Worlds-apart yet common tongues; The letter “en” that numbers ten; Nine-digit deficit; Cloudy Klein Contortionist; Super-duper coughing creature! Serena, Simone, Mia Hamm! Double-hockey-sticks-critters triplet; Phenomenal surnominal songbird; E______ of S_______!

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 5πe² SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Cloudy Klein Contortionist

Fill in the blanks of the title and the final line of the following “poem.”

E _ _ _ _ _ _ _ of  S _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Like some great, grey weasel

Or jumbo smoke-filled/smoke-engulfed Klein bottle turning itself outside-out,

He makes movements of a madman, strait-jacketed

(Locks unopen, chains unbroken),

And then, to the amazement of all...

P_ _ _   o _ _   o _   h _ _   t _ _ _ _!

Appetizer Menu

Skydiversionary Appetizer:

Worlds-apart yet common tongues; The letter “en” that numbers ten; Nine-digit deficit 

Worlds-apart yet common tongues

1. There are two well known major languages that are almost half a world apart from each other and yet they each have something very unusual in common with each other. 

Do you know what it is?

The letter “en” that numbers ten

2. Looking carefully at the Earth Globe you can find a well-known land mass where you might see ten n’s. Can you locate it?

Nine-digit deficit

3. Maria had been teaching beginning Spanish for about twelve years now, and loved both her job and the students. It was mutual, and one of her students at the end of her first year had given her a small gift in appreciation. It was ten plastic words that each spelled a different digit in Spanish. She loved these toys and proudly displayed them in order on her desk. 

I am sure you can feel her disappointment when one morning, arriving at her desk, she found all but one of these digits missing. Can you determine which digit remained, and how you came to your conclusion?

MENU

Oval Office Hors d’Oeuvre:

Super-duper coughing creature!

Take a pair of two-word terms: one who dupes others into giving him money and something a
critter may cough up. 

Rearrange the combined letters to spell the first and last names of a president. 

What are these two-word terms and presidential name?

Muscat & Salalah Slice:

Serena, Simone, Mia Hamm!

Remove the first and seventh letters from a word that describes Serena Williams, Simone
Biles or Mia Hamm. 

The result is a pair of words associated with Muscat and Salalah. 

What are these three words?

Riffing Off Shortz And Goodman Entrees:

Double-hockey-sticks-critters triplet

Will Shortz’s April 20th Puzzle Challenge, created by Philip Goodman, of Binghamton, New York, reads:

Name an animal in five letters. Add two letters
and rearrange the result to name a bird in seven letters. Then add two letters to that and rearrange the result to name another animal in nine letters. What creatures are these?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Goodman Entrees read:

ENTREE #1

Name a puzzle-maker in thirteen letters. Rearrange these letters to spell a five-letter creature, two three-letter creatures and a French pronoun that can refer to either of the three-letter creatures... but only if both of them are not bitches.

Who is this puzzle-maker?

What are the three creatures and the pronoun?

Note: Entrees #2 through #7 were composed by our friend and riff-meister extraordinaire Nodd.

ENTREE #2

Name an animal in three letters. 

Add four letters and rearrange the result to name a bird in seven letters. 

Change the first letter to an A and remove the last letter. 

Rearrange the six remaining letters and follow them with the three-letter animal to name a nine-letter, two-word animal. 

What creatures are these?

ENTREE #3

Name an animal in three letters and a bird in six letters. Change the third letter of the bird name to an S and rearrange the combined nine letters of the animal and the bird to name another bird. What creatures are these?

ENTREE #4

Name two animals in three letters each. 

To these six letters add three more letters and rearrange the result to name an animal in nine letters. 

What creatures are these?

ENTREE #5

Name an animal and a bird, nine letters in all. 

Change one letter from an M to a V and rearrange to name another animal. What creatures are these?

ENTREE #6

Name a fish and a bird, nine letters in all. 

Change one letter from an O to a C and rearrange to name another animal. 

What creatures are these?

ENTREE #7

Name an insect and add three letters to name a bird. 

Change an E to a U, add two more letters, and rearrange the result to name an animal in nine letters. 

