciphered the message and then set about identifying the package sender and planning a counterstroke.

What is the message?  

How was it deciphered?

MENU

Intimidating Hors d’Oeuvre:

An idiom becomes antonymical

Take an idiom consisting of an adjective and noun. 

The noun can also be a verb, like the words “rock” and “roll” are. 

An anagram of the adjective and the past tense of the verb are synonyms of “intimidated.”

(Note: The past tense of the verb, which ends in “ed”, is also an adjective.)  

What is this idiom?

What are the synonyms?

Piano Man Slice:

Carbon-based black viscous coffee?

Name what you might see on a piano bar piano or on a coffee shop countertop, in four words containing 13 letters. 

Spoonerize words #1 and #4, then switch words #2 and #3 to name what sounds like a mineral used as a fertilizer and a carbon-based black viscous liquid, separated by a contraction of a conjunction. 

What might you see? 

What are the mineral and viscous liquid?

Riffing Off Shortz And Gwinn Slices:

Wait! Wait! Great Scott!

Will Shortz’s July 9th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Peter Gwinn, who writes for National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!”, reads:

Take the first name of a famous movie director. 

Write it in uppercase and lowercase letters. 

Rotate the third letter of this name 180° and you’ll get the name of the main character in one of this director’s most popular movies. Who is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Gwinn Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the full name of a puzzle-maker who, it seems, is on the NPR payroll. 

Write it in lowercase letters. 

A. Rotate the seventh and ninth letters of this name 180° and rearrange to get a caption for image A.

B. Rotate the first and seventh letters of this name 180° and rearrange to get a caption for image B.

C. Rotate the ninth letter of this name 180° and rearrange to get a caption for image C.

D. Rotate no letters of this name 180° and rearrange to get a caption for image D.

Who is this puzzle-maker?

What are these captions?

ENTREE #2

Take the surname of a famous movie director who dabbled a tad in television. Rotate the third letter of this name 180°. Move the second letter to the end so that it replaces the last letter. You’ll get the first name of a character in the main cast of an American mystery serial drama television series that this director directed. 

Who is this director?

What is the name of the character in the television series, and what was the series?

ENTREE #3

You are participating in a chess tournament. Your opponent’s ____ has just captured your queen. 

You exclaim, “____!”

Rotate two letters in the first blank 180° and you’ll get the word in the second blank. 

What two words are these?

ENTREE #4

Take the first three letters of a five-letter word one may be trying to rid him-or-herself of. 

Rotate two of these three letters 180° and you’ll get a word for where one might get ushered into to rid oneself of this word.

What are this five-letter word and three-letter word?

ENTREE #5

Capitalize the first and fourth letters of a naturally occurring psychedelic protoalkaloid known for its hallucinogenic effects comparable to those of LSD.

Rotate the first letter 180°. Place a space before the fourth letter and an “r” after that fourth letter.
Reverse the order of the last two letters. Replace a Roman numeral equal to 51 with a Roman numeral equal to 5.

The result is the a horror movie director.

 What is this protoalkaloid?

Who is this director?

ENTREE #6

Take the 12-letter name of a famous movie director. Switch the order of two adjacent letters. Move the twelfth letter to the middle and place an “h” next to it, forming letter-segments – of five, four and four letters – separated by spaces. The result, after rearranging the four letters in the middle segment, is three parts of the human body.

Who is this movie director?

What are the three body parts?

ENTREE #7

Take the surname of a famous movie director. Move the last letter to the front and divide the result into three parts that make up the first two-and-a-half words of the first line in the chorus of a Johnny Cash hit song that was co-written by his future wife June Carter and Merle Kilgore. 

The first, sixth, fifth and fourth letters of the movie director’s eight-letter first name spell the last word in that “chorus line.”

Rearrange the four remaining letters of the first name to spell a word that belongs in both of the blanks below.

An international airport is named after this film director. Its International Air Transport Association ____ is RMI; its International Civil Aviation Organization ____ is LIPR.

Who is this director?

What is the first line in the chorus of this Johnny Cash hit song?

What word belongs in both blanks?

ENTREE #8

Take the full name of a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning and Obie Award-winning playwright and film director. 

Four letters in his name can be rotated 180° to form different letters, but don’t do that. 

Instead just rearrange the ten letters to spell: 

* the profession of a character named “Hazel” in a 1960’s sitcom; 

* the title of the actress who portrayed Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham on a popular PBS serialized drama; and 

* the medium that brought these characters into viewers’ living rooms.

Who is this playwright/director?

Who are the profession of the character and title of the actress?

What is the medium?

ENTREE #9

Remove one letter from the first name of a famous movie director. The result is a part of the human body. 

The surname of the director spells a calculus
that may form within an adjacent body part.   

Who is this director?

What are the two body parts?

ENTREE #10

Take a famous movie director whose surname is a plural noun. 

Rotate the first letter of the first name 180° to get what sounds like a four-letter singular noun. You can draw water from both nouns. 

Who is this director?

What are the singular and plural nouns?

ENTREE #11

Take the surname of a “film noir” documentary filmmaker. 

Change the first letter to the letter that precedes it in the alphabet and its fifth letter (a vowel) to the vowel that precedes it in the alphabet (U becomes O, O becomes I, etc.), and remove the last letter. The result is the surname of an actor who moved to America from Germany after Hitler took power.

Spell the first name of the filmmaker backward to spell that same surname.

Who are this filmaker and actor? 

Dessert Menu

Candy-Minty-“Brandy” Dessert:

Candy-brand transformation

Spell a nearly-century-old candy brand backward.

Switch the two vowels. The result sounds like an approximately-half-century-old brand of mints.

Replace the second vowel with a different vowel to spell a service brand, less than a decade old.

What is this candy brand?

What is the brand of mints?

What is the service brand?

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.