“Birdy words” & “candy brands” Cash & Carry “Pursechases” Reindeer games in the news; “Doctor, Lawyer, Industrialist, Chef” “Better living through chemistry... Shazam!”

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

“Doctor, Lawyer, Industrialist, Chef”

 Name a profession consisting of an even number of different letters — like “lawyer” or “chef,” but not like “doctor” or “industrialist.”

Take a compound word that is a synonym of this profession. The two parts of this
compound word are anagrams of one another. 

What are this profession and synonym of this profession?

Appetizer Menu

Delightfully Puzzley Appetizer:

“Better living through chemistry... Shazam!”  

“Science, Anyone?”

1. ⚖🧪🥼Take a legal term. 

Drop its first three letters. 

Take the result. Make a copy of the second letter and place it at the beginning, leaving the original second letter where it was. The final result is a term related to chemistry. 

Now rearrange the three letters you dropped
orginally to get another legal term. 

What are these three terms?

Note from Plantsmith:

The following appetizer was inspired by Ecoarchitect’s “Nine Supreme Injustices” in his July 15, 2022 edition of Econfusions.   

“Mercy me!” and “Shazam!” 

2. 📺Take a plural word that often characterizes sound bites of politicians. 

Replace its first two letters with two letters that spell the third word in a common southern exclamation that is synonymous with “Mercy me!” or with “Shazam!” (as exclaimed by Gomer Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show.”)  

The result is a word for a list of values that
politicians may or may not live by. 

What are these two words?

Hint: The common 3-word southern exclamation that is synonymous with “Mercy me!” or with “Shazam!” starts with W, I and a letter that is a homophone of a creature.

A Murine movie scene, no dry eyes!

3. 🎭Name a popular singer, first and last names. Reverse the order of these names and pluralize the new second name to get what sounds like what  might be a caption for a famous Disney movie scene. 

Who is this singer? 

What are the movie and movie-scene caption?

MENU

Sensational Seasonal Slice:

Reindeer games in the news

Name a sensationalized, grotesquely dramatized, scandal-mongering over-hyped, and exaggerated form of news reporting, in two words. 

Remove from these words the angry letters in the word “ire” and replace them with the familial letters in the word “son”. 

Rearrange the result to spell a character in a holiday song, and a adjective and noun that describe that character.

Riffing Off Shortz And Bergmann Slices:

Cash & Carry “Pursechases”

Will Shortz’s December 11th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Warren Bergmann of Neenah, Wisconsin, reads:

Listen carefully: Many people carry _____ (4-letter word) in a _____ (5-letter word) to make
_____ (9-letter word). You can rearrange the letters of the first two words (the 4- and 5-letter ones) to get the last word (the 9-letter one). What words are these?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Bergman Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Christmas creche scenes usually feature a ______ (6-letter word) in a ____ (4-letter word). Often a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, is present. 

But occasionally a different four-letter bird, a ____ (4-letter word), may make an appearance. 

You can rearrange the
14 letters of these three words to spell the name of a puzzle-maker.

What are these 6-letter and 4-letter words, and the 4-letter bird?

ENTREE #2

Name an evergreen, candle-lit Christian tradition, in two words, that symbolizes the passage of four weeks in the liturgical calendar of the Western church. 

Anagram the combined letters to get a two-word caption for the image pictured here.

ENTREE #3

Name: 

1. the site of a famous wedding (4 letters);

2. a structure at the wedding that provided wedding guests relief from the sun (4); and 

3. one of the stone jars used to facilitate a miracle there (4).

Anagram these 12 letters to spell:

4. What was poured into the stone jars, and

5. What wedding guests might have used to transfer the transformed liquid from the stone jars into their wedding-wine-goblets.

What five words are these?

ENTREE #4

Name a cylindrical container that may contain cookies, sugar or flour. 

Remove the second letter and anagram the result to name an underground tank that may
contain rainwater.

What are these two containers?

ENTREE #5

Many shady people carry _____ (4-letter word) in a _____ (4-letter word) to use as an inducement to make ____ ___ (4- and 3-letter
words). 

You can rearrange seven of the letters of the first two words (the 4- and 4-letter ones) to get the last two words (the 4- and 3-letter ones). 

What words are these?

ENTREE #6

If musicians Sarah, Daniel and Oz, also known as the “___ ____,” (3- and 4-letter words) get discovered, make it big, and sell more records than The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Madonna, Led Zeppelin and Queen combined, they will have made recording _______! (7-letter word) 

You can rearrange the letters of the first two words (the 3- and 4-letter ones) to get the last word (the 7-letter one). What words are these?

ENTREE #7

___ _________ (3- and 9-letter words) is the bailiwick of a ____________ (12-letter word), like, for example, Coach Genghis or Wackford Squeers. 