What creatures are these?

Note: Entree #8 was composed by our friend and riff-meister extraordinaire Plantsmith.

ENTREE #8

Take some five-letter animals. 

Add two letters and mix the result to get some birds. Add two more letters and mix to get some more animals. 

What are these three creatures?

ENTREE #9

Name a eight-letter bird whose color may be a hue that rhymes with a black liquid.

Some letters of this bird, in order but not consecutive, spell:

* an oral animal part, and

* a Spanish pal.

Some letters of this bird, not in order, spell:

* an animal that has that above-mentioned oral animal part, and

* the newborn animal born of a creature that might be gray (but is not yet old).

What are this bird, oral animal part, Spanish pal, animal with the oral part, and newborn animal?

ENTREE #10

Name a creature in three letters. 

Add two letters and rearrange the result to name a holy human creature. 

Then add four additional letters and rearrange
the result to name a thick-skinned third creature. 

What three creatures are these?

ENTREE #11

Name a bird in three letters. 

Insert two adjacent letters within the name to name a bird in five letters. Then add five letters and rearrange the result to name a non-avian creature in ten letters. 

What three creatures are these?

Dessert Menu

“Bye Bye Baldness” Dessert:

Phenomenal surnominal songbird

Spell the surname of a  singer backwards. Add a space. The result is a description of this singer’s music. 

Who is the singer? 

What is the description?

Hint: This surname can be anagrammed to spell a two-word description of a word that follows “Bye Bye” and a word that follows “Bald.” 

Every Thursday 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.

“Crittergories!” State becomes a statesman? Sitcommy actresses, seafaring vessels; “Thumb of Pamela, Up or Down?” Greeting & Eating; Toponym, idiom, synonym; A crop in soil (along with oil!) Pointed, painful, perhaps painted? Quizzing a kind of cuisine? Yearlings? Dog days? June bug? March hare?

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 5πe² SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Toponym, idiom, synonym

Replace the second word of a place on the world map with a homophone.

Reverse the word order to form an idiom
meaning “to become infuriated.”

Replace the word on the right with a common article and remove the space to form a one-word synonym of that idiom. 

What are the toponym, idiom and synonym?

Appetizer Menu

Tortoiseshell Challenges:

“Crittergories!” State becomes a statesman?  Sitcommy actresses, seafaring vessels; “Thumb of Pamela, Up or Down?” Greeting & Eating;

“Crittergories!”

1. 🏝 Think of a popular U.S. vacation spot in two words. 

Change the first letter to a copy of the last letter, and anagram. 

You’ll find a category of critters that are popular at the vacation spot. 

What is the vacation spot? 

What is the critter category? 

State becomes a statesman?

2. 🗳Name a U.S. state. 

Duplicate the sixth letter, then rearrange the letters to form the first and last names of a current politician from California. 

What is the state? 

Who is the politician? 

Sitcommy actresses, seafaring vessels

3. 👭Name two actresses who worked together. 

The first is well-known for several sitcoms. 

The second is mostly known for one sitcom, but she later played the same character on a few other TV shows. 

The first actress’ first name rhymes with the
second actress’ last name, as well as a word associated with seafaring vessels. The second actress’ first name is an Old French translation of a common word. 

Place the first actress’ last name before this common word. You’ll have a company name, one that was associated with several seafaring vessels and one in particular. 

Who are the actresses? What is the word associated with seafaring vessels? What is the common word? What is the company? What is the most famous seafaring vessel associated with it? 

Thumb of Pamela, Up or Down?

4. 🍇🍉🥑Pamela likes: 

JAMES BUCHANAN and GROVER CLEVELAND, but not JAMES POLK or ZACHARY TAYLOR; 

PAPAYAS and GRAPES, but not MELONS or AVOCADOS; 

TINA FEY, but not AMY POEHLER; 

JAMES BROWN, but not ARETHA FRANKLIN. 

Based on this, does Pamela like OHIO or TEXAS? Why?

Greeting & Eating

5. 🤝Think of a two-syllable brand name that’s good for greeting. 

