Jeff bakes up half-a-dozen “Zarkinesque” puzzles... & a dozen challah rolls! A property more compelling than primality? Pepsacola? Cocoa-Cola Beach? Eat, drink & delight in the tasty! Fixin’ to fix a faulty fixture; Vehicles, valets and vitality

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Fixin’ to fix a faulty fixture

Name a native or inhabitant of a certain country. 

Consecutive letters in this word spell a house fixture. 

The remaining letters, in reverse, spell an important component of that fixture which, if it needs fixing, should definitely be fixed. 

What are this inhabitant, fixture and part.

Appetizer Menu

SuperCaliJefferifficExpialidocious Appetizer:

Jeff bakes up half-a-dozen “Zarkinesque” puzzles... & a dozen challah rolls!

“Mmm-mmm, that home-made-rolls aroma... ‘Challahlujah!’”  

1.🥖🍞Take the names of two online retailers. 

Combine their letters and rearrange the result to spell two words that complete the following sentence:

“When it comes to the desired aroma of homemade rolls or bread, the best bakers say it should...”

What are these retailers?

What two words complete the sentence?

Note: The photograph of the challah rolls and the rolls in the photo themselves were created by Jeff Zarkin himself!

Also, Jeff has generously offered to share his culinary genius and ingenuity (and recipes!) with anyone who may wish to replicate his “ever-lovin’ fresh-from-the-oven” baking expertise. Just email me and I shall send you his contact information.

A few more images of Jeff’s mastery appear below his six Appetizers.

Have no doubt about “out and about!”

2.📤Name something you might see when you are out and about. 

Rearrange its letters to get what it might be attached to.

Something nice on the periodic table

3.🧪Take the name of a chemical element. 

Delete one letter. 

The remaining letters, in order, spell something nice.

“It seems stress goeth before a fall”

4.⛪Take a term for a person of the cloth. 

Delete one letter. 

Rearrange the result to get something this person of the cloth might be proud of.

Summery meadowy dew?

5.🥀Take the name of something you might see in a summer meadow. 

Drop the first letter. 

Rearrange the result to get a word you might use to describe it.

Mixed-up medics

6.🏥Take the name of a medical specialist. 

Delete one letter and rearrange to get the name of a different medical specialist. 

Who are these two medical specialists?

MENU

Pleasurable Hors d’Oeuvre

Eat, drink & delight in the tasty!

Take a word that means “to eat or drink with pleasure.” 

Change its first letter to get a word that means “delightfully tasty.” 

What are these words?

Hint: The two words, each more than one syllable long, are accented on different syllables.

“I once knew some twosome...” Slice:

Vehicles, valets and vitality

Take the two surnames of a well-known twosome. 

Place a vehicle, in one syllable, before one of the surnames to get a two-word term for a valet. 

Place a vital part of that vehicle before the other surname to get a smaller, unmotorized vehicle. 

Who are the people in this twosome? 

What are the vehicles?

Riffing Off Shortz And Vespe Slices:

Pepsacola? Cocoa-Cola Beach?

Will Shortz’s July 30th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Jim Vespe of Mamaroneck, New York, reads:

Name a well-known U.S. city in nine letters. Change the third and fifth letters to get the name of a beverage. What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Vespe Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Rearrange the letters in a not-at-all-well-known ten-letter U.S. city to spell the two missing words in the caption for the left-hand image of the two-paneled illustration: “____ with a ______.”

A puzzle-maker lives in that U.S. city. Change the fifth letter of that city. Insert a hyphen after the sixth letter. Move the first four letters to the end, preceded by a space. The result is a six-letter hyphenated word followed by a four-letter word that is a caption for the right-hand image in the illustration. 

What is this U.S. city?

What are the captions for the two images in the illustration?

ENTREE #2

Name a world capital city that is home to a magic museum that showcases magical practices from all over the world: from sophisticated modern illusions to the magic of the Middle Ages.

Change one letter in the city to name a legendary magician who was also an enchanter and wise man from the Arthurian Era.

What is the city?

Who is this legendary magician? 

ENTREE #3

Name a well-known North American city in eight letters. Subtract 900 from the first letter and change the sixth letter to a new letter. 

Switch the order of the sixth and seventh letters of this result to spell a noun for “streaks of condensed water vapor created in the air by an airplane or rocket at high altitudes.”

What are this city and noun?

ENTREE #4

Name a well-known U.S. city in seven letters. Change the sixth letter to get the name of an identity for Mexican Americans who have a non-Anglo self-image – a name that in the
1960s was widely reclaimed in the building of a movement toward political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of indigenous descent.

What is this city?

What is the word with which many Mexican Americans with a non-Anglo self-image identify?

ENTREE #5

Name a well-known U.S. city in seven letters. Insert a space before a pair of double letters. Between those double letters insert two new letters that do not appear in the spelling of the city.

(These letters are homophones of two words that appear together in scores of song lyrics – for example, “just the way ___ ___,” “___ ___ so beautiful,” and “come as ___ ___.”)

The result spells a two-word reptile.

What is this U.S. city?

What is this reptile?

ENTREE #6

Name a U.S. state. Change the third and the fifth letters to an “r” and an “r”. Slice the result into two pieces to spell:

1. an herb of the mallow family with green pods that are used in soups or stews, and

2. a firm and slender variety of tomato.

