Tidbits of “Biliteral” symmetry; “Literature, Music, TV & Movies” Make a buck... or a lot of ’em! What is the name of this brusher with fame? Our glass, half full of sandy sundials

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 3(7!) SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Make a buck... or a lot of ’em!

Name a biblical figure and a word describing that figure. 

Rearrange the combined letters of these words to name two things it takes to make a buck. 

What are these things?

Hint: The biblical figure’s spouse might be described by a four-word phrase Jesus once used to describe worthy and virtuous people. The initial letters of the words in the phrase can be rearranged to spell particular body parts.

Appetizer Menu

A Trio Of Appetizing Word Teasers:

“Literature, Music, TV & Movies”

📚1. The name of a famous person in literature contains the name of an object that they use. 

Replace the object in the character’s name with something that they wear, and you will get another thing that you can wear. 

Who is the person, and what are the articles of clothing?

🎶📺2. Take the two-word title of a famous hymn. 

Remove the first letter of the second word. You will get the name of a TV show. 

What is it?

🎥3. What two-word title of a famous movie is an anagram of a word meaning “pretends to be sick”?

MENU

Chronological Slice:

Our glass, half full of sandy sundials

Name an idiom, in 15 letters, that indicates a span of time. 

Its figurative meaning is usually understood to last longer than its literal meaning. 

What is this phrase?

Hint: The initial letters of the words in the idiom, in order, spell a first name. 

Riffing Off Shortz And Harvey Slices:

Tidbits of “Biliteral” symmetry

Will Shortz’s December 6th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Jared Harvey of Santa Cruz, California, reads:

Think of a common word in six letters. Write it in lowercase. If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will show the same word. What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Harvey Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the first and last names of a puzzle-maker. 

Rearrange their combined letters to spell a hyphenated eight-letter word for what a binge drinker of Ole Smoky Moonshine may do during the morning-after hangover and a three-letter word for the container that the drinker perhaps drank from.

Who is the puzzle-maker?

What may the binge drinker do and what is the container?

ENTREE #2

Think of a proper place-name noun in six letters. Write it in uppercase. Connect the final two letters with a horizontal line. 

Remove a horizontal line from the first letter.

If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will show the same original uppercase proper noun. 

What is it?

ENTREE #3

“Test-takers’ interpretations of the inky Rorschach image revealed much about their personality characteristics and emotional functioning,” the psychologist said.

Think of two common words of four letters each that are synonymous with “inky Rorschach image” and “revealed.” Write these synonyms next to each other in lowercase. If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will show the same two words in the same order.

What are these synonyms?

ENTREE #4

Think of a word for a common salad food in six letters. Write it in uppercase in pencil on a piece of paper. 

Add an uppercase N to the end, forming a seven-letter string of letters that don’t spell a word. Now write an uppercase N on a piece of glass with a felt pen, then flip the piece of glass over and look at what you wrote. Erase the N you wrote on the paper and replace it with what you saw on the flip side of the glass.  

If you hold up a mirror at the side of this pencil-on-paper result, the reflection will show a phrase which, with proper spacing, consists of an English adverb and article and a French noun. 

The bilingual phrase describes the original seven-letter string of letters you wrote in pencil.

Hint: If you restore the original N you added to the end of the salad food and add an A and U to the beginning of that seven-letter string, the result will be a nine-letter synonym of a relatively self-operating mechanism – like a robot, for example. 

What is the salad food?

What is the bilingual phrase?

What is the synonym of “robot?”

ENTREE #5

“Vacuum the living room.”

“Mop the kitchen.”

“Vacuum the bedrooms.”

“Mop the bathroom.”

People who own a Roomba vacuum and Braava mop might make such a list. Think of a common word that indicates what a Roomba or Braava essentially is. Write it in lowercase, then erase the first letter.

If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will describe, in two words (sometimes hyphenated), what kind of list the one shown above is. 

What is the common word that indicates what a Roomba or Braava essentially is?

What kind of list is it?

ENTREE #6

Think of a not-so-common word and a common word, each in four letters. 

The not-so-common word is “an area of open country,” one where winds are unfetterd by trees. 

The common word is what winds do. Write the two words side-by-side in lowercase. 

If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will show the same two words. 

What are they?

ENTREE #7

Note: The following puzzle is fake news.

A district commissioner of a large city (one that collects no sales tax in a state that collects no income tax) posted a five-word all-uppercase tweet in which he took credit for the tax breaks. The words in his tweet were 1, 4, 3, 2 and 5 letters long. 

The 4-letter word beginning with an M means “to impair or make essentially defective or ineffective.” 

The 3-letter word begins with a T.

If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection of the tweet will show the same 15 letters in the same order (although you will have to allow that two of the four spaces will be in different places.) 

What did his tweet read?

ENTREE #8

Think of an not-so-common bird in six letters. Write it in uppercase. 

If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will show a word for a percussion instrument.

What are this bird and percussion-instrument word?

ENTREE #9

Think of a common word in five letters. Examples of this word are “Be prepared,” “Carpe Diem” or “E Pluribus Unum.” 

Write the word in uppercase, putting a space between the first two letters. 

If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will show first name and initial of the surname of a bus driver in an animated TV series. 

What is this common word and who is this TV character? 

ENTREE #10

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

This “truth universally acknowledged” is the opening sentence in a work of literature. It is also an example of a five-letter word. Write this word in uppercase, putting a space between the second and third letters. 

If you hold up a mirror at its side, the reflection will show the equivalent of 1,009 plus either a short synonym of “morning” or a short designation for radio stations that are more conducive to talk formats than music formats. 

What is this five-letter word? 

What is the equivalent of 1,009? 

What is either a short synonym of morning or a short designation for radio stations that are more conducive to talk formats than music formats?

ENTREE #11

In a crucial hockey match, Alexander Mikhailovich Ovechkin, winger and captain of the Washington Capitals, is able to fake Boston Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask out of position and score an overtime-period goal. As a result, the Capitals barely scratched out a one-goal victory. 

Write a 4-letter synonym for “fake (an opponent) out of position.” Write it in uppercase letters as if you were filling out a DOWN clue in a crossword puzzle. 

If you hold up a mirror at its topside, the reflection will show a synonym for “scratched (out, as a hard-fought victory)”. 

What are these two synonyms?

ENTREE #12

A DOWN crossword puzzle clue reads “Make a choice or selection” in six letters. Write just the first five letters in the grid, in uppercase, leaving the bottom square blank. 

If you hold up a mirror at its topside, the reflection will show a five-letter answer to another clue in the puzzle: “Canned tomato choice, other than stewed, crushed and pureed.”

What are these six-letter and five-letter crossword puzzle answers?

Dessert Menu

Painterly Dessert:

What is the name of this brusher with fame?

A well-known museum once sponsored an exhibition of a relatively unknown painter’s artwork. 

The exhibition coincided with a retrospective of a renowned artist’s works, which drew crowds to the museum, making the two-word nickname of the more obscure painter famous. 

The first two letters of the nickname’s second word and the last two letters of the first word spell the name of the museum, for short.

Who is this artist?

What is the museum?

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.

A nesting turchiduckenkey! Doughboys and Deerstalkers; Awareness of one’s surroundings; A recipe for mobster roles; Granny Smiths, stamps & cinema

 PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 3(7!) SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Awareness of one’s surroundings

Complete the somewhat familiar phrase “House of ____” with one word. 

Triple one of the two vowels in the word. Add an “s” to the mix.

Rearrange the result to form a word for what surrounds a house... and not just this house but, really, what surrounds almost any house. 

What word in the blank completes the phrase? 

What surrounds most all houses?

Appetizer Menu

Delightfully Puzzley Appetizer:

Granny Smiths, stamps & cinema

🍏🍎1. Name a 4-word, 17-letter exhortation
that Dr. Anthony Fauci and others who are fighting the Covid-19 pandemic might use as a rallying cry. 

Remove an H and rearrange the remaining letters to form a 4-word phrase for something it would be easy to do in an orchard full of Honeycrisps and Jonathans, but would not at all be easy to do in an orchard full of Granny Smiths and Pippins. 

What are these two phrases?

🍈🐀2. Name a tasty but foul-smelling fruit with a prickly rind. Move its first letter 16 places later in the alphabet and rearrange the result to form the name of a one-word rodent known as a nuissance. 

A two-word synonym of the rodent is an anagram of a two-word caption for the stamp image pictured here.

What are the fruit and the rodent?

What are the synonym of the rodent and two-word caption?

🎥3. Name a two-word fictional city where a cabbie and cop named Ernie and Bert ply their trades. Move the first letter of the first word 16 spaces later in alphabet.

A two-word result is what the actor portraying Sundance does when western lawman Joe LeFors and his posse close in on him and his buddy Butch. (The first word of the result is the actor’s surname.)

A three-word result is also what a cinema-goer with deuteranomaly might perceive during the famous chase scene in “Bullitt,” or what a cinema-goer with deuteranomaly might perceive during the climactic Grand Canyon cliff-jumping scene in “Thelma and Louise.”