Replace each syllable with a rhyme. 

You’ll get a brand name that’s good for eating.

What are the two brand names?

MENU

Malevolent Modifier Hors d’Oeuvre:

Pointed, painful & perhaps painted

Name an adjective with negative connotations. 

Move its first letter to the end to spell its
synonym. 

Replace that letter at the end with an anagram of something pointed, painful, and sometimes painted to form a seven-letter noun with negative connotations. 

What are this adjective, its synonym, and something pointed and painful?

What is the seven-letter negative noun?

Creature Creeping Thru A Calendar! Slice:

Yearlings? Dog days? March hare? June bug?

Take the letters of a word that can be seen on a calendar. 

Write a duplicate of one of those letters. 

Rearrange the result to spell a creature and word that often describes it. What are the creature and descriptive word?

Riffing Off Shortz And Popp Entrees:

A crop in soil (along with oil!)

Will Shortz’s April 13th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle challenge, created by Jessica Popp, of Indiana, Pennsylvania, reads:

Name a famous European tourist site in nine
letters. Rearrange its last four letters to name something that its first five letters can be planted in.

Puzzleria!s riffing-off Shortz and Popp puzzles read:

ENTREE #1:

Name a puzzle-maker whose name contains four consecutive letters that spell a word for a movable bar attached to the fingerboard of a fretted instrument to uniformly raise the pitch of all the strings. 

Place a space between the sixth and seventh letters. Replace the sixth letter with the last letter. Delete the third letter. Translate a French word into English.

The result is how a guitar-playing stage performer might answer the question: “What do you do between songs to refresh yourself and relax?”

Who is this puzzle-maker? What is the “movable bar?”

How does the guitarist reply to the question?

Entrees #2-through-#7 were created by our friend and riff-meister Nodd.

ENTREE #2

Name a famous European tourist site in nine letters. 

Double the last two letters. Rearrange these eleven letters to spell a two-word phrase for tourist attractions that many European countries are known for, especially Italy, France, and Greece. 

ENTREE #3

Take the name of the tourist site featured in the preceding Entree and remove from it a word for a kind of sound made by certain birds. 

Rearrange the remaining letters to spell a food that is grown in the country in which the site is located.

ENTREE #4

Again, take the name of the tourist site featured in the preceding two Entrees. 

This time remove a word for a kind of mountain pass and rearrange the remaining letters to spell a food that originated in a country adjoining the country in which the site is located.  

ENTREE #5

Name a famous European tourist site in eight
letters. 

Rearrange its letters to spell the first name and the first letter of the last name of a famous American. 

ENTREE #6

Name a famous European tourist site in ten letters. 

Remove the first four letters and slightly
rearrange the rest to spell a word for a body of nations that figured prominently in the history of the location of this site.

ENTREE #7

Name a famous European tourist site in two words comprising ten letters. Remove from the second word a U.S. state postal abbreviation. 

Slightly rearrange the remaining letters to spell a vegetable and something that may explain why some people dislike this vegetable. 

Entree #8 is the brainchild by our friend and riff-meister Plantsmith.

ENTREE #8

Take a popular European tourist site that contains two of the same vowel and two of the same consonant. 

Add a third consonant to make “three of the same consonant.” 

Mix these letters to get a pretty plant and a bryophytic plant that is preceded by the words “Spanish,” “Peat” or “Randy.”

What is this tourist sight?

What are the pretty plant and bryophytic plant?

ENTREE #9

Name a famous European tourist site in 17 letters. Rearrange these letters to name:

1. what Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dalí or Rembrandt is an
example of (6 letters)...

2. what Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” is an example of (6 letters)... and

3. what Kasparov, Karpov or Fischer are a master of (5 letters).

What is this tourist site?

What are the two “examples of” and one “master of?”

ENTREE #10

Name a famous European tourist site in nine letters. Rearrange its nine letters to name something that began in 1797 and ended in 1801, or something that began in 1825 and ended in 1829.

What is this tourist site?

What are the things that spanned the years from 1797 to 1801 and from 1825 to 1829?

