Cow, mosquito, Quito Moscow; Bacon and “Ag(gs)amemnon” Court jester’s courtly gestures; Modern music-maker-maker & medieval mathemetician; “Spinder?” “Lenopard?” “Yank?” “3 names, 3 words, 3 years of Puzzle Fun”

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week: 

Modern music-maker-maker & medieval mathemetician

Take the surname of a 20th Century inventor of a music-maker. 

Remove the final letter, which is silent. Put the remaining letters in alphabetical order. One of the letters repeats. 

For instance, GUARNERI is the surname (but with no silent letters) of any member of a familiy of Italian lute-makers who lived during the 17th and 18th Centuries (but not the 20th Century). If GUARNERI satisfied our puzzle’s criteria, you would write down:

A E G I N R R U.

Alas, GUARNERI does not meet our puzzle’s criteria. So, back to the drawing board.

After you do find a satisfactory surname, replace your alphabetized letters with their numerical rank in the alphabet. 

The result is eight numbers associated with a medieval mathemetician. 

Who are this inventor and this mathemetician? 

What are the eight numbers?

Appetizer Menu

“Puzzle Fun” Appetizer:

“3 names, 3 words, 3 years of Puzzle Fun”

Note: This installment of “Puzzle Fun by Bobby Jacobs” celebrates the third “birthday” (or “anniversaire,” as the French would say) of Bobby’s popular, thought-provoking, challenging and always tantalizingly, appetizingly fun puzzles. You can open this link to see Bobby’s September 18th, 2020 debut edition of “Puzzle Fun.” His subsequent puzzles open with these links:

10/30/20; 12/11/20; 1/22/21; 2/26/21; 4/9/21; 6/4/21; 7/23/21; 9/3/21; 11/5/21; 12/31/21; 3/4/22; 5/6/22; 7/1/22; 9/9/22; 11/18/22; 1/13/23; 4/7/23; 6/16/23!

And now, here is Bobby’s newest bemuser:

Take the name of a famous three-named person (like Martin Luther King, Joyce Carol Oates, or Frank Lloyd Wright, for example). 

Find a three-word phrase in which:

*🎂the first word is the second and third letters of the person’s last name,

*🎂the second word is the second letter of their middle name, and 

*🎂the third word is the first three letters of their first name. 

The first three letters of the person’s middle name spell an adjective that describes the situation of being “the three-word phrase.” 

Who is the person and what is the phrase? 

And what does the person have to do with “Puzzle Fun” on Puzzleria?

MENU

Rosy-Fingered Dawn Hors d’Oeuvre:

Bacon and “Ag(gs)amemnon”

Rearrange the letters of a word you might see during breakfast to spell the names of a pair of mythological figures. 

What is this word that would perhaps catch your eye during breakfast? 

What are the names of the mythological
figures?

“Mandibleck The Chick?” Slice:

“Spinder?” “Lenopard?” “Yank?”

Place an “n” within a word for a creature. 

Replace a four-letter word that appears in the result with letters that mean the same thing as that four-letter word. 

The result is a popular pet name for this creature. 

What are this creature and pet name?

Hint: The four-letter word (that you replace with letters that mean the same thing as that four-letter word) is associated with the creature’s lifespan.

Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices:

Cow, mosquito, Quito Moscow

Will Shortz’s September 10th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle – created by Joseph Young, a frequent contributor who conducts the blog Puzzleria! – reads:

Name a creature that has a world capital in its name. Replace the capital with another creature and you’ll get another world capital. What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Young Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a seven-letter world capital. 

Replace the three letters that appear in the first half of the alphabet with one different letter that appears in the first half, just a few places after the other three.  

Place this letter at the end of the remaining letters in the capital. 

The result is the surname of a puzzle-maker. 

This puzzle-maker’s first name is an anagram of a five-letter world capital – but only if you replace the first and fourth letters of the puzzle-maker’s name with a bit (or, actually, two bits) of Artificial Intelligence (something he could probably use!), and replace two letters in the name with one letter that makes the same sound as those two letters.

Who is this puzzle-maker?

What are the world capitals?

Note: The following seven riffs, #2 THROUGH # 8, were penned by Greg VanMechelen (Ecoarchitect) whose “Econfusions” appear regularly on Puzzleria!

ENTREE #2

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name. 

Replace the creature with a body part and
you’ll get the last name of a current well-known American politician. What is this creature? Who is the politician?

ENTREE #3

Name a creature that has a brand name of a drink in its name. 

Replace the brand name with another creature and you’ll get a world capital. What are this creature and capital?  

ENTREE #4

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name. 

