Joseph Young's Puzzleria!

Friday, May 1, 2015

When jocks become jokes; This one is a "stumper"; Reptilian replication

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e⁵ SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! Happy May Day. And remember, in Hawaii, May Day is Lei Day.

Mayday is also the international radio-telephone signal word used as a distress call. Its etymology is a homophone of the French phrase m’aider, meaning “help me.” That might have been what I yelled the time I nearly drowned in a riptide at Hapuna Beach on Hawaii’s Big Island.

Speaking of the French (and speaking French), a slightly premature Bon anniversaire to Puzzleria! This is our 52^nd weekly edition of Puzzleria! We officially turn one year old next Friday. So May Day doubles as our week-early Happy Birthday. Our birthday (actual date of birth) was Friday, May 9, 2014. We shall be celebrating the anniversary (anniversaire) of our birthday. So those savvy French got it right again.

“Battle of the Sams” or “Sammy Scrimmage”

Speaking of m’aider, ponder this distressing circumstance: If Sam “Mayday” Malone was pitching to Sammy SOSa, who would prevail?

An even more distressing circumstance occurred last week when Will Shortz purveyed a puzzle about politicians that was very similar to one already created by Puzzleria! contributor skydiveboy, aka Mark Scott of Seattle, aka Master French Puzzle Chef Monsieur Garcon du Parachutisme. Mark had given it to us months ago for publication in Puzzleria! We dawdled, dawgawnit, and puzzlemeister Professor Shortz beat us to the puzzle punch.

As summer looms, the 2016 campaign season is beginning to heat up also. On our menu this week is a puzzle slice about a politician. A few weeks ago Liddy Dole was an answer to one of our slices. An excellent recent NPR puzzle involved Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. (See “puzzle” link above.)

The hint to our Uncorking The Campaign Slice is connected homophonically to the setting of the sitcom in our Piece Of Cake Timely Sporty Slice. Enjoy!

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Piece Of Cake Timely Sporty Slice:

When jocks become jokes

Name a current athlete, first and last names, that everybody seems to be talking about lately, especially certain 11 (or 10) o’clock newscasters. Remove from the athlete’s last name another thing everybody seems to be talking about (but not just lately), especially newscasters who are forecasters.

Spelling the remainder of the surname backward would result in a food harvested by digging. But don’t do that. Instead spell it forward and add to it a food harvested by picking, thereby forming a city’s name that is the setting of a late great situation comedy. The athlete’s first name is a name of a character on that sitcom.

Who are the athlete, sitcom and character?

Hint: Regal guitarist might cover Leo’s “Regards…”

Uncorking The Campaign Slice:

This one is a “stumper”

Name a current politician, first and last names. The last name might follow the words “belt” or “disk.” The first name, which is a nickname, is a world city, a European capital, that is. The nickname is a world city, a European capital minus 51, that is. (51 as it would be written in an ancient European capital, id est).

Who is this politician?

Hint: The politician shares her/his last name, and four letters of his/her formal first name, with a former great NFL player who spent his entire professional career with one team, a team which was once head-coached by a man who was portrayed in a biographical movie with a cast that featured a notable future politician. The coach’s real-life hometown was the same as Annie Hall’s and Jack Dawson’s.

Creepy Critter Slice:

Reptilian Replication

Name a reptile, in two words.

Replace the second and fifth letters in the first word with two different letters. In the second word, replace the fifth letter with a different vowel, replicate the fourth letter twice, and place one of those letter-triplets at the end of the word.

The result describes what one might witness when a woman dances while wearing a certain garment a size or two too big.

What are the reptile and the (“letter-replicated”) result of wearing a size-too-big garment to the dance?

Every Friday at Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! 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 Tuesdays 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.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Fishy hotdish recipe; Lights, camera, and the pursuit of "That's a wrappiness!" Nation deconstructing

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Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

This week we are treated to another delectable bonus puzzle slice from the redoubtable Gourmet French puzzle chef, Monsieur Garcon Du Parachutisme. He is known in the blogosphere also by his screen name “skydiveboy.” (He is an expert at both parachutes and puzzles.) Our guest puzzle chef is also known as Mark Scott of Seattle, Washington.