You can rearrange the letters of the first two words (the 3- and 9-letter ones) to get the third word (the 12-letter one). 

What words are these?

ENTREE #8

Describe – in three words of 1, 4 and 5 letters – a person who purchased, in 2011 or later, one particular non-gas-guzzling (and non-gas-sipping!) vehicle.

Anagram these combined ten letters to name something (if we can infer this purchasing person’s political proclivities) that she or he would advocate making  back in the early 1970s, in three words of 4, 3 and 3 letters.

ENTREE #9

“__ ___ goal in life is to make _____,” is a quotation that might have been attributed to John Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller, Vladimir Putin, King Solomon, Augustus Caesar or Genghis Kahn. The words in the
blanks are an adjective, adjective and noun. Rearrange the letters in the two adjectives to spell the noun.

What is this quotation? 

ENTREE #10

An entry penned in the diary of “Coco O’Neill, the Cockney Girl”:

“Lothario is one ___ cat. First, ‘_ meets a woman, then proceeds to ___ her. Then they’re makin’ _______!”

 The words in the blanks, in order, contain 3, 1, 3 and 7 letters. The seven letters in the first three words are an anagram of the fourth word.

What are these four words?

ENTREE #11

“__’_ the kind of ___... no, that’s the wrong word. He’s the kind of monster who will never apologize, never make ______,’’ said Waushara County Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden in 1957, whose mother had been murdered by this “monster. said Waushara County Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden in 1957. 

You can rearrange the letters of the first two
words in the blanks (each 3 letters) to get the last word in the blank (6 letters). What words are these?

ENTREE #12

Former President Trump and other election-deniers are of the opinion that former Vice President _____ (5 letters) didn’t have the courage to overturn the election results on January 6, 2021. 

That is an opinion that _______ (7 letters) still to this day among those who want to “stop the steal.’’ Therefore, it would make _______ _____ (7 and 5 letters), alas, that this may be the end of democracy as we know it.  

You can rearrange the letters of the first two words in the blanks to get the third and fourth words in the blanks. What four words are these?

Dessert Menu

Slangy Dessert:

“Birdy words” & “candy brands”

Take a redundant two-word avian term that was once a candy brand.

Swap the initial sounds of the singular form in the avian term to spell two slang terms for something that is often abused. 

What phrase is this?

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.  

OhiO? OslO? OxymOrOns! Municipal backmasking; “Schlurred Speach Schnapps”; “What Maisie Knew” Hemidemisemiquaver? Hemidemisemicolon!

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

“What Maisie Knew”

Little Maisie’s mother reads “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to her for the first time. 

In what U.S. state does little Maisie conclude MacDonald’s farm is located?

Appetizer Menu

PuzzleRiffic Appetizer:

OhiO? OslO? OxymOrOns!

Ohio, Oslo?

1. 🌎Take the name of a state, drop one letter and rearrange to get a world capital. 

What are this state and capital?

“Please state your profession”

2. 👷🏇Start with the name of a state. 

Drop one letter and rearrange to get a group of people in a specific occupation.

Drop another letter and rearrange to get a group of people in a different occupation.

Both occupations are associated with the same five-letter word — a word with two different meanings.

Name the state, the occupations, and the five-letter word.

Note: Our Schpuzzle of the Week in the November 18, 2022 edition of Puzzleria! challenged you to find ONE two-word oxymoronic phrase in which both words begin with the same four letters in the same order. Jeff Zarkin’s riff on that puzzle appears below.

Jeff, however, challeges us to find THREE oxymoronic phrases, each with two words that share the same FIVE first letters!

Riffing off a “Humdrum Humdinger” of an Oxymoron

3. 🐂😝

Find a trio of two-word oxymoronic phrases that begin with the same first word, a synonym of ceaseless. 

The three second words in the trio of oxymoronic phrases all begin with the same five letters as that synonym. These three second words are synonyms of:

❶ a  short simple play or dramatic entertainment (9 letters),

❷ a set period of time between events (8 letters), and

❸ a pause between acts of a play or parts of a public performance (12 letters).

What are these three oxymoronic phrases?

MENU

Sippin Syllables Slice:

Schlurred Speach Schnapps

Name a language. 

Change its middle letter to the letter one place earlier in the alphabet. 

Spell the result backward to spell two words  — a drink, briefly, and an ingredient in that drink. 

What are the language, drink and ingredient?

Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices:

Hemidemisemiquaver? Hemidemisemicolon!

Will Shortz’s December 4th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Joseph Young of St. Cloud, Minnesota, who runs the website Puzzleria!, reads:

Name a symbol or punctuation mark on a computer keyboard. 

Anagram it to get the brand name of a product you might buy at a grocery, in two words. 

