Mr. Ed’s Neighborhood; Basinyms; Lowering-the-bar talk; Child’s play; Cutting off your nose to write your racy paperback; Put it on, pull it out

Hello and Welcome to our September 16^th edition of Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! We’re blogging this week from the department of murky mysteries here at Puzzleria! Plaza…

Yes, this week we turn our dial to NPR (National PuzzleRia-do!) and tune in to Bartok… (oops, wait, that would be NPR classical programming)…

So no, tune in instead to Car Talk, Click and Clack, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Tappet Brothers!...Puzzleria!-style.

Puzzleria!’s “Car Talk Puzzle” is a mint-condition creampuff created and contributed by our friend PlannedChaos. It is titled “Cluck And Schmuck Slice: Lowering-the-bar talk,” and can be “tuned in” on the frequency just under out main MENU... 

“What can be do to get you into this puzzle today?!”

Also “on tappet” this week are an Hors d’Oeuvre, Morsel, Appetizer, Dessert and five Ripping/riffing Off Shortz Slices that introduce a newly coined concept called “basinyms” – which are the “last-but-not-least” cousins of “acronyms.”

Here at Puzzleria! we aim to offer our guests a maximum of amplitude and frequency with a minimum of commercial interruptions and static. Please enjoy.

Hors d’Oeuvre Menu

Trios Of Pictures Worth Octets Of Words Hors d’Oeuvre:

Child’s play

Captions for the images shown here combine to suggest the name of one children’s game. 

Here are clues to the captions:

ONE: A hyphenated term describing the spectators pictured (9 letters, 3-6)

TWO: A reflexive descriptive statement (12 letters, 5,2,5)

THREE: An ad slogan, (13 letters, 6,2,5)

Rearranging the letters of each caption should help you determine the name of the game.

Morsel Menu

Recite By Hearty Appetite Morsel:

Put it on, pull it out

Name something you can put things on and place after it something that can pull things out. Remove a “t” from the first object and an “n” from the second object to form a two-syllable food item.

Now name a sentence that most American schoolchildren can probably recite by heart. Isolate from the sentence two one-syllable words that flank a pronoun in the sentence.

Place the latter word in front of the former word. Remove a “t” and an “s” from the latter and an “h” from the former to form the same two-syllable food item named above.

 

School children may eat this food item for lunch or as an after-school snack.

What are the two words in the sentence? What is the food item?

Appetizer Menu

Completing In The Word Series Appetizer:

Mr. Ed’s Neighborhood

What is the seventh word in the following series?

Net, reef, neigh, net, vent, vet, _____

Hint: The seventh word in the series is a five-letter word.

MENU

Cluck And Schmuck Slice:

Lowering-the-bar talk

In the wake of last week’s Bartok/Car Talk puzzle, Puzzleria! has acquired a lost transcript of National Public Radio’s “Car Talk” broadcast of its Puzzler segment! It appears below in its entirety:

(Playing the role of Ray is PlannedChaos, and playing the role of Tom is LegoLambda)

 

RAY: Welcome back to the third half of Puzzleria!... and to the new Puzzler. Are you ready?

TOM: Is it obfuscated and declarified?

RAY: Obfuscated, declarified, de-everything. Here it is:

Suburbia, 1960. Domesticity itself. At a house still under construction, a recently married couple embrace as the wife leaves for the nail salon, and the husband goes back inside to finish packing for a two-week business trip. They’ve never been happier, even within the presence of stray tools, sawdust and occasionally faulty utilities.

Having finished packing, the husband decides to relax by imbibing a bit before taking a waiting taxi to the airport. He pours his drink of choice, a ’42 claret, and inhales the earthy bouquet. But he is barely able to enjoy the tonic before accidentally spilling wine onto his wife’s favorite dress. He hurries to the kitchen sink, but the tap is dry.

 

Choosing the lesser of two evils, he flushes the stain with milk from the fridge, the only other liquid he can find.

Not able to find pen and paper to explain the situation to his wife once she returns, the husband spies a pair of scissors and an appliance box with a brand name printed on the side. Being a clever fellow, he notices that the letters in the brand name are exactly what is needed to spell out his message. He cuts furiously, and as the taxi driver begins laying on the horn he is just able to arrange seven scissored-out rectangles into two words before rushing out the door.

The question is: What is the brand name, and what message did the husband leave?

TOM: And why was he drinking near her clothes? And why did she marry such a klutz? (laughter)

RAY: Some questions are best left unanswered. But if you think you know the answer to my question, drop us a hint in the Comments Section below, where my brother will most likely reward your efforts with snark and derision. We try to keep him away from the computers, but sometimes he somehow manages to log on using his dial-up internet connection.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about your car, keep it to yourself because this is a blog and we can’t take your calls. We couldn’t even if we wanted to… and trust us, we don’t want to.

TOM: Not with that attitude we don’t!

RAY: Thanks to special guest contributor Tom, visiting us from the “great junk heap” up in the sky… think of it as a salvage yard for poor souls. And remember, don’t solve like my brother.

TOM: Don’t solve like my brother.

RAY: We won’t be back next time. Bye-bye.

Ripping/riffing Off Shortz Slices:

Basinyms

Will’s Shortz’s National Public Radio Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle from September 11^th reads:

Think of a well-known category with exactly seven things in it. Alphabetize the things from their ending letters, and the last letter alphabetically will be “e.” In other words, no thing in this category ends in a letter after “e” in the alphabet. It’s a category and set of seven things that everyone knows. What is it?

Puzzleria!’s Ripping/riffing Off Shortz Slices deal with “basinyms” – words formed from the final letters of groups of words is a set phrase of series of words. For example, the basinym of ReservE OfficeR TraininG CorpS is ERGS. The CentraL IntelligencE AgencY is LEY, The NationaL HockeY LeaguE is LYE, and Passion fruiT, OrangE GuavA is TEA (or NEA if you go with PassioN, OrangE GuavA).

If the order of the words in a basinym is arbitrary the words may have multiple basinyms. For example, BacoN LettucE TomatO (NEO) may also be called by its ONE (tomatO bacoN lettucE) or EON (lettucE tomatO bacoN)   basinyms. (The other basinyms for this popular sandwich are NOE, ENO, and OEN.) 

ONE:

Think of a well-known group of exactly four people. Arrange the last letters of their first names to spell the 4-letter first name of a fifth person – a contemporary of the members of the group that also shares their nationality and profession.

The last name of the fifth person is the last name also of one of the four people in the grouping. The first name of the fifth person is a word peripherally related to the profession of all five.

What are the five first names of these people?

TWO:

A trio of positive qualities has six possible basinyms (see NEO, ONE, EON, etc., above). The three qualities are often grouped together in a particular order. The basinym conforming to this particular word order spells a common interjection.

What are this trio of words and this attention-getting basinym?

THREE:

Think of a well-known group of exactly four people. A basinym of their first names spells the past tense of a verb, a form of which appears 110 times in books they wrote.

Who are these four people and what is the verb?

FOUR:

A basinym of the singular forms of four symbols used in several games spells out something that must be paid.

What are the symbols and the thing needing to be paid?

FIVE:

A basinym for the first names of a sextet of sitcom characters spells the name of a prolific thrash metal band.

What are the sitcom and the band?    

Dessert Menu:

Doff And Don Dessert:

Cutting off your nose to write your racy paperback

Write the full name of a famous movie director/actor in three-words. Doff the letters in the word “noses” and remove a space to spell the pen name of a famous author in two words.

 

Who are these artists?

Hint: The director/actor actually did doff (and don) various noses while making movies.

Hint: Many people assume incorrectly that the director/actor’s middle name is a first name.

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.