Replace the creature with a disease and you’ll get something to eat. Name the capital and creature. 

ENTREE #5

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name. 

Change one letter to the next in the alphabet, and replace the creature with a different creature, and the result will be another world capital. 

What are these capitals and creatures?   

ENTREE #6

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name. 

Replace the creature with something found in a dining room and you’ll get something to eat.  

What are this capital, “dining-room find,” and edible thing?

ENTREE #7 

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name. Replace the creature with the name of a well-known international magazine and the
result will be the name of an international river which has its origin in the same country as the magazine. 

What are the capital, creature, magazine and river?

ENTREE #8

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name.  Replace the creature with the last name of a famous actress (actually two actresses) and you’ll get the name of a major American city.  What are this capital, creature and last name?

ENTREE #9

Take a word for Roo but not Kanga, and a word for what a kangaroo, klipspringer or hare does. Anagram these combined letters. Place the result in front of a word for an African antelope, spelled backward. Add a space and you’ll get the name of a puzzle-maker.

What are these three words?

Who is the puzzle-maker?

ENTREE #10

Write down – in 6 and 3 letters, followed by 2 and 3 letters – what it sounds like when a Cockney boasts about his “treadmill pet’s” beaver-like building skills: “Look at my ______ ___! Blimey, can __ ___!”

The first exclamation spells a world capital.
The second spells a cheese the Cockney might feed his pet.

What are the four words in the blanks?

What are the world capital and cheese?

ENTREE #11

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name. Replace the creature with five letters to spell a word that assumes that you are not midnight-snacking and raiding the fridge during nighttime hours.

Take the five replacement letters. Place the fifth letter at the beginning to spell a noun some might use to characterize this  creature in the name of the capital.

What is this capital?

What is the word that assumes that you are not midnight-snacking?

What are the creature and noun?

ENTREE #12

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name, a creature that doesn’t doesn’t actually exist and didn’t didn’t actually fly. 

Replace this creature with an abbreviated spelling of a large West Coast city to get a common misspelling of a creature (but the correct spelling of a holy man created in God’s image).

Replace this abbreviated spelling of a large West Coast city with a common, often-domesticated creature to get what the holy man might spout.

Replace this common creature with a south-of-the-border snack (a snack you might expect that creature to snarf down if you put it in his dish) to get another large West Coast city.

Replace that West Coast city with a hyphenated toy followed by a space to get the name of a cellist.

What are this world capital and non-existent
flightless creature?

What is the abbreviated spelling of a large West Coast city and correct spelling of a holy man?

What is the common, often-domesticated creature? What might the holy man spout?

What are the south-of-the-border snack and other large West Coast city?

What are the hyphenated toy and the name of the cellist?

ENTREE #13

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name.

“Behold the creature.” Place a capital letter and hyphen in front of it to get a four-letter word associated with a Hoover. 

Replace the first half of the world capital with the initial letter of the Hoover-associated four-letter word. The result is another four-letter word.
After this word place another creature – “an animal of strange or terrifying shape.”

The two-word result is “a large, stout, venomous lizard that has rough, bumpy, black and orange, pinkish, or yellowish skin, a thick tail, and venom glands in the lower lip and that is found especially in arid regions of the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico.”

What is this world capital?

What is the four-letter word associated with a Hoover?

What is the “large, stout, venomous lizard, etc. ...?”

ENTREE #14

Name a holy man who died, but was not born, in Bethlehem. Remove from his first name the name of the capital city where he was baptized, leaving two letters. 

Place the first two letters of a second capital
city between them.

Place the first two letters of a third capital city after them.

The result is the first name of a puzzle-maker. 

Now take a fourth capital city, one that is in Asia. Take just the second, third, fourth, eighth and ninth letters of this city. Invert the fourth letter. The result is the surname of this puzzle-maker.

What are the first three capital cities the puzzle asked you to find? 

What is the Asian capital city?

Who is the holy man?

Who is this puzzle-maker (who is not a holy man)?

Hint: The last two letters of the Asian capital city are also the fourth and fifth letters of that city.

ENTREE #15

Name a world capital that has a creature in its name. 

Remove the creature, leaving the initial of a playwright’s surname and the name of a character in a play he penned.

The removed creature is the first half of the name of one of the playwright’s title characters.

What are this capital and creature?

Who is the playwright?

What are the names of the two characters?

Dessert Menu

Your You’re Welcome Dessert:

Court jester’s courtly gestures

Name a welcoming gesture. Switch the order of two letters to name gestures of approval. 

What are these welcoming and approving gestures? 

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.