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.