Who’s the guy in the hoosegow? Bethlehem West; Neologisimetrics; "That is one thorny rows poser!" Blue plate, home plate, round-trip gait; Blue plate, fashion plate, ashen pate;

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER e^{4 +} pi⁴ SERVED

Welcome to our January 15^th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!

We are happy this week to feature another challenging puzzle submitted to Puzzleria! by our friend ron. It appears under our main MENU and is titled Tops And Bots Slice: “That is one thorny rows poser!” (ron is the “poser” of this “rows poser.” I guess that makes us the “posees!”) Thank you greatly, ron, for this generous gift.

Our other offerings this week include two Breakfast Omelets (Thanks, Paul, for introducing the prospect of tasty omelets into last week’s Comments thread!); an appetizer that uses some of the same ingredients as the second omelet; a Slice of “LegoLambdanLarceny” (Ripping Off Sandy, Shortz); and for dessert, a soufflé that contains just the slightest soupcon of ingredients appearing in the first Breakfast Omelet.

Go ahead. Get your wits about you. Indeed, collect your complete set o’ wits… and get eggy wit it!

Breakfast Omelet Menu

 

Free Range Egg Breakfast Omelet:

Blue plate, fashion plate, ashen pate

The answers to eight of the nine clues below contain two words. The ninth answer contains three words. (The parenthetical content after each clue reveals how many letters are in each word of each answer.)

1.) Finley, Ryan, Witt, Weaver, Wright, Tanana, Santana and Chance, for examples: (5 letters, 8 letters… or, more specifically, a 5-letter, sports-page jargony, plural possessive nickname, followed by an 8-letter plural noun)

2.) “Sunday best” that is worn by Catholics or Louisianans, perhaps: (6 letters, 7 letters)

3.) Relatively smudgy forehead cross thumbed by a jittery priest on the first day of Lent: (10, 3)

4.) The result when a camper who is trying to sleep late even though his tent is surrounded by trees dripping with noisy songbirds is that he _______ ______ : (7, 6)

5.) BBs, for example: (9, 4)

6.) Erasers for non-permanent marker brand-name pens: (7, 6)

7.) Consumers of omelets made from eggs laid by free range chickens, perhaps: (5, 8)

8.) King Kong’s chuckling snorts (with thanks to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson): (5, 8)

9.) Equipment worn by Ponch or Jon: (1, 5, 7)

Each answer to the nine clues above consists of the same 13 letters rearranged into nine different permutations. Rearrange them one more time to form a tenth permutation: three words that reflect the gist (in 2, 6 and 5 letters) of a secondary fashion news story that went semi-viral this past week:

__ __

__ __ __ __ __ ’ __

__ __ __ __ __

What are these three words?

Tasty Eggy Breakfast Omelet, Western Style:

Blue plate, home plate, round-trip gait

While performing on the gridiron, the late NFL player who is featured in the “Bethlehem West” puzzle (on the Appetizer Menu immediately below) may have been described as a “blue and

__ __ __ __ __ __

__ __ __

__ __ __ __ __ __ __.”

Those three words are a color, a truncated form of a 12-letter adjective, and a noun related synonymously to the mythological figure whose name is an anagram of the nickname of the player’s team.

 

Rearrange the 16 letters in the blanks to form the two words that reflect the gist of a recent ongoing national news story.

What are the three words in the blanks? What are the two words in the story?

 

Appetizer Menu

Tautological As Tied Tropes Appetizer:

Bethlehem West

 

Take a two-word phrase consisting of a five-letter adverb related to insanity and five-letter adjective related to the moon. This phrase likely would have seemed tautological to a medieval person living in the 16^th Century. The person might have found the two words to be tautological, redundant and superfluous based on his/her rudimentary Middle Ages-era understanding of astronomy along with his/her probable awareness of an institution in London with “St. Mary” and “Bethlehem” in its name. 

Rearrange those ten letters in those two words to form two new 5-letter words, the first and last name of a late Hoosier who played 13 years in the NFL, all as a celebrated member of one team. Interchange the third and fifth letters of his first name, add two marks of punctuation, and capitalize the second and third letters to name a truncated form of how he or any one of his teammates might have identified himself, in three syllables. Add an “S” to the end to name a team that has lately made headlines.

What is this team? Who is this player? What is the two-word seemingly tautological phrase?

 

MENU

Tops And Bots Slice:

“That is one thorny rows poser!”

Consider the two rows of letters pictured below:

C  I  O  Q  U

 

B  P  R  T  Y

In what way are the letters in the top row different from the letters in the bottom row?

Ripping Off Sandy, Shortz Slice:

Neologisimetrics

Will Shortz’s Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle on NPR this week, composed by listener Sandy Weisz of Chicago, reads:

Name a unit of measurement. Remove two consecutive letters. The letters that remain can be rearranged to name what this measurement measures. What is it? 

Puzzleria!’s patented piggyback puzzle, composed by blog administrator Lego Lambda of somewhere north of Chicago, reads:

Name a unit of measurement. Remove three letters, two of them consecutive. Move the second letter of the result to the end, thereby forming a new word naming what this measurement may measure.

What is the measurement and what may it measure?

Dessert Menu

Just A Jailbird Dessert:

Who’s the guy in the hoosegow?

A news story this past week involved the following five words, the names of two people connected by a conjunction:

__ __ __ __

__ __ __ __

__ __ __

__ __

__ __ __ __ __

One of the people has a history of incarceration, but has not exactly been “a model prisoner.” Let us just say this prisoner has HAD NO PENAL PENANCES.

Rearrange the 18 letters in those four uppercase words to form the five words that belong in the blanks above. What are the words?

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 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.