Note that the menu title of Mark’s puzzle is “Global Bonus Slice,” or GBS for short, which is the monogram of another clever fellow, one who wrote a play that might have been subtitled “Clark Kent and His Alter Ego” (or, if you are a Freudian, “Clark Kent and His Super-ego”).

Do you have any confusion about this or other puzzles penned by our gourmet French puzzle chef? Do you have a yen to question Mark? You might try reaching him in our Comments Section. If he is otherwise occupied, then we might be able to shed light on his puzzles (or any other puzzles we purvey).

Global Bonus Slice:

Nation Deconstructing

Think of a country. Take all the letters of this country in order and break them down into four parts to name: 1.) a weapon, 2. a title, 3.) a personal pronoun, and 4.) a preposition.

What is this country?

Thanks to Mark for that scrumptious cosmopolitan appetizer. The puzzles on our menu this week involve a casserole, an actor’s meaty (hammy?) role and, as usual, a dash of rigmarole to taste. Enjoy:

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Mouth Watering Slice:

Fishy Hotdish Recipe

In a casserole pan, prepare two sectioned lemons and one pound of chopped perch. Stir gently. Pour in a quarter of a bottle (three ounces) of Coopers Original Australian Pale Ale.

Mix these three ingredients – lemons, perch and ale – together and place them on a lower rack for a maximum of 25 minutes to create a hot Australian dish. Place onto a serving board to cool. Makes two servings.

Name the dish.

Questionable Marquee Slice:

Lights, camera and the pursuit of “That’s a Wrappiness!”

Name a currently popular actor, first and last names, in nine letters. In a 2003 action-drama movie in which he starred, this actor’s character was seeking something, in eleven letters. The first five letters of the actor’s name are the same, and in the same order, as the first five letters of what his character sought.

The actor and the thing sought share no other letters in common. But those remaining ten letters can be rearranged into three words which, when followed by one of those things “thou shalt not” do, describe something the actor’s character already has that will help him find what he is seeking.

Name this actor. What was his 2003 character seeking? What “four-word something” does he have that will help him find it?

Hint: Keep the letters of the three-word title of the 2003 movie in order but make a two-word term out of it. The term might describe a condenser fan motor, a drum support roller, or burner drip bowl, to name just three examples.

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.

Friday, April 17, 2015

Wooden Airships; Salami on Weapon-rye

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e⁵ SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! In a few weeks we will be celebrating our first anniversary. In preparation, as we were riffling through documents in the P! archives, we happened upon a sheaf full of weatherworn, dog-eared, cat-pawed newspaper clippings from 1947.

(Even though Puzzleria! began on May 9, 2014, these musty clippings somehow mysteriously found their way into our archives. But that’s okay, because mystery is smack-dab in the middle of Puzzleria!’s wheelhouse.)

And so, because we are recyclers (and bicyclers) extraordinaire, we cobbled... no, wait, we cut-and-pasted these mysterious clippings into this week’s “Airlines Headlines Slice: Wooden Airships.” Cobbling is what we do to corny content, such as the following paragraph:

Speaking of “archives,” is that what pirates exclaim when they enjoy oniony grass-like herbs in their salad? Is it where bees make multicolored honey? And, does Archivy grow, all Wrigley-like, on a St. Louis landmark?

But such lite-weight, get-thee-to-a-punnery cornpone is merely a vegetarian appetizer. The real meat can be sampled and savored below from our menu:

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Dagwood Sandwich Slice:

Salami on weapon-rye

Take two different letters that both appear in the first one-fifth of the alphabet. “Sandwich” them around the fourth letter of a kind of weapon to form a word that is a part of that weapon. The words are not etymologically related.