What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a kind of pie, what most people who ingest it experience, the nickname of a puzzle-maker, and what the sentence “The Cockney church-seater led church-goers to their pews and told them to ‘Sit down and ‘ush up!’” is a two-word example of. 

(These five words contain 5, 3, 4, 5 and 3 letters). 

Rearrange those letters to spell the name of a puzzle-maker and the name of his blog. 

What are the five words, the name of the puzzle-maker and the name of the blog? 

ENTREE #2

Name a two-word American international brand of frozen foods. Anagram it to get a member of a wedding party and a synonym of “I do.”

What are this frozen food brand, wedding party member and synonym?

ENTREE #3

Name the capital of a large Atlantic coastal African country that is an exporter of an edible product that, as a verb, is a synonym of “snowball.” This product is often packaged in a cylindrical container that requires a two-word tool to access its contents. 

Take the 23 total letters of this capital, product and tool. 

Rearrange them to name a four-word (8, 5, 6 and 4 letters) edible grocery product that does not require any tool to open it.

What is the capital of the country, the edible product, and the tool?

What is the product that requires no tool?

ENTREE #4

Name a gourmet snack brand, in words of seven and twelve letters, that ends with an “apostrophe s.” (’s)  Delete an “n”. 

Rearrange these letters to write a two-word caption, in six and twelve letters, for the image pictured here. 

What are the snack brand and the caption?

ENTREE #5

Name a brand name of a product, in two words of four and seven letters, that you might buy at a grocery — especially if you are counting calories are are worried about packing the pounds onto your midsection... or if you are trying to keep your gluteus maximus to a “minimus!” (How’s that for an asinine clue?!)

Hint: Two consecutive words in the text of this puzzle can be anagramed to spell the two-word product brand.

What is the product? 

What are the two consecutive words? 

ENTREE #6

Name a Nestles’ brand-name product you might buy at a grocery, in one hyphenated ten-letter word. 

Interchange its first and ninth letters, then revove the hyphen, to spell a six-letter buttery candy of brittle but tender texture, and a four-letter spice made from the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed.

What is the Nestles’ brand?

What are the candy and spice?

ENTREE #7

Name a two-word, nine-letter symbol or punctuation mark on a computer keyboard that becomes a Roman numeral if you rotate it 90-degrees. Anagram its letters to spell the sound made by hot rod tires on the street or by school children on the playground.

What is the symbol?

What is the sound?

ENTREE #8

Name a punctuation mark on a computer keyboard that, if you rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, becomes a facial-feature expression. If you rotate it instead 90 degrees counterclockwise, the punctuation mark become the opposite of that facial feature.

Anagram this punctuation to get the last name of a British dramatist and a word that appears twice in a one-act play he created on 1996.

What is this punctuation mark?

What are the play and playwright?

ENTREE #9

Take a five-letter word for a Rolls-Royce Phantom, Ghost or Silver Cloud; a Bentley Brooklands, Flying Spur or Mulsanne; an Aston Martin Rapide or Lagonda; a Jaguar Mark X; or a Lotus Carlton. 

Also take a four-letter word for a British baby carriage.

Anagram these nine combined letters to spell a symbol on a computer keyboard.

What are these three words?

ENTREE #10

“How did you expect me to react?! The gourmet chef I hired to cater my fancy dinner party served us Steak à la carte with no side dish or garnish! What’s worse, when I sent the crate he packed the steaks in to the crime lab, there were trace amounts of arsenic on the inside!”

Anagram any of five different words in the paragraph above to spell a word for a symbol on a computer keyboard key.

What is that key? 

ENTREE #11

Name a symbol on a computer keyboard. Change the first letter, a vowel, to a different vowel. 

Rearrange the result to spell a hinged part of a lake cabin, in two words. 

What are this symbol and hinged part?

ENTREE #12

Name a symbol on a computer keyboard, in two words. Move the second letter of one word so that it is the second letter of the other word.
The result is a possible caption for the image pictured here. 

What are the symbol and caption?

Dessert Menu

Jets And Sharks Dessert:

Municipal backmasking

Name an athlete on a professional sports team, like a Shark in the National Hockey League or a Jet in the National Football League. 

Put the last sound of this word at the start and the first sound at the end, and phonetically you’ll name an athlete on a relatively nearby professional team. 

Who are these athletes?

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 creatures great and small; Confectioner-in-chief; Poetically proverbial breakfast fare; The Gift of the “Zane (Grey) Magi” “Instrumental journeys & chronophobia”

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Confectioner-in-chief

Write the two original varieties of one candy brand as plural words (like, for example, Hershey’s Kisses Cherry Cordials and White Chocolate Hugs).