In what city do Ernie and Bert ply their trades?

What does a title role actor do to evade capture by Joe LeFors?

What do deuteranomaly-impaired cinema-goers perceive during the chase scene in “Bullitt” and the cliff-jumping scene in “Thelma and Louise?”

MENU

Playing Many (Body) Parts Slice:

A recipe for mobster roles

If you say the name of a past actor’s screen name it will sound like three body parts. 

The actor is associated with mobster roles.

Who is this actor?

Hint: A part of the actor’s pre-acting-career life was portrayed in an award-winning biographical drama-comedy. 

Riffing Off Shortz And Davis Slices:

A nesting turchiduckenkey!

Will Shortz’s November 29th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Wesley Davis of Black Mountain, North Carolina, reads: 

When you get the answer to this puzzle it will make you smile. Name an animal and spell it
backward. Now name a variety of meat and insert it inside the animal’s name that you’ve spelled backward. A common word will be revealed. What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Davis Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Take the first and last names and the hometown of a puzzle-maker. 

Rearrange the letters to form a caption for the image pictured here. The caption contains four words of 4, 4, 8 and 8 letters beginning with N, B, M and S.

What is the caption?

What are the name and hometown of the puzzle-maker?

ENTREE #2

Name a variety of meat. Place it within a pair of identical letters. 

A common word will be revealed for
implements one might employ to eat this variety of meat. 

What are this variety of meat and implements for eating it?

ENTREE #3

Name a 4-letter variety of meat and insert it inside a 4-letter suffix meaning “a person or substance that kills” or “an act of killing.” What will be revealed is not a common word; indeed it is not a word at all... but perhaps it should be. 

The word, which might have a hyphen in its center, would describe the locus  of the figures of Mary, Joseph, the Magi and the shepherds in a creche scene.

What is this non-word that perhaps should be a dictionary-worthy word?

What are the variety of meat and suffix associated with killing?

ENTREE #4

Name a four-letter exclamation one may utter while committing a gaffe. 

Spell it backward. 

Now name a variety of meat and insert it inside the exclamation that you’ve spelled backward. 

A common word will be revealed. What is it?

ENTREE #5

Name a variety of meat and insert it inside what Tahiti Monarchs do. 

A seven-letter word will be revealed that means “an act of subjecting someone to
disgrace, humiliation, or disrepute especially by public exposure or criticism.” 

What is this word?

What is the variety of meat, and what do Tahiti Monarchs do?

ENTREE #6

Name an animal and spell it backward. Switch the second and third letters of the result and remove the first letter. 

The final result is the first name of an athlete who is considered by many to be the best ever to play his or her sport.

What is this animal"

Who is the athlete?

ENTREE #7

Name a variety of meat and insert it inside the 4-letter informal name for an 18-wheel trucker in a 1970s convoy. 

A common word for a bedroom or for a part of a firearm will be revealed. 

What are this variety of meat and informal name for a 1970s trucker?

What is the word for a bedroom or part of a firearm?

Hint: The informal name for the 18-wheel trucker usually contains an apostrophe.

ENTREE #8

Name the profession of Jules Leotard or Charles Blondin, in seven letters. 

Spell its first four letters backward to name an mammal. The remaining letters, in order, spell a much smaller mammal. 

What mammals are these?

What is the profession of Jules Leotard or Charles Blondin?

Dessert Menu

Hunter S. Thompson Machine Gun Dessert:

Doughboys and Deerstalkers

Name two four-letter words for things that both soldiers and hunters use.

The words rhyme. 

What are these rhyming 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 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.

3 stars in the “rom-com cosmos” No lunching on poetasty lotuses! U.S.M.C. = U.S. Marine Critters; Throwing stones at glass stadia; Non-landbound crafts & Texas branding

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 3(7!) SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

No lunching on poetasty lotuses!

(Note: I hope this puzzle is just “As You Like it.”)

After a poet’s name place the word “thou” followed by the poet’s name spelled backward. 

The result, in bygone poetic language, suggests that this poet is no lotus-eater. 

Who is this poet?

Appetizer Menu

Crafty Appetizer:

Non-landbound crafts & Texas branding

1. Find a five-letter adjective and three-letter noun for something produced in Texas. 

Change the noun to an adjective that sounds like the way that  many Texans pronounce the noun. 

Rearrange the combined letters of these two adjectives to name a familiar brand in eight letters.

What is this brand?

2. Name two crafts made to travel above the surface, twelve letters total. 

One needs air, the other doesn’t. 

