Word numbers and number words; “One cheeseburger, media rare” ABBA adds Al 'I hate poi' Yankovic Enforcing a three-drink minimum; Hope & Crosby, Bonnie & Clyde, Butch & Sundance, Pete & ...

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

“One cheeseburger, media rare”

Name a current restaurant chain and an informal moniker of a past communications conglomerate. 

Both contain two words. 

Their second words are the same. 

Their first words – taken in order, one after the other without a space – spell a large city west of the Mississippi River. 

What city is it?

Appetizer Menu

Original Integer Digital Journey Alphanumeric Appetizer:

Word numbers and number words

Note: Here is a brief belated introductory "autobio" of our friend Bobby Jacobs, master puzzle-maker:

I am Bobby Jacobs. I am a math student at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). I like pi, prime numbers, and Puzzleria!

I have been solving Will Shortz's National Public Radio puzzles since 2018. 

The crossword puzzle in my logo (above) has 96 words. That is the most words possible in a 15-by-15 crossword that is symmetrical, connected, and every word has at least 3 letters. It is very fun.

Here are my three latest puzzles. Enjoy!

🍎📖🐈1. What is a three-letter word such that if you move each letter halfway through the alphabet, then you will get a synonym of the original word?

👍2. What is the smallest positive integer whose Engilsh name is an anagram of the name of another positive integer?

🖐3. What are three digits such that all six 3-digit numbers that use each digit have English names that are anagrams of each other?

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Leader Of The Pack Slice:

Hope & Crosby, Bonnie & Clyde, Butch & Sundance, Pete & ...

Take the first four letters of the name of a movie character and a word for a character named “Pete” with whom he often shared
screen-time. 

The result sounds like a two-word term for a “dominant male” or “leader of the pack.”

What is this two-word term?

Who is the movie character?

What is the word for “Pete?”

Riffing Off Shortz And Gori Slices:

ABBA Adds Al “I hate poi!” Yankovic

Will Shortz’s May 30th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Al Gori of Oak Ridge, New Jersey, reads:

Name a famous city in 10 letters that contains an “S”. Drop the “S”. Then assign the remaining nine letters their standard value in the alphabet — A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. The total value of the nine letters is only 25. What city is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Gori Slices read:

ENTREE #1

A puzzle-maker’s name, first and last, is very close being the name of a person who was very close to being “Number 43.”

Rearrange the letters in the name to spell the one-word title of hymns composed by Handel, Jenkins, Poulenc and Vivaldi (which is also the title of a garage-rock staple recorded by an Irish band whose name is the objective case of a plural pronoun).

You can also rearrange the letters in this puzzle-maker’s name to spell something mechanics use when checking automotive fluids, in two words.

What is the hymn (and garage-rock) title?

What do mechanics use?

Who is the puzzle-maker?

ENTREE #2

Name a classic movie title in 10 letters that contains all three consonants in a word for a part of a movie camera, like the one that was used to film the movie.

Remove these three letters.

Then assign the remaining letters their standard value in the alphabet – A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. The total value of the seven letters is only 12. 

What movie is it?

What is the movie camera part?

ENTREE #3

Name a non-English word that is translated as “union” or “alliance.” The word is familiar to most English speakers.

Assign to the letters in the word their standard value in the alphabet – A=1, B=2, C=3,
etc. 

The average value of each of the letters is 21.2; in other words, the typical letter in the word is between U (21) and V (22).

What is this non-English word?

ENTREE #4

Eco-farmer Bessie Brown thought it prudent to put some leafy greens into Ol’ Dobbin’s diet, so she mixed in a handful of ________ along with the “old-school” oats in his _______.

Each word in the blanks contains seven letters.

Assign the letters in second word their standard value in the alphabet — A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. The total value is 30.

Assign the letters in first word their standard value in the alphabet. The total value is 21.

What are the words in the blanks?

ENTREE #5

Name an article of clothing that enjoyed some measure of popularity in the mid-Twentieth Century, in two words containing eight letters total.

Assign the letters their standard value in the
alphabet — A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. 

The total value of the letters is 145, which works out to an average of about 18.1 per letter, between an R and S.

