Rabbit-eared pigs; "Night Train Lane"? "Broadway Joe"?; Tragic tales of two flights

Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzle-ria!

We must pay pictorial tribute to this past week’s astoundingly outstanding comet landing. After a decade-long odyssey, the European Space Agency mission to land a shutterbugging robot probe (here at Puzzleria! we call that “piggybacking”) onto the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, has been accomplished. 

The comet, which is hurtling sunward, reportedly resembles a rubber duck in shape. (I guess that would mean a rubber duck that exercises regularly and watches its diet.)

And so, this amazing astronomical feat (and we at Puzzleria! are specialists in (g)astronomical feats of puzzledom) has left me with two marks of “eggs-clamation” on my face… that is, a pair of crisply cooked and archly cocked bacon-strip eyebows  hovering over wide-open-with-wonder oval eggshell scleras surrounding yellow yolky irises. 

Will Shortz’s National Public Radio “four clock faces” puzzle from last week, however, has left me just with egg on my face... and not sunny-side-up egg... rather, runny-side-down egg.

Yes, if I were the late John Entwistle (Who?), the yoke would be on me. I pretty much guaranteed that Will Shortz would reveal an answer different from what most bloggers seemed to be expecting from him. But I was wrong as rainbows in a black-and-white film.

Not to beat a dead ox (oh, okay, let’s go ahead and beat a dead ox!) but Will's November 2 offering read:

Write down the following four times: 3:00, 6:00, 12:55 and 4:07. These are the only times on a clock that share a certain property (without repeating oneself). What property is this?

The answer Will revealed on NPR’s November 9 Weekend Edition Sunday is that the position of the hands on those four clock faces resemble the Roman numerals L (3:00), I (6:00), V (12:55) and C (4:07).

That is the answer many solvers across the blogosphere suspected Will would reveal, although he received only 50 correct entries. It is a clever idea, the angle of the clock hands forming letters. 

But what bugs me about the puzzle (and led me to believe a different, and perhaps better, answer was in the offing) is the wording in the following sentence:

These are the ONLY times on a clock that share a certain property (without repeating oneself). {Uppercase and boldness added for emphasis.}

First off, I have no clue whatsoever what the parenthetical “without repeating oneself” might mean.

But my main gripe is that these are not “the only times” that share the property of forming Roman numerical letters. To wit, 3:00 Looks Like an L, but so does 3:01 or 2:59. 6:00 is a fine I, but midnight or noon are also I-shaped. 12:55 is a V, but so are 12:54, 12:56 or, for a “wide-stance” V, 1:50. And 4:07 (which is a “pointy C” resembling a V rotated 90 degrees clockwise) might just as well be 1:20, 1:19, 4:06, 4:08, etc.

The remaining Roman numeral letters X, D and M cannot be formed by clock hands (unless, as commenter Paul mused tongue-in-cheekily on the AESAP blog, the second hand somehow comes into play!) Indeed, the only other uppercase letter of the alphabet formable by two hands is probably a “pointy J” (10:00).

Please let me know if I am missing something. I often do.

That said (and vented), I had a blast solving this puzzle, the process of which prompted me to create the “piggyback puzzle” titled “Four Clocks Redux” posted on last Friday’s November 7 Puzzleria!

I have done the same type of piggybacking with this week’s easier-to-solve NPR puzzle. The NPR puzzle reads:

Name a well-known clothing company. Move each of its letters three spaces earlier in the alphabet and rearrange the result. You'll name something you don't want in an article of clothing. What is it?

My piggyback puzzle reads:

Porcidorsal Slice:

“Walruses, Tigers and Golden Bears, Oh My!”

A Tiger, Walrus and Golden Bear might well sport apparel manufactured by the the well-known clothing company in the NPR puzzle. Name something (in two words) that the members of this menagerie do for fun and profit. Move each letter of what they do three spaces earlier in the alphabet and rearrange the result to form something historically “linked” to both “Paradise Lost” and “Blood Transfused.” What do they do, and what do you form?

And how do you do? Fine, we hope. And we hope you’ll do just fine too on this ensuing menu of spicy puzzle slicery:

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Celestial Slice

Tragic tales of two flights

In the 1970s, news outlets covered a story about an object that might have been visible against Alaskan skies. In the 1990s, news outlets covered a story about an object that was definitely visible against Alaskan skies (and skies elsewhere). Each object had a tail, and each object’s flight was tainted by tragedy.

Remove the final letter of the name of a person associated with the earlier flight. Change the remaining second-last and last letters to their mirror images and delete the curvy ends of their descending tails. (Important! Use the font in which this puzzle is printed, not the Times New Roman font that is normal on this web page, and is used in the second part of this sentence!) Replace a space with a punctuation mark. The result is the name of the 1990s object.

What are the names of the person and the 1990s object?

(Hint: A person associated with National Public Radio is also associated with the person in the 1970s tragedy.)

Pearls Of Swinedom Slice

Rabbit-eared pigs

What current television show, if it is punctuated and spaced appropriately, might name a possible advertising campaign sponsored by the National Pork Producers Council?

Sporty Slice

Night Train Lane? Broadway Joe?

Two professional athletes – one retired, the other active – have the same last name but are not related. Both were first-round draft picks of professional teams. In the course of competition, each achieved the same coveted honor (you know, something like an NPR lapel pin!). Their collegiate team nicknames both begin with a B.

One of the athletes has a three-syllable nickname. The first two syllables, when spoken aloud, sound very similar to, but not exactly like, the other athlete’s first name.

Who are these athletes?

(Hint: A two-word summation of all vowels in both players’ last names is often used as a playground taunt that is an alternative to a taunt involving Coke bottles.)

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 puzzle-loving and challenge-welcoming friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria!