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.

Two creatures great and small; Confectioner-in-chief; Poetically proverbial breakfast fare; The Gift of the “Zane (Grey) Magi” “Instrumental journeys & chronophobia”

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Confectioner-in-chief

Write the two original varieties of one candy brand as plural words (like, for example, Hershey’s Kisses Cherry Cordials and White Chocolate Hugs).

The singular form of the candy brand appears – in consecutive letters – within the name of a United States president with whom both plural words are associated. 

Name this candy brand, plural words and president.

Appetizer Menu

Note: This week’s Appetizer is contributed by a fan of Puzzleria! who has contributed an Entree and an alternate solution in recent weeks. This fan is using no screen name as there are mysteries afoot for the future...

“Fan”tastic Appetizer:

“Instrumental journeys & chronophobia”

“Gonna take an instrumental journey”

1. 🎷🎸📯🥁Think of a fantasy journey in two words, ten letters, taken by characters called George, Taylor, Jim, Marty, J, and Mrs. Kelcher’s daughter. 

Remove from those two words a letter that is also a number. Rearrange the remaining letters to name a device which is instrumental in journeys which once were considered fantasy but have since become the height of commonplace. 

What are the fantasy journey and the now common device?

“Chronophobia”

2. ⏰Take a word for a division of time and a word associated with a division of color. 

Arrange the combined eight letters of those
two words to get a word for what is proverbially the fear of all time. 

What are these three words?

MENU

Twenty-Six-Letter Slice:

Poetically proverbial breakfast fare

Name a kind of cuisine, a two-word breakfast food, a one-word breakfast food, a coffee container and a muffin container. Anagam these 26 letters to spell a five-word proverbial phrase attributed to a poet. 

What are these six words and this proverb?

Riffing Off Shortz And Hochbaum Slices:

The Gift of the “(Zane Grey) Magi”

Will Shortz’s November 27th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Alan Hochbaum of Duluth, Georgia, reads:

What common eight-letter noun can be shortened in two ways — using either its first three letters or its last four letters? The answer is a familiar item.

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Hochbaum Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a biblical patriarch, David’s nemesis, what the bible says Hegai was, and the surname of a paleontologist who campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields — in 7, 7, 6 and 5 letters.

Rearrage these 25 letters to name a puzzle-maker (first and last names), and the city and state of his residence.

Who is this puzzle-maker? Where does he live?

Who are the patriarch, nemesis and paleontologist. What was Hegai?

Note: Entree #2 was created by our friend Plantsmith, whose “Garden of Puzzley Delights” feature appears regularly on Puzzleria! 

ENTREE #2

Take a common food name in eight letters. You can use the first three letters and the last five letters to spell essential parts of two other food names — one of them fast, the other one hyphenated.

What is this eight-letter food name and the pair of fast and hyphenated “side dishes”?

Hint: Mantle, Maris, Jeter or Judge + an aimless, casual scribble + foppish

ENTREE #3

Name a common two-word term, in nine and six letters, for something broadcast on television. The first three letters from each word, in order, form a shortened six-letter word
for the two-word term.

Delete the first four letters of the nine-letter word and the first two letters of the six-letter word, leaving nine letters that are different from one another. 

Rearrage these letters, using three of them more than once, to form the five-word title of an example of the original two-word term. 

What are the original two-word term, its shortened form, and the five-word title?

ENTREE #4

What popular and proper eight-letter noun can be shortened in two ways — using either its first three letters or its last six letters? 

Hint: The noun is a common yet “noble” name.
Its letters can be rearranged to spell five-letter and three-letter words that belong in this geographical sentence:

“The city of _____ sits at one extreme ___ of this ‘string-beany’ nation.”

ENTREE #5

A compound word for a common seven-letter vehicle can be shortened in two ways — using either its first four-letter part or its second three-letter part. 

The first part of the word ends with “eleven.”
The second part of the word begins with “one hundred.”

What is this vehicle?

ENTREE #6

Take five consecutive interior letters from a ten-letter lower-case producer of spirits. These five letters spell a shortened form of  this ten-letter word. 

Take the five letters that remain, in order. Transpose the two consecutive vowels, and change one of them to an “a”. The result is a producer of a “less spirited” beverage.

What are this 10-letter producer of spirits and its five-letter shortened form?

What is the producer of the “less spirited” beverage?

ENTREE #7

Take  a word for a unit of electric current that ends with a three-letter preposition that means “before.” 