A jazz bandleader helped popularize the style frequently wearing the outfit on stage, dubbing it “the ultimate in clothes.” 

Assign the 11 letters of his two-word name their standard value in the alphabet — A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. 

The total value of the first five letters is 10. The total value of three of the last four letters is 64.

What is the article of clothing?

Who is the bandleader?

ENTREE #6

Name a five-letter variant of a four-letter informal word for a “weak, cowardly, or ineffectual person.” 

Assign the five letters their standard value in the alphabet — A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. The total value of the five letters is 107. 

What informal word is it?

ENTREE #7

Note: The following Entree was inspired by GB, whose “GB’s Bafflers” appears regularly on Puzzleria!

Name a city that ain’t so famous, in two words of five letters letters each, in which an equally “ain’t so famous” puzzle-maker is based.  

The first word in the city contains an “S”. Remove the “S”. Then assign the remaining nine letters their standard values in the
alphabet — A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. The sum of those nine letter-values is a number whose two digits are the same, like, for example, “double-nickels” or “55”.

The sum of these particular nine letter-values is greater than “double-nickels” (55) but less than the product of “double-dimes” (10x10).

Take just one of the identical digits in the sum; it represents the number of letters in the state in which the puzzle-maker is based.

Who is this “ain’t so famous” puzzle-maker?

What are the city and state?

Hint #1: If you divide the name of the state in two unequal parts, the numerical sum of the letters in the first part is “double-nickels,” as is the numerical sum of the letters in the second part!

Hint #2: Invert the two-digit number that is sum of the nine letter-values. The result will be the number of the “Mother Road” or the number on the jersey worn by Mario Lemieux, Yasiel Puig, Ray Nitschke... and, perhaps, The Beast!

ENTREE #8

Note: The following riff-off appeared earlier this week in a comment posted by our friend jan on Blaine’s Puzzle Blog, where he comments regularly (and brilliantly!).

Take the first and last names of a puzzle-maker. 

Add the next  item in the following series: ST, ND, RD...

Then add the letter with the alphanumeric value of “Lucky 13.”

You will get, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary,  “a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem...” kind of like the text of this puzzle!

Who is the puzzle-maker?

What is the “step-by-step procedure for solving a problem”?

ENTREE #9

In the Riffing-Off-Shortz image that illustrates ABBA adds Al “I hate
poi!” Yankovic, what is the significance of Al Yankovic saying “I hate poi!” in his cartoon bubble?

Dessert Menu

“Make Mine a Cosmopolitan Please” Dessert:

Enforcing a three-drink minimum

Name a non-English-language beverage, in three words. 

Change one of its words to a homophone in that same language.

The result is three different beverages. 

Translated into English, what are these three beverages?

Hint: The initial letters of the three beverages that you translated into English, in order, form a three-letter word that has a peculiarity that makes it interesting to lovers of wordplay. 

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.

“We won’t give you the time of day... figure it out for yourself!” Terms of enduring endearment; Less becomes more, more or less; “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful... series” Sea creatures, iron horses, “Pachydermocrats”

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Terms of enduring endearment

Rearrange the first two-thirds of an adjective associated with young couples to spell an informal term for a young woman (especially in the United Kingdom).

Spell the last half of the adjective backward to spell a term for a young man. 

What is this “young-couplesque” adjective?

What are the terms for the young woman and man?

Appetizer Menu

Delightfully Puzzley Appetizer:

Sea creatures, iron horses, “Pachydermocrats”

1.🍄 Name a predatory creature you see at sea, in two words, whose name contains another sea creature. 

Drop three consecutive middle letters to get a
one-word “fungus among us Gophers in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

What is this two-word sea creature, and the creature contained within it?

What is the fungus?

Hint #1: A snorkler at sea who observes the two-word creature might then also observe, punnily, “That’s _ _____!”

Hint #2: The three consecutive middle letters removed from the two-word sea creature spell a seaman’s affirmative response.

2.🚂 Name a famous rock singer from the 1970’s. Drop the last two letters from the first name, and move its third letter 17 “ties” ahead, on-down the “alphabet track,” so to speak (so “A” would become “R,” For example.) 

