Food Mapping; "Acrofinitions"

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e⁵ SERVED

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.

MENU

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.

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.

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