What is this state?

What are the herb and tomato variety?

ENTREE #7

Take the eight letters of a well-known U.S. city. Change the fourth letter to an “n”. Rearrange the fourth-through-seventh letters to spell pasta dishes that date back more than seven centuries. 

What is this city?

What are the pasta dishes?

ENTREE #8

Name a well-known U.S. city in ten letters. Change the first letter to an “e” and move it to the fifth position. The result is a European country’s “Yes” and a city in a country that
shares that country’s border.

What is this city?

What are the county’s “Yes” and the neighboring county’s city?

ENTREE #9

Name a well-known U.S. city in nine letters. Remove the 4th, 5th, 6th 8th and 9th letters. The remaining four letters spell the name of a beverage for which the city’s state is known.

Now take the five removed letters. Change the
third one to the letter previous to it in the alphabet. Change the fifth one to an “r”. The result is another beverage.

Take this same U.S. city. Two consecutive letters are a Periodic Table symbol of an element. Replace that symbol with the last letter in the name of that element. Rearrange the resulting eight letters to spell a latex-producing plant.  

What is this city?

What are the two beverages? 

What is the latex-producing plant?

ENTREE #10 

Name a well-known U.S. city in eleven letters. Change the third letter to the one that follows it in the alphabet to get the name of farm implements you might see in the vicinity of the
city followed by where, exactly, you might see those implements. 

What is this city?

What is the farm implement, and where might you see it?

ENTREE #11

Name a well-known U.S. city in nine letters. Change the first letter to a three-letter homophone of that letter. Form a second word
and third word using the second-through-sixth and the sixth-through-ninth letters of the city. The homophone is the first word in the following:

“The average (first word) (second word) of the 82.5 square miles of (third word) in this city is 653 feet.”

What is this city?

What are the first, second and third words?

ENTREE #12

Name a pretty well-known seven-letter city situated in one of the top-five-largest U.S. states in area. “Shoot an ‘i’ out” and change the third letter to a “t” to get something that is
more associated with the entire nation than with just the one state where this city is situated. 

What is this city?

What is the something that is associated with the entire nation?

ENTREE #13

Name a well-known U.S. city in eight letters. Remove the first letter and divide what remains into two names.

The first name is the surname of a singer whose hubby, also a singer, wrote a song with a “Gun” in its title and with lyrics alluding to his desire for his wife.

The second name is the name of a singer who recorded the title song of a movie with a “Gun” in its title.  

What is this city?

Who are the two singers?

What are the song titles?

ENTREE #14

Name a well-known U.S. city in nine letters. Switch the second and sixth letters. Then switch the sixth and seventh letters of this result. Change the middle letter to an L and move it to the end. The result is one of seven heavenly creatures, according to some Catholics.

The names of three of these seven creatures are anagrams of  “Big Earl,” “Aper Hal” and “Alchemi.”

What is this city?

What is this heavenly creature?

What are the names of three of them?

ENTREE #15

Name a common fixture in some Hollywood “swashbuckler films” that romantic leading male actors like Errol Flynn might swing from during the course of swordplay. Remove from the fixture two consecutive vowels in the circular alphabet (like “ou” ,“uy” or “ya”, for example) that are not adjacent in the fixture.

The result is an eight-letter U.S. city.

What are this fixture and city?

ENTREE #16

Name a reasonably well-known U.S. city in ten letters.

Replace the sixth letter with the two consonants that flank it (ignore any nearby vowels).  

Remove the first and last letters of the city.

The result is two dances – one centuries old, the other less than a century old. 

What is this city?

What are the two dances?

ENTREE #17

Name a well-known U.S. city in seven letters. 

Let A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.

The numbers corresponding to the third and fourth letters sum to 12. Reverse the order of the digits in 12 to get 21. Replace the third and fourth letters of the city with two letters whose alphanumeric values sum to 21.

The numbers corresponding to the first and second letters in the city sum to 23. Add the letter corresponding to the number 23 to the end of the altered city. 

The result is a one-storied house with a low-pitched roof – one of many you will find in this city.

What is the city?

What is the one-storied house with a low-pitched roof?

ENTREE #18

Name a reasonably well-known U.S. city that (like the city in Entree #17) begins with a consonant and also contains a double-consonant.

Change the first-letter-consonant to the “single-consonant version” of the double consonant in the city.

Change the double consonant in the city to the “double-consonant version” of the first-letter-single-consonant in the word.  

The result is one of many creatures you will see on ranches and farms in the city’s vicinity.

What is this city?

What is the creature? 

Note: Below are a few “riffy leftovers” from last week’s  “‘Bret Hart’” “‘Get Smart’” NPR Puzzle.

ENTREE #19

Name a classic TV show in two words. Switch the order of the two words. Replace each with a rhyming word. Place the words “of the” between these new words to get a simple
definition of “patella.”

What is this TV show?

What is the definition of “patella?”

ENTREE #20

Name the two lead characters in a classic TV show, a male and female. Take rhymes of the first name of the male character and of the surname of the female character. The result is the name of an American author.

What is this TV show and its lead characters?

Who is the author?

Dessert Menu

Digital “Madge and Hal” Dessert:

A property more compelling than primality?

The numbers 2,917, 41,641 and 280,187 are all prime numbers. 

Name another perhaps more interesting property they share.

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.