Finally, “couple” a copy of that third letter to
the “caboose” of the singer’s surname.

The results of all this metallic, clanky, steamy “roundhouse-rail maneuvering” are botanical beauties of a particular genus, in two words.

Who is this singer?

What are these botanical beauties?

3.🌹 Name a world capital. Move its fifth letter up one step down on the “capitol-steps alphabet,” so to speak (so “A” would become “B,” for example.) 

Next, just as a senator might attach a rider to a bill, attach the first and last letters of this result, in order, to the end of the result.

The final result of all this “smoke-filled-room legislation” is a kind of flower.

What is this world capital?

What is the flower?

Hint: The name of the world capital’s nation is a homophone, not of a kind of a kind of flower but rather, of a kind of other rooted, growing and larger natural wonder. 

MENU

Here, There And Everywhere Slice:

Less becomes more, more or less

If you remove a “t” from the adverb “there” you get its antonym “here.”

Can you remove an interior vowel – and the
space it occupies – from an adjective to form what appears to be an antonym of the adjective?

What adjectival antonyms are these?

Riffing Off Shortz And Barkan Slices:

“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful... series”

Will Shortz’s May 23rd NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Roger Barkan of Savage, Maryland, reads:

Think of an eight-letter word in which the third and sixth letters are “A”. Remove the A’s. The
remaining six letters start a common series. What is it? And what comes next in that series?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Barkan Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the first name of a puzzle-maker and his hometown.  

Rearrange the letters to name a kind of motor
and where you might find a mechanic working on it. 

What is this motor and where might it be worked on?

Who is the puzzle-maker?

ENTREE #2

Think of products, in two words of four and nine letters, that you might use to make your team of bovine trained draft animals appear paler. 

Reverse the order of the words. 

Remove an “R” and two “X’s” and rearrange the remaining letters in each word to form the start a common radio or television series. 

What is it? 

And what comes next in that series?

ENTREE #3

Think of a five-letter word for a particular thing that grows. 

The third letter is “r”. Remove the “r”. 

The remaining four letters start a common series you experience at the dinner table or restaurant. 

What comes next in that series is a word that begins with “sw”.

What is the common series, and what comes next?

What is the particular thing that grows?

ENTREE #4

Take the first three words of a familiar series. 

Remove all but the first  two letters of each word, leaving six letters. 

Switch the third and fifth letters. Insert the first letter of the seventeenth word in the series beteen the last two letters. The result is a school subject.

What subject is it?

What is the familiar series?

ENTREE #5

Think of an eight-letter, two-word phrase that the World Wrestling Entertainment network (WWE) uses in promotional “WrestleMania” videos seen on YouTube and elsewhere. 

The two words begin with “L” and “T” and are
approximate rhymes (or “near rhymes”).

The second and seventh letters in this phrase are “i”. Remove the i’s. The remaining six letters start a common series. 

What is it? 

And what comes next in that series?

What is the two-word phrase?

Hint: The common series is associated with a very long-running soap opera. It is a series of words.

ENTREE #6

Take the first four words in a well-known series, one after the other without spaces.

Replace the 3rd letter with an “i”, the 6th and 7th letters with a space, and the 10th, 11th and 12th letters with a “w”. 

The result is a pair of of a pair of five-letter words:

1. The name of a periodical publication, with “The...” and

2. What an astonished reader might exclaim while reading an article in the publication.

What is the well-known series?

What are the first four words in the series?

What is the name of a periodical publication?

What might an astonished reader of the publication exclaim?

ENTREE #7

Think of a six-letter word for what some people do on professional sporting events, and a five-letter word for a unit of weight. 

Remove two letters from each word, leaving two new words that start a seasonal series.

Rearrange the letters you removed to spell a general word for a team that may participate  in a professional sporting event.

What do some people do on professional
sporting events?

What is the unit of weight?

What is the word for a professional team?

What two words start a seasonal series series?

Dessert Menu

Idiomatic Dessert:

“We won’t give you the time of day... figure it out for yourself!”

Name a two-word idiom associated with a time of day. 

Homophones of the two words are common words that are the same parts of speech. 