What are these words?

Hint: Most people are familiar with both words, but not as many people are familiar with them in their “weapon” and “part-of-a-weapon” senses.

Airlines Headlines Slice:

Wooden Airships

The news clippings on Puzzleria! this week all mention (or allude to) the rescue of Rosalita (Rosie) Roseboro on November 2, 1947 during the maiden (and final, as it turned out) flight of Howard Hughes’ prototype H-4 Hercules military transport aircraft. However, after poring over library-microfilm newspapers (and pouring over them with black coffee when we occasionally nodded off), and after scouring online archival accounts of that historic but brief air journey, we can find no mention of this rescue whatsoever.

So what? So, whatever. All we know, Mr. Phelps, is that your puzzling mission, should you choose to accept it, is to edit these four headlines:

1.) Big ‘bird’ gives mom daughter

2.) Hughes’ aeroplane rescues girl from harbor

3.) Transport plane delivers daughter from water to mom

4.) Hughes’ craft rescues damsel in distress

into one elegant headline. (This may seem like one of Will Shortz’s “creative challenges,” but it is not; we have one specific headline in mind.)

Our intended five-word headline consists of, in order: a two-word subject, a predicate, an indirect object, and a direct object. For example, it reads something like “Lego Lambda provides Puzzlerians puzzles.”

In the five-word headline you form, you will be able to:
Switch the initial letter of the third word with the initial two letters of the first word, in effect “spoonerizing” them to form two new words. Connect the fifth word to the end of the new third word. The result is the name of a popular singer and band leader.

Place the second word after the fourth word, leaving a space. The result is the “author” of some juvenile verse that the popular singer, then age 42, recited once at a concert.

What is this headline? Who are the singer and the “author?”

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.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Alphagraffiti; "It'll take an act of Congrocery marketing!"; Bonus Slice: Global oxy-yokel

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e⁵ SERVED

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! ‘Tis still April, month of showers. Rain showers of cats and dogs, pitchforks and hammer-handles, warm fuzzy-wuzzies and puzzle-slices for the unmuzzled…

And, speakin’ of wuzzie-fuzzies, we here at Puzzleria! don’t cotton to usin’ no energy-saving nozzles when we shower you with our sprays of puzzles (except perhaps if you hail from California).

And, speaking of the Western Seaboard, we offer this week another delectable bonus puzzle slice cooked up by our friend Mark Scott who hails (when it is not raining, anyway) from Seattle, up-a-ways on that sinister coast.

Mr. Scott – also known as “skydiveboy” on the blogosphere, and as Master Gourmet French Puzzle Chef “Monsieur Garcon du Parachutisme” here at Puzzleria! – has served up stacks of such bonus slices already in Puzzleria!’s just-under-a-year-so-far cyber-run.

The stylish chef, who in many ways is out-of-this-world, is nevertheless everthemore a man of the world, which many of his puzzles reflect, including this one, an irresistible appetizer:

Cosmopolitan Slice:

Global Oxy-yokel

Think of a country in two syllables that could be considered an oxymoron.

What is this country?

Feeling sharp? Feeling dull? Try feeling your way through the following menu of chockful-o’-moxie, ironic puzzle slices:

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Easy As ABC Slice:

Alphagraffiti

Think of the alphabet as uppercase letters printed on a closed loop of paper so that …XYZ is followed by ABC… (The loop not need to be a Mobius strip, although it very well could be.)

Take four consecutive letters from this alphabet. Alter one of the letters, graffiti-style, by adding just a little bit to it. The four letters (three original ones plus the new one you created), in their same order, now spell out a word.

Now take five consecutive letters from the alphabet, also in uppercase print. Alter one of the letters, graffiti-style, by adding a little bit to it. The five letters (four original ones plus the new one you created), in their same order, now spell out a word.

What are these two words?

Political Slice:

“It’ll take an act of Congrocery marketing!”

Name an American politician who is sometimes called by a nickname. Replace two letters of the nickname with their mirror images.

