OhiO? OslO? OxymOrOns! Municipal backmasking; “Schlurred Speach Schnapps”; “What Maisie Knew” Hemidemisemiquaver? Hemidemisemicolon!

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

“What Maisie Knew”

Little Maisie’s mother reads “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to her for the first time. 

In what U.S. state does little Maisie conclude MacDonald’s farm is located?

Appetizer Menu

PuzzleRiffic Appetizer:

OhiO? OslO? OxymOrOns!

Ohio, Oslo?

1. 🌎Take the name of a state, drop one letter and rearrange to get a world capital. 

What are this state and capital?

“Please state your profession”

2. 👷🏇Start with the name of a state. 

Drop one letter and rearrange to get a group of people in a specific occupation.

Drop another letter and rearrange to get a group of people in a different occupation.

Both occupations are associated with the same five-letter word — a word with two different meanings.

Name the state, the occupations, and the five-letter word.

Note: Our Schpuzzle of the Week in the November 18, 2022 edition of Puzzleria! challenged you to find ONE two-word oxymoronic phrase in which both words begin with the same four letters in the same order. Jeff Zarkin’s riff on that puzzle appears below.

Jeff, however, challeges us to find THREE oxymoronic phrases, each with two words that share the same FIVE first letters!

Riffing off a “Humdrum Humdinger” of an Oxymoron

3. 🐂😝

Find a trio of two-word oxymoronic phrases that begin with the same first word, a synonym of ceaseless. 

The three second words in the trio of oxymoronic phrases all begin with the same five letters as that synonym. These three second words are synonyms of:

❶ a  short simple play or dramatic entertainment (9 letters),

❷ a set period of time between events (8 letters), and

❸ a pause between acts of a play or parts of a public performance (12 letters).

What are these three oxymoronic phrases?

MENU

Sippin Syllables Slice:

Schlurred Speach Schnapps

Name a language. 

Change its middle letter to the letter one place earlier in the alphabet. 

Spell the result backward to spell two words  — a drink, briefly, and an ingredient in that drink. 

What are the language, drink and ingredient?

Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices:

Hemidemisemiquaver? Hemidemisemicolon!

Will Shortz’s December 4th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Joseph Young of St. Cloud, Minnesota, who runs the website Puzzleria!, reads:

Name a symbol or punctuation mark on a computer keyboard. 

Anagram it to get the brand name of a product you might buy at a grocery, in two words. 

What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a kind of pie, what most people who ingest it experience, the nickname of a puzzle-maker, and what the sentence “The Cockney church-seater led church-goers to their pews and told them to ‘Sit down and ‘ush up!’” is a two-word example of. 

(These five words contain 5, 3, 4, 5 and 3 letters). 

Rearrange those letters to spell the name of a puzzle-maker and the name of his blog. 

What are the five words, the name of the puzzle-maker and the name of the blog? 

ENTREE #2

Name a two-word American international brand of frozen foods. Anagram it to get a member of a wedding party and a synonym of “I do.”

What are this frozen food brand, wedding party member and synonym?

ENTREE #3

Name the capital of a large Atlantic coastal African country that is an exporter of an edible product that, as a verb, is a synonym of “snowball.” This product is often packaged in a cylindrical container that requires a two-word tool to access its contents. 

Take the 23 total letters of this capital, product and tool. 

Rearrange them to name a four-word (8, 5, 6 and 4 letters) edible grocery product that does not require any tool to open it.

What is the capital of the country, the edible product, and the tool?

What is the product that requires no tool?

ENTREE #4

Name a gourmet snack brand, in words of seven and twelve letters, that ends with an “apostrophe s.” (’s)  Delete an “n”. 

Rearrange these letters to write a two-word caption, in six and twelve letters, for the image pictured here. 

What are the snack brand and the caption?

ENTREE #5

Name a brand name of a product, in two words of four and seven letters, that you might buy at a grocery — especially if you are counting calories are are worried about packing the pounds onto your midsection... or if you are trying to keep your gluteus maximus to a “minimus!” (How’s that for an asinine clue?!)

Hint: Two consecutive words in the text of this puzzle can be anagramed to spell the two-word product brand.

What is the product? 

What are the two consecutive words? 

ENTREE #6

Name a Nestles’ brand-name product you might buy at a grocery, in one hyphenated ten-letter word. 

Interchange its first and ninth letters, then revove the hyphen, to spell a six-letter buttery candy of brittle but tender texture, and a four-letter spice made from the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed.

What is the Nestles’ brand?

What are the candy and spice?

ENTREE #7

Name a two-word, nine-letter symbol or punctuation mark on a computer keyboard that becomes a Roman numeral if you rotate it 90-degrees. Anagram its letters to spell the sound made by hot rod tires on the street or by school children on the playground.

What is the symbol?

What is the sound?

ENTREE #8

Name a punctuation mark on a computer keyboard that, if you rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, becomes a facial-feature expression. If you rotate it instead 90 degrees counterclockwise, the punctuation mark become the opposite of that facial feature.

Anagram this punctuation to get the last name of a British dramatist and a word that appears twice in a one-act play he created on 1996.

What is this punctuation mark?

What are the play and playwright?

ENTREE #9

Take a five-letter word for a Rolls-Royce Phantom, Ghost or Silver Cloud; a Bentley Brooklands, Flying Spur or Mulsanne; an Aston Martin Rapide or Lagonda; a Jaguar Mark X; or a Lotus Carlton. 

Also take a four-letter word for a British baby carriage.

Anagram these nine combined letters to spell a symbol on a computer keyboard.

What are these three words?

ENTREE #10

“How did you expect me to react?! The gourmet chef I hired to cater my fancy dinner party served us Steak à la carte with no side dish or garnish! What’s worse, when I sent the crate he packed the steaks in to the crime lab, there were trace amounts of arsenic on the inside!”

Anagram any of five different words in the paragraph above to spell a word for a symbol on a computer keyboard key.

What is that key? 

ENTREE #11

Name a symbol on a computer keyboard. Change the first letter, a vowel, to a different vowel. 

Rearrange the result to spell a hinged part of a lake cabin, in two words. 

What are this symbol and hinged part?

ENTREE #12

Name a symbol on a computer keyboard, in two words. Move the second letter of one word so that it is the second letter of the other word.
The result is a possible caption for the image pictured here. 

What are the symbol and caption?

Dessert Menu

Jets And Sharks Dessert:

Municipal backmasking

Name an athlete on a professional sports team, like a Shark in the National Hockey League or a Jet in the National Football League. 

Put the last sound of this word at the start and the first sound at the end, and phonetically you’ll name an athlete on a relatively nearby professional team. 

Who are these athletes?

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.