Roamin’ the High Seas – Empirically Speaking; “Rocketeers... Modern-day Musketeers?” The Blessed Virgin... Renovated Version? “Lions & Bengals & Zebras Oh My!” Trains, Planes & “Rivermo’boats!” Poof!

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 5πe² SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

“Rocketeers... Modern-day Musketeers?”

Note: A baker’s-dozen words related to lift-off lurk within the following text. Can you find them? 

After a peacefully successful splashdown landing in the Pacific...

Thanks to Wi-fi verifiability, and the expertise of NASA “rocket-torsi” X-ray specialists...

And after beholding shininess on sides of the moon both near and far, and experiencing zero-gravity...

That’s when the successful earth re-entry of the “crewquartet” of the Artemis II Space Mission around the Moon became history... 

And that’s also when our trustworthy quartet of “Planetary pioneers” helped to heighten hopes of our nation’s eventual colonization of that silvery-sometimes-slivery-sometimes-circular, satellite.

In the wake of the Pacific splashdown that concluded this historic NASA Artemis II lunar mission, the U.S. Navy helped extract these astronauts from their capsule... with the Artemis II Mission Commander Reid Wiseman – himself a “navy gob – last off.

(Note: This week’s Appetizer comes courtesy of a very inventive puzzle-maker and very valued friend of Puzzleria!)

Appetizer Menu

Knotty Nautical Appetizer:

Roamin’ the High Seas – Empirically Speaking

“Yo ho ho and a case of pelage”

1. 🛳🚢Take a compound word for a maritime officer with a particular responsibility aboard ship. 

One of the component words in the compound word names part of that responsibility.  The final consecutive letters of the compound word are the name of a legendary ship. 

What are the compound word, the component word, and the name of the ship? 

“Kick the Empire down the road” 

2. 📬🖃 Take a U.S. State postal code. 

Insert the postal code of another U.S. State to get the name of a civilization. Insert the name of that civilization into the postal code of a third U.S. State, and divide the result to get a two-word term for a common food container. What are the three postal codes, the civililization, and the container?

MENU

Vanishing Hors d’Oeuvre:

Poof!

A brand name ends with the name of a creature. 

Delete this brand’s last letter. Replace its first letter with a letter near it in the alphabet.

You will be left with nothing at all!

What are this brand name and creature?

Prolific Folk-Rock Slice:

Trains, Planes & “Rivermo’boats!” 

Name a late-yet-prolific country-folk-rock singer-songwriter who penned and performed songs about trains, highways, rivers and Americana. 

This guitar-______ whose first name is ______, is not a member of a century-old institution consisting of a prestigious collection of performing musicians. The name of this institution is an anagram of the missing letters in the blanks.

Reverse the syllables of something that shares the stage with this singer during live performances to reveal the surname.

What are the words in the blanks?

What is this institution?

With what does the singer share the stage during performances?

What is the name of this singer who is not a member of the institution?

Hint: Rearrange the letters in the three-word sign you might see on a drive-by kiosk near a seedy sleazy red-light district of a city to spell the surname of this singer.

Riffing Off Shortz And Rice Slices:

The Blessed Virgin... Renovated Version?

Will Shortz’s April 12th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Benita Rice of Salem, Oregon, reads:

Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Change the eighth letter to a V and rearrange the result to make an adjective that describes this landmark. What landmark is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Rice Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a puzzle-maker (6 letters, 4 letters). Delete one pair of consecutive letters that spell a preposition in reverse. Reverse the order of the pair of letters bracketed by spaces (thereby forming a new

preposition!). But then remove the spaces.

The result is the name of Dante’s beloved.

What is the new preposition?

Who is this puzzle-maker?

Who was Dante’s beloved?

(Note: Entrees #2 through #7 are the creations of our “resident riffmeister” Nodd.)

ENTREE #2

Name a famous foreign landmark in nine letters. 

Remove the first two vowels. Rearrange the remaining letters to spell parts of the body that once figured prominently in activities at this site. 

What are the landmark and bodily features?

ENTREE #3

Name a famous foreign landmark in six letters. 

Rearrange its letters to get a material that
closely resembles a material found in a part of this landmark. 

What are the landmark and the two materials?

ENTREE #4

Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Remove the first and third letters and rearrange to spell (1) an adjective describing
this landmark and (2) a concern that led to the building of this landmark. 

What are the landmark and the two words?

ENTREE #5

Name a famous natural foreign landmark in ten letters. 

Change the first vowel to a different vowel. 

Rearrange to get a two-word phrase for something those who spend a night at this landmark probably would wish for. 

What are the landmark and the phrase?

ENTREE #6

Name a famous U.S. landmark in seven letters. 

Change the first vowel to a different vowel and add an S. Rearrange to name an activity that takes place at this landmark. 

What are the landmark and the activity?

ENTREE #7

Name a famous foreign landmark (6,6). 

Rearrange to spell (1) a means of transport
commonly seen there and (2) two substances you would rather not see in the water there. 

What are the landmark, the means of transport, and the two substances?

ENTREE #8

Name a famous foreign landmark, in five and four words. 

Rearrange these nine combined letters to form a high-risk-stakes bet (one often with a big payoff,
but perhaps also a low probability of winning), in four and five letters.

What are this landmark and this high-stakes bet?

ENTREE #9

Name a “town” in India with a 1.3-million population. 

Take the combined letters in the word “town” and in the name of the town, plus a letter you might see on a baseball scorecard. Anagram the result to spell a famous Eastern Hemisphere landmark, in two words. The landmark and “town” are about 1,500 miles apart.

What are the names of this “town” and landmark and the letter on the scorecard?

ENTREE #10

Name an iconic two-word world landmark. It is a landmark that is not “insane,” but is “close to being insane,” both geographically and phonetically. 

Number its letters, 1 through 11. 

Replace the 1st letter, a vowel, with the vowel that precedes it in the alphabet.

Replace the 2nd letter with the letter in the alphabet to its immediate left.

Replace the 9th letter with its inverted form.

The result is an new string of 11 letters. 

Spell three words using letters:

3   1   6  6,

4  11  8  9, and

7   2   5 

Place those three words to the left of the two-word landmark to name a five-word tragic event.

What is this landmark?

What is the new 11-letter string?

What is the five-word tragedy?

What new letters did its 1st, 2nd and 9th letters become?

Dessert Menu

Savannas, Pampas & Aerial Mountain Passes Dessert:

“Lions & Bengals & Zebras Oh My!”

“A septet of ________ simultaneously shrilled and echoed across a wide field filled with wildly combative Lions and Bengals and (and even Zebras) that all tangled together in the wake of a heated territorial turf dispute – the kind that ____ all one’s energy! (All this commotion had been precipitated by a controversial ‘____ call of the wild,’ if you will, bellowed by one of the striped creatures.”)

What are the three missing words?

How are the dozen missing letters in just the first two blanks related to a European mountain range?

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.