ENTREE #11

Name a famous European tourist site in 16 letters. Rearrange these letters to spell two eight-letter words: one preceded by “Mother” and another that precedes “whale.”

What is this tourist site?

What are the two eight-letter words? 

Dessert Menu

Spelled-Alike Sound-Alike Dessert:

Quizzing a kind of cuisine?

Name a kind of cuisine. 

The first four letters spell a body part. 

The final four letters sound like body parts. 

What are this cuisine, body part and body parts?

Every Thursday 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.

Malady! Psychoneurosis? Beautiful Plant!, “Picture this!” Anna Graham’s Alcove (A Nod to Nodd), Reader’s Digest’s Fabulous Fabulists; Pasteurized milk & pasture-raised beef; A drama tipped off by its title; Limitlessly limber limbs; Opposing political parties; A MuskElon Can’t Elope Without a Ladder!

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 5πe² SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

A drama tipped off by its title

Choose one word from the title of a well-known dramatic play. Remove the first and last letters of this word.

Insert an “h” within the word and a hyphen elsewhere within the word. 

Reverse the order of letters after the hyphen. 

The result is a hyphenated term that describes the play. What are this play and its description?

Appetizer Menu

Delightfully Puzzley Appetizer:

Malady! Psychoneurosis? Beautiful Plant!; “Picture this”; Reader’s Digest’s Fabulous Fabulists; Anna Graham’s Alcove. (A Nod to Nodd)

Malady? Psychoneurosis? Beautiful Plant!

#1. ⚘🎕💮𑽇 Name what was in past centuries considered a malady or medical ailment that is now, in the 21st-century, considered a “psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychogenic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions.”

Replace the first two letters of this
“malady/psychoneurosis” with a state postal abbreviation to get a beautiful plant.

What are this “malady/psychoneurosis” and plant?

“Picture this!”

#2. 🥄Compose a two-word caption for the image
pictured here. 

Spoonerize your caption to get a deliciously nutritious breakfast cereal name. 

 Reader’s Digest’s Fabulous Fabulists

#3. ✍Remove a capital vowel from the name of a fabulous fabulist who wrote wisdom literature. Place after this a savory Scottish delicacy (after you remove a “g” from it and change an “i” to a “u”. 

The result is a body part that deals in digestion.

Who is the fabulist?  

What is the savory Scottish delicacy? 

What is the body part?

Anna Graham’s Alcove (A Nod to Nodd)

#4. 😱

When Serafina _______ over the _______ (inadvertently left by her brother in the kitchen somehow!) a ________ went flying out the window and landed on a _______ of a prized peony cultivated by Serafina’s mother, who happened to be tending her garden and thus eeked and shrieked screams of “gardening agonizing horror,” hence adding to a series of unfortunate events in the life of Serafina, now banished to the basement!

...For an example of how this would work:

Fill in the four blanks with three five-letter anagrams of one another, and with a fourth word that would be a anagram of the other three except that is uses one of the five letters twice, like for example: 

An ALERT babysitter, noticing that the baby in her charge is swallowing its RATTLE, will immediately ALTER her texting session with her boyfriend, save the baby’s life, and wait till LATER to return to her bout of boyfriend-texting. 

MENU

Women’s Wear Hors d’Oeuvre:

Limitlessly limber limbs

Name something women might wear to make their limbs appear limber, lithe, gracefully tall, shapely, slender and/or willowy. 

Remove the first and last letters to name a tree with graceful limbs. 

What might women wear. 

What is this graceful tree?

Descending A Word Ladder Slice:

A MuskElon Can’t Elope Without a Ladder!

Elon Musk’s “15 minutes of fame” may well be waning. So, before Mr. Musk becomes a mere, dim MAGA afterthought we deemed it wise to publish these “Rungs Rudolfo” before Elon is wrung from the Trump administration!)

Word Ladder Instructions: As you descend the rungs of the ladder, change one letter with every step down that you take... until ELON becomes MUSK.

This ladder has only one solution using common words, so we have filled-in the first letters of the unknown four-letter words. 