What is this time period?

What are the words that are the same parts of speech?

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.

Two hues, two cities, one citizen; All hands on deck: red pips are drawn, players take warn! Removing an ? enhances the flow; Zinger-zongwriter zans zithers or zylophones; Is applause a back(ward)handed compliment?

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Two hues, two cities, one citizen

Take what you call any citizen of a certain large European island and two colors on a Pacific Island’s flag.

Rearrange the letters to name two capital
cities — one in Europe and one in the United States. 

What are these two cities, one citizen and two colors? 

Hint: A third color appears in one of the five answers.

Appetizer Menu

Divining Devils (Using Tarot?) Appetizer:

All hands on deck: 

red pips are drawn, 

players
take warn!

Throughout the 20th Century there was a two-word phrase commonly used in a popular card game in this country that, in retrospect, should have been taken as a warning of what we should have feared in our current century. 

Can you name the game and the phrase?

MENU

A Capella Slice:

Zinger-zongwriter zans zithers or zylophones

Take a word that describes many musical instruments, but not zithers or xylophones. 

Move the first four letters of this word so that they replace its final letter. 

The result is the last name of a living singer/songwriter. 

Who is it?

Riffing Off Shortz Slices:

Is applause a back(ward)handed compliment?

Will Shortz’s May 16th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle reads:

Name a popular singer — first and last names.
Change one letter to a “P” and read the result backward. You’ll get what many people do around this singer. Who is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a popular puzzle-maker — just the last name. 

Change one letter to a to a different letter, read the result backward, and add an apostrophe. 

You’ll get what many people might drink that
will likely impede their ability to solve the puzzle-maker’s puzzles. 

Who is it?

Hint: The puzzle-maker’s first name appears somewhere in the text of this puzzle.

ENTREE #2

Name a living actress who is a native of the Magnolia State — first and last names. 

Change one letter to a “P” and read the result backward. 

You’ll get what J. M. W. Turner, Jacques-Louis David and Paul Delaroche once decided to do. 

Who is this actress?

What did those three people once decide to do?

ENTREE #3

Name a popular singer — first and last names. Spell the result backward. 

Take the first seven letters and the 11th and 13th letters of this result and rearrange them to spell the phrase “her dirges,” which is how some people describe the singer’s songs. 

The letters that remain, in order, will spell a style of jazz (which is decidedly not dirgeful!) developed in the 1940s in the United States. 

Who is the singer?

What is the non-dirgeful style of jazz?

ENTREE #4

Each student in a 1960s-era geography class of 50 is assigned to sketch a image of one of the fifty United States which will then be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a U.S. map. 

The teacher, Pam Plat, strolls the classroom aisles assigning each student a different state to sketch. 

When she finally approaches the fiftieth
student, the other 49 are engaged in completing the topological task at hand. 

This student’s first name is also the surname of a child actor who was popular at that time, and they share a resemblance. 

Pam assigns the boy a Midwestern state. To Pam’s dismay, he responds negatively in three words of 4, 4 and 3 letters: “____ ____? ___!”

Spell those eleven letters backward to form two-word alliterative term that sounds like an “more economical-sounding” version of a similarly alliterative but “less economical-sounding” lodging option for weary travelers. These two alliterative lodging options begin with the same word, a capital city in Asia. 

The second word of the “less economical-sounding” lodging option is the surname of a celebrity whose first name is a European capital. The second word of the “more economical-sounding” lodging option is the first name of the the reluctant artist in Pam Plat’s class.

What was the reluctant student’s negative response to Pam Plat?

What are the two alliterative lodging options?

Note: The “less economical-sounding” lodging option actually existed. The “more economical-sounding” lodging option did not.

ENTREE #5

Oswald, a common laborer during the Dark Ages, is felling trees in the forest. 

One day, Oswald takes a noontime work break near a lake where a group of fellow female laborers are cleaning up after a morning of picking plants that will be used to make dyes for coloring clothes. 

Oswald, with a sharply focused eye, begins watching them from behind a tree until one of the bathers (with an eye similarly focused) spots him, screams, and calls the constabulary on her Saxonphone.