That result as well as the politician’s last name are two words that both can be seen on shelves in a grocery store, on the same side of the same aisle (just like in Congress!).

Who is this politician?

Note: The two letters that are replaced with their mirror images are lowercase, not uppercase, letters.

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.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Food Mapping; "Acrofinitions"

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Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! Today is Friday the 3^rd day of Maypril (month moniker courtesy of TheWretched Mess News, one of my dad’s favorite publications when I was a Young-un).

Today we must discuss Will Shortz’s National Public Radio Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle offering from the March 29 broadcast. I promised followers of both the Blainesville and AESAP blogs that I would do so.

It is an excellent puzzle from the estimable Henry Hook whose skills I praised in a past Puzzleria! Will Shortz also deserves credit, of course, for sharing HH’s puzzling prowess with us.

Hook’s puzzle reads:

“This week’s challenge is a little tricky. Given a standard calculator with room for 10 digits, what is the largest whole number you can register on it?”

I am not sure what Will’s “intended answer” is for this poser. But I believe there is a handful or so of acceptable answers, even though most “largest whole numbers” in those answers differ. Usually it’s bad puzzle form if multiple answers are possible, but in this case it was somehow a delight to sift through them. Indeed it felt like one of Will’s “creative challenges” in which there is no “correct” answer, just “most creative and elegant” answers. (See the two paragraphs just above this week’s MENU.)

The answers to the NPR puzzle for this week are discussed very insightfully on the Thursday PM comments on Blainesville and AESAP blogs. Among the answers I considered submitting to NPR as my “official” guess were 9,999,999,999, BILLION, ZILLION, GOOGOL, 9,999GOOGOL, GOOGOLPLEX, 8, 10 and 99. There are other possible correct answers I didn’t think of at all!

I quickly eliminated 9,999,999,999 as my answer because it is not even remotely “a little tricky.” The five answers in uppercase are all formed from inverted numbers. For example, if your punch 7060066666 into your calculator and stand on your head it will look something like 9999g00g0L. If I were a better bettor, I plunk my money down on this as Will’s intended answer (and for the Wisconsin Badgers to become NCAA hoops champs).

“GOOGOLPLEX” would have been a great answer except that you can’t form a “P” or “X” with an inverted number. If you turn 8 sideways it is the symbol for infinity. My dictionary defines infinity and zillion as “numbers” (albeit “indefinitely great” and “indeterminately large,” respectively), but I doubt Will will accept them.

I went to sleep Monday evening thinking I would submit some GOOGOL variant as my answer, yet wondering if there were a better answer I might be missing. I woke up Tuesday and raked the sleep from my eyes and face with my hands. Bang! It hit me. My hands are “a standard calculator with room for 10 digits.” (One definition of “standard” is “regularly or widely used, available or supplied.” When I write doggerel I often count metrical feet with my fingers.

Bingo! My answer would be 10. After doing some “Duck Duck Googling” and other Internet searching I came across this site, and changed my answer to 99 which I then submitted to NPR. Of course this is not close to “the largest whole number you can register on” a calculator (9,999GOOGOL likely is) but I have a sneakily suspicious hunch that 10 or 99 might be Henry Hook’s intended answer.

I had been feeling an increasingly nagging perplexity about any answers involving GOOGOL because Blaine, The brilliant proprietor of Blainesville who routinely gives clever and excellent hints to Will’s puzzles, gave this hint: “I must have misdialed when trying to phone a friend; I got Ed Asner instead.” I could not connect that hint to googol even though when I checked the spelling of “googol” in my Merriam Webster’s I was reminded that it was coined by the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner... Edward Kasner/Ed Asner; I just did not make that connection. But I did make a connection between Blaine’s hint and this site/photo, which only served to confirm my newfound “99 solution!” It was like reading meaning not intended by the poet into a poem.