So, climb down, carefully but cleverly:

    ELON

    E _ _ _

    F _ _ _

    F _ _ _

    F _ _ _

    F _ _ _

    M _ _ _

    M _ _ _

    MUSK

Riffing Off Shortz And Chaikin Entrees:

Pasteurized milk & pasture-raised beef

Will Shortz’s April 6th NPR Puzzle Challenge comes from listener Andrew Chaikin of San Francisco, California. It reads: 

Think of an 11-letter word that might describe milk. Change one letter in it to an A, and say the result out loud. You’ll get a hyphenated word that might describe beef. What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Chaikin Entrees read:

ENTREE #1

During the 1950s and 1960s in Cuba, a portrait artist was commissioned by an influential felon named Ernesto to depict members of Ernesto’s family. 

So the artist pulled out his palette ___ ____ ___ ___, which included wives Hilda  and Aleida, as well as Aleida’s daughter who was also named Aleida.

Remove the spaces between the first two
blanks and between last two blanks to form the first name of a puzzle-maker and what sounds like his surname. 

What are the words in the four blanks? Who is the puzzle-maker?

Note: Entrees #2 through #7 were composed by Nodd, our friend and master-of-the-riff.

ENTREE #2

Think of a word for something cows do. 

Change one letter in it to an A and switch the first and third letters. 

You’ll get a word for something that might be done to beef. 

What are these words?

ENTREE #3

Think of a word that describes a kind of milk. 

Add three letters to get a word that describes a
kind of beef. 

What are these words?

ENTREE #4

Think of a word that describes a kind of milk. 

Rearrange its letters to get a word that
describes something that might be used in preparing roast beef. 

What are these words?

ENTREE #5

Think of two words that describe things that may affect a person’s consumption of milk. 

Rearrange six of the combined letters of these two words to spell a word associated with the production of beef. 

What are these three words? 

(Hint: The rest of the combined letters can be arranged to spell the name of an Asian country and the first word of the name of a U.S. university in a Midwest state.)

ENTREE #6

Think of two words that describe bulls and cows generally. 

Rearrange their letters to spell two things you
might do to beef when preparing it, and an informal term for what you might serve with it. 

What are these five words?

ENTREE #7

Think of a word that describes a type of cow. 

Change one letter to an A and rearrange to get a two-word phrase that describes what someone who has a “beef” when given a negative answer might do in response. 

Alternatively, change one letter to an H and rearrange to get a word for what some may do in response to this Entree and the expression they might use in doing so. 

What are the type of cow, two-word phase, the word for what some may do, and the expression?

ENTREE #8

Think of an 11-letter word that might describe milk. 

This word might also describe not beef (the word that would describe beef would be “pasture-raised”) but rather would describe a word that differs from “beef” by just one letter. 

What is this other word?

ENTREE #9

Seven little guys who fancy themselves as big guys (named Cashful, Mopey, Bleepy, Sleezy, Hammy, Trumpy and Don) are friends of a pair of young sisters, each whose two-word name contains a hue. 

Rearrange the 16 combined letters in these sisters’ names to spell the four-letter name of an 80-year-old fashion house (founded 1946 to make haute couture items that the sisters love to buy) and plural words for two kinds of birds who constantly flitter and flutter about the heads of these sisters.

Who are these sisters? 

What are the fashion house and two plural birds?

ENTREE #10

Think of an 10-letter verb for something producers often do to milk.

This verb also sounds like a three-word-12-letter phrase for where you see cows go if you are a spectator at a “cow race.”  

Take the 11-letter past tense of the 10-letter verb. 

Change one letter in this word to an A and say the result out loud. You’ll get what sounds like the possible two-word-12-letter aftermath of a rural tornado. 

What 10-letter verb is often done to milk?

Where do you see cows go if you are a spectator at a “cow race?”

What is the possible two-word aftermath of a rural tornado? 

Dessert Menu

Search-Worthy Dessert:

Opposing political parties

Take the American spelling of a political party, in one word, followed by any one member of a particular opposition party to the first party, in two words. Remove the two spaces. The result is a venue for research and experimentation. 

What are this party, opposing party member, and venue?

Every Thursday 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.