The singular form of the candy brand appears – in consecutive letters – within the name of a United States president with whom both plural words are associated. 

Name this candy brand, plural words and president.

Appetizer Menu

Note: This week’s Appetizer is contributed by a fan of Puzzleria! who has contributed an Entree and an alternate solution in recent weeks. This fan is using no screen name as there are mysteries afoot for the future...

“Fan”tastic Appetizer:

“Instrumental journeys & chronophobia”

“Gonna take an instrumental journey”

1. 🎷🎸📯🥁Think of a fantasy journey in two words, ten letters, taken by characters called George, Taylor, Jim, Marty, J, and Mrs. Kelcher’s daughter. 

Remove from those two words a letter that is also a number. Rearrange the remaining letters to name a device which is instrumental in journeys which once were considered fantasy but have since become the height of commonplace. 

What are the fantasy journey and the now common device?

“Chronophobia”

2. ⏰Take a word for a division of time and a word associated with a division of color. 

Arrange the combined eight letters of those
two words to get a word for what is proverbially the fear of all time. 

What are these three words?

MENU

Twenty-Six-Letter Slice:

Poetically proverbial breakfast fare

Name a kind of cuisine, a two-word breakfast food, a one-word breakfast food, a coffee container and a muffin container. Anagam these 26 letters to spell a five-word proverbial phrase attributed to a poet. 

What are these six words and this proverb?

Riffing Off Shortz And Hochbaum Slices:

The Gift of the “(Zane Grey) Magi”

Will Shortz’s November 27th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Alan Hochbaum of Duluth, Georgia, reads:

What common eight-letter noun can be shortened in two ways — using either its first three letters or its last four letters? The answer is a familiar item.

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Hochbaum Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a biblical patriarch, David’s nemesis, what the bible says Hegai was, and the surname of a paleontologist who campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields — in 7, 7, 6 and 5 letters.

Rearrage these 25 letters to name a puzzle-maker (first and last names), and the city and state of his residence.

Who is this puzzle-maker? Where does he live?

Who are the patriarch, nemesis and paleontologist. What was Hegai?

Note: Entree #2 was created by our friend Plantsmith, whose “Garden of Puzzley Delights” feature appears regularly on Puzzleria! 

ENTREE #2

Take a common food name in eight letters. You can use the first three letters and the last five letters to spell essential parts of two other food names — one of them fast, the other one hyphenated.

What is this eight-letter food name and the pair of fast and hyphenated “side dishes”?

Hint: Mantle, Maris, Jeter or Judge + an aimless, casual scribble + foppish

ENTREE #3

Name a common two-word term, in nine and six letters, for something broadcast on television. The first three letters from each word, in order, form a shortened six-letter word
for the two-word term.

Delete the first four letters of the nine-letter word and the first two letters of the six-letter word, leaving nine letters that are different from one another. 

Rearrage these letters, using three of them more than once, to form the five-word title of an example of the original two-word term. 

What are the original two-word term, its shortened form, and the five-word title?

ENTREE #4

What popular and proper eight-letter noun can be shortened in two ways — using either its first three letters or its last six letters? 

Hint: The noun is a common yet “noble” name.
Its letters can be rearranged to spell five-letter and three-letter words that belong in this geographical sentence:

“The city of _____ sits at one extreme ___ of this ‘string-beany’ nation.”

ENTREE #5

A compound word for a common seven-letter vehicle can be shortened in two ways — using either its first four-letter part or its second three-letter part. 

The first part of the word ends with “eleven.”
The second part of the word begins with “one hundred.”

What is this vehicle?

ENTREE #6

Take five consecutive interior letters from a ten-letter lower-case producer of spirits. These five letters spell a shortened form of  this ten-letter word. 

Take the five letters that remain, in order. Transpose the two consecutive vowels, and change one of them to an “a”. The result is a producer of a “less spirited” beverage.

What are this 10-letter producer of spirits and its five-letter shortened form?

What is the producer of the “less spirited” beverage?

ENTREE #7

Take  a word for a unit of electric current that ends with a three-letter preposition that means “before.” 

Retain the letters in this word that appear “before” this preposition but remove the preposition itself. 

The result is a shortened form of the unit of electric current.

What are this unit of electric current and its shortened form? 

ENTREE #8

Take a nine-letter noun for a common article of clothing. Create a shortened form of this noun by deleting its final six letters. Those six letters can be rearranged to spell a word that follows “World,” “television” or “geometric.”

What is this article of clothing?

What word follows “World,” “television” or “geometric?”

Dessert Menu

James Herriot Dessert:

Two creatures great and small

Name a tiny creature, in two words and ten letters. 

Replace the first word with a two-letter synonym and remove the space to spell a huge creature, in one word. 

What are these two creatures?

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.