With apologies to Will Shortz, we are cooking up a new kind of puzzle slice this week. We call it our “Creative Challenge Slice.” It is patterned after Will’s occasional (I believe they are annual) “special two-week creative challenges.” In 2011, for example, he asked us to compose a palindrome containing the name of a famous person, such as “Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W, aside.” In 2012 Will challenged us to combine titles of TV shows to form amusing sentences, such as “I’ve Got a Secret/ Murder, She Wrote/ The F.B.I.”

There are no “correct answers,” just “creative answers,” more of an “essay exam” than “true or false test.” Will allows us two weeks so we can give these challenges our best efforts, and so he can take a little break to win or host a ping-po…, I mean, a table tennis tournament, or whatever else he does for fun. You will not get two weeks from us to solve these slices, however. We are lousy at ping-pong.

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Easy As Pie Slice:

Food mapping

Name a natural food in two words. Scrunch/smush the two words together (that is, remove the space between them) and change one of the vowels to a different vowel to form a word you would see on a world map.

What are these three words?

Creative Challenge Slice:

Acrofinitions

“Acrofinitions” are definitions in which the first letters of each word spell out the word being defined. They are cousins to acronyms, such as SNAFU and SCUBA.

Examples of acrofinitions are:

Cute Adorable Tabby

Dispenser Of Growls

Not Exhibiting Wear

Bound Object Of Knowledge

Enormous Lumbering Endangered Pachyderm Having A Nozzle-like Trunk

Book Imparting Believers Life Everlasting

Receptive Airwaves Devices Incurring Occasional Static

Pieces Of Puffiness Containing Occasional Raw Nuts

Three Rectilinear Intersecting Abutting Non-skew Geometrical Lateral Elements

Spelling Competition Requiring Anagrammatic Brainpower Building Lexicographical Elements

or…

Squares Containing Runes And Blanks Boardward Laid Eruditely

One can also attempt to “acrofine” people’s names:

Jotter Of Some Exasperating Puzzle Homework

Britain’s Esteemed Artists: Their Legacy? Excellent Songcraft

Puzzle Aficionado Utterly Laudable

Writer Of Radiant Descriptions Who Outshines Meteors And Novae

relentlessly Original Nonesuch

judicious Admirable Naturalist

Deductive, Athletic, Very Inventive Dude

Stylish Knowledgeable Yeoman Detesting Indifference, Volunteering Enigmas, Barbaric Of Yawp

Eliciting No Yawns, An Amazing Numerical Displayer Who Edits Imperfection, Resolves Defects Afflicting Lego’s Fonts, And Networks

Bloke Of Brobdingnagian Knowledge, Epigrammatic Repartee, Fathomless Understanding Flowing From Lilliputian Ego

(Please tell me if I have forgotten any fine Puzzlerians! who require acrofining. Or, write your own acrofinitions for them. Thanks.)

Okay, you can do better, perhaps even rewrite any of these slapdash acrofinitive efforts. But there are vast fields of verbal fruits out there ripe for the acrofining. So, hop aboard the ol’ International-Harvester and get pluckin’.

Extra-credit question: Can a reasonably coherent acrofinition be created for any word at all? For, example, for the word “wallydraigle”? “Syzygy”? “Keratoconjunctivitis”? Or for “acrofinition” itself?

Note: You need not wait until next Tuesday to post your answers to this Creative Challenge Slice. Reveal them whenever you wish in our comments section. Thanks.

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.

Friday, May 1, 2015

When jocks become jokes; This one is a "stumper"; Reptilian replication

Friday, April 24, 2015

Fishy hotdish recipe; Lights, camera, and the pursuit of "That's a wrappiness!" Nation deconstructing

Friday, April 17, 2015

Wooden Airships; Salami on Weapon-rye

Friday, April 10, 2015

Alphagraffiti; "It'll take an act of Congrocery marketing!"; Bonus Slice: Global oxy-yokel

Friday, April 3, 2015

Food Mapping; "Acrofinitions"

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