Put them together and rearrange all the letters to name someone very well-known. 

What crafts are these and who is the person?

MENU

Eponymous Slice:

Throwing stones at glass stadia

Take a stadium named for a sports figure. Move the first letter of the surname to the end to spell the surname of a man for which a now-demolished stadium was named. 

The stadiums were almost within a stone’s-throw of one another. 

Can you name these stadia?

Riffing Off Shortz And Hochbaum Slices:

U.S.M.C. = U.S. Marine Critters

Will Shortz’s November 22nd NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Alan Hochbaum of Duluth, Georgia, reads:

Name a marine animal in two words. Remove two consecutive letters in the name and read the resulting string of letters in order from left to right. You’ll name a major American city. What is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Hochbaum Slices read:

Note: We will lead-off this week’s riff-offs with three contributions (Entrees #1, #2 and #3) created by our friend ecoachitect whose “Econfusions” feature appears regularly on Puzzleria!

ENTREE #1

Name a sea creature in two words. Remove two consecutive letters and the result will be the end. What is the creature and what is the end?

Hint: The beginning word of the sea creature can be found at the end of the sea creature’s body.

ENTREE #2

Name a small, though well-known city in the United States.  

Change 2 consecutive letters (the last 2) and the result will be a U.S. state.  

Hint: Both sets of changed letters are postal
code abbreviations for U.S. states. 

ENTREE #3

Take a common, uncapitalized 9-letter word. Replace the first 2 letters with a single letter, and the result will be a two-word phrase, in 9 and 8 letters, for something we hope to see very soon. 

ENTREE #4

Take the hometown and state of a puzzle-maker. Rearrange the combined letters to spell two words:

* The surname of an acclaimed actor, and

* Another word (besides “actor”) beginning with an “a” that applies to the actor by dint of productions titled “Early Stages,” “Distinguished Company” and “Backward Glances.” 

Who is this puzzle-maker and what is the hometown?

Who is the actor and what other “a-word” applies to him

Hint: You can also rearrange the combined letters in the puzzle-maker’s hometown and state to name a city about 400 miles northeast of that hometown (via Interstate-85) and a place at Cardinal Gibbons High School Baseball Field in that city where you might relax after the six-hour drive.

ENTREE #5

Name two-word a marine mammal with large paddle-like forelimbs, no hind limbs and a flat fin-like tail. Its plural form contains three and four letters. A “whimsical” alternative plural form contains three and six letters. 

From this alternative plural form remove either the third and fourth letters or fourth and fifth letters. 

Read the resulting string of letters in order from left to right. You’ll name a major American city. 

What is it?

ENTREE #6

Name a large marine creature in two words of five and three letters. 

Remove two consecutive letters in the name and read the resulting string of letters in order from left to right to form the first and last names of an artistic American in Paris. 

Who is it?

ENTREE #7

Name one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals, in two words of four letters each. 

Remove two consecutive letters in the name that are the postal abbreviation of a U.S. breadbasket state. Replace them with two the two initials of a U.S. president whose mug is on a mountain. 

Read the resulting string of letters in order from left to right. You’ll name a major North American city. 

What are the marine mammal and North American city?

ENTREE #8

🐰 Remove a state postal abbreviation from a state capital to spell a 4-letter woodland creature. 

The state with the postal abbreviation is geographically one state removed from the state that is home of the capital.

📱 Remove the abbreviation for “retweet” from a large western U.S. city to spell a 6-letter country. 

🥈 Remove a symbolic two-letter bit of silver from a large midwestern U.S. city to spell a California city with about one-twenty-seventh the population of the midwestern city. 

🐖🐖🐖🐺 Remove 501 (as the ancient Romans wrote it) from a midwestern U.S. state capital to spell a 5-letter constructor of houses (not made of straw or sticks) that cannot be blown down merely by huffing and puffing. 

🏃 Remove a prefix for “two” from a large southern U.S. port city to spell a 4-letter critter. Now remove two letters that precede “/GYN” from the same large southern U.S. port city to spell a 4-letter word for roughly one-twenty-sixth of a marathon. 

🐦 Rearrange four consecutive letters in an 8-letter U.S. state capital to spell the name of a bird that is also the name of a simpleton or nut-job. The remaining letters, in order, spell the name of a subscription video-on-demand streaming service. 

Dessert Menu

Stellar Dessert:

3 stars in the “rom-com cosmos”

Take the first names of two stars who acted in a 1970s romantic comedy. 

Change a short vowel sound to a different
short vowel sound to name what sounds like a legendary musical star. 

Who are these three stars?

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.