So, the jig is up! A constable shows up, hauls Oswald to the stocks, and locks him in. 

The next morning’s Anglo-Saxon Sentinel’s front-page features a three-word headline (in 4, 6, and 4 letters) and three-word subheading (in 5, 4, and 5 letters). The headline describes Oswald’s offense; the subheading describes Oswald’s acuity of eyesight during the offense.

The subheadline contains six vowels, all the same. If you change one of those vowels to a different vowel and spell the result backward you will form the headline.

What are the headline and subheadline in the Anglo-Saxon Sentinel?

ENTREE #6

You are an undergraduate at the University of Winnipeg majoring in neuroscience. You are putting the final touches on your term paper titled “The ABC’s of Aspiration Biopsy Cytology.” Upon completion you sigh with relief, then access the campus computer-system drive that is your personal network storage space on campus. It is a cyber-place where students can save and access their files from any campus computer.

And so, you save the document file to the storage drive, then sign off. Alas, later when you attempt to access your document on the campus home directory (to do some eleventh-hour proofreading) it is nowhere to be found!

You visit the campus IT specialist and explain your plight. She begins troubleshooting, first checking if any department files on the O Drive have been compromised. They have not. She sighs with relief.

(The O Drive stores only department and administrative files, and is accessible only to faculty and administration. The drive which is accessible to students is known by a letter that is relatively close to O in the alphabet. That is the drive you saved your term paper to, but now cannot access.)

The specialist next turns her attention to the student drive you cannot access. She cannot access it either!

You plead, “There must be some kind of recovery software you can try! Can you do that, please?” 

The IT specialist, however, instead replies with a proposal that involves using a computer forensic program that will copy, and then inspect, the suspect drive.

Her reply consists of four words of 2, 3, 5 and 1 letters. The 3-letter word contains an apostrophe.

Spell these eleven letters in reverse to spell an indeterminate hyphenated word that merely approximates the trillions of bytes the University of Winnipeg’s two storage drives contain.

What four-word solution did the IT specialist propose as a counter to your recovery-software suggestion?

What is the 11-letter hyphenated word?

ENTREE #7

Take an album title by Kendrick Lamar followed by a novel title by Stephen King. The result is an informal, impolite two-word expression that is used to express anger or annoyance. 

Change one letter to an “n” and read the result backward. You’ll get a heartless character from a classic movie.

Who is this character?

What is the impolite expression?

ENTREE #8

Name a rule (in three words that total ten letters) that some casinos impose for Single Deck Blackjack (the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tampa, for example).

Change one letter in the rule to an “a” and read the result backward. The result is something Nikola Tesla might have been tempted to do, in two words (had he been homicidal and had access to a knife). 

What is the casino rule?

What might Tesla have been tempted to do?

ENTREE #9

Take a two-word idiom that, in its plural form, is a synonym of “smooth sailings.” 

Read the result backward. You’ll get an adjective that could describe many healthy, fit, stylish and elegant actresses who have been labeled as “sex symbols” and “scream queens”... followed by the first name of one such actress. 

What is the idiom?

What is the adjective and who is the actress?

ENTREE #10

Name two words that may have appeared in a 1994 review for the fourteenth and final album by a successful but aging progressive rock supergroup. The album was “contractually obligated” and, likely as a result, received many less-than-stellar reviews.

One of the two words in this particular review
was an abbreviated name the group was sometimes called — a 3-letter acronym of its members’ names. The other word is the final one in the opening sentence of the review: “This album made me fall ______.” 

Place a three-letter synonym of “to criticize severely” between those two words (which is a synonym of what most reviewers of the album chose to do to it).

Spell those three words backward to form three new words for what a baker may do when she begins a pie-making process.

What are the two words in the review and the three-letter synonym that you placed between them?

What may a baker do when she begins a pie-making process  

Hint: The initials of the four words in the album title can be arranged to spell “hits,” which (in fairness) describes some of the supergroup’s earlier albums.

Dessert Menu

Flower And Flowee Dessert:

Removing an “?” enhances the flow

Name something that flows. 

Remove an interior letter to name what it flows through. 

What flows?

What does it flow through?

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.