Retain the letters in this word that appear “before” this preposition but remove the preposition itself. 

The result is a shortened form of the unit of electric current.

What are this unit of electric current and its shortened form? 

ENTREE #8

Take a nine-letter noun for a common article of clothing. Create a shortened form of this noun by deleting its final six letters. Those six letters can be rearranged to spell a word that follows “World,” “television” or “geometric.”

What is this article of clothing?

What word follows “World,” “television” or “geometric?”

Dessert Menu

James Herriot Dessert:

Two creatures great and small

Name a tiny creature, in two words and ten letters. 

Replace the first word with a two-letter synonym and remove the space to spell a huge creature, in one word. 

What are these two creatures?

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.

Actor, mascot, tater-prepper; From mildly amusing to deadly serious; Duffers know there are no holes in 1! A-Star-Moony lesson; Hot turkey & five delicious "sidely dishes"

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Note: There is no need to delay this special Thanksgiving edition of Puzzleria! It is ready to publish, so here it is! Enjoy nibbling on our puzzles after your meal, before the turkey-induced triptophan kicks in. I give thanks to all who contribute to, participate in, and enjoy our blog. 

— Lego 

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Duffers know there are no holes in 1!

There are three holes in 89. There are two holes in 96. There is one hole in 20. There are no holes in 53. 

Those statements are true. 

Replace 53 with a number that keeps the fourth statement true, but makes the statement sound false if the statement’s two nouns are spoonerized.

What number is this?

Appetizer Menu:

Worldplayful Appetizer

Hot turkey & five delicious “sidely dishes”

Hot turkey

1. 🦃Think of a word that describes a verbal
attack. 

Double an internal letter and add a space between the two newly-doubled letters. 

The result is a two-word phrase that could describe a roasting step. 

What is this phrase?

A P!uzzle

2. 🐉Think of a word used weekly on Puzzleria!. Move its last letter to the beginning to obtain a mythological creature. 

What is this creature?

Well-known number

3. (1776) On January 5, 1914, an assignment was made using a sequential series, yielding a number that is familiar to almost all Americans. 

What is this number? 

How was it determined?

Improper homophones

4. 🗺The demonyms for an inhabitant of a US state capital and for a European country are spelled identically but (usually) pronounced differently. 

What are these demonyms?

Henanatomical recipe

5. 🐔Write the names of two component countries of an overarching entity. Separate them by a space, in place of their real-life border. Insert an H into each component country: one at position one of country two and
one at position two of country one. 

Add a space and an apostrophe to the result. You now have a possible three-word description of the cetacean homologue of an anatomical feature of a female chicken that produces a familiar product. What is this phrase?

Lamentations

6. 🎱☆💪🏁Many would characterize the current political climate in the USA (and many other countries) with an idiomatic phrase. 

This phrase sounds like a combination of the following, in order:

1. A number

2. A state capital

3. A part of the human anatomy

4. A goal in a certain sport.

What is the phrase?

MENU

Adjectival Slice:

From mildly amusing to deadly serious

Take just the first syllable of a mildly amusing activity. Ignore the rest of the word. 

After this syllable’s first letter insert two letters associated with that activity. 

The result is a deadly serious adjective. 

What are this amusing activity and serious adjective?

Riffing Off Shortz And Picciotto Slices:

An A-Star-Moony lesson

Will Shortz’s November 20th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Henri Picciotto of Berkeley, California (who coedits the weekly “Out of Left Field” cryptic crossword) reads:

Name a branch of scientific study. Drop the last letter. Then rearrange the remaining letters to name two subjects of that study. What branch of science is it?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Picciotto Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Name a puzzle-maker and the city in which he lives. Rearrange these letters to name a church-singer, throat-wringer and branch-clinger.

Who is this puzzle-maker?

Identify the church-singer, throat-wringer and branch-clinger. 

ENTREE #2

Name a branch of scientific study. 

Drop the last letter. 

Then rearrange the remaining letters to name two subjects of that study. 

What branch of science is it?

Hint: One of the study subjects is a vulgar x-rated word. One less vulgar synonym of that word begins with “ex-”. Another less-vulgar synonym of that word, if you change one vowel, is a word that describes kings, queens and jacks.

ENTREE #3

Name a branch of scientific study. 

Rearrange its seven letters to describe, in two words, a piece of rotten wood half-sunken in a swamp. 

What branch of science is it?

What is the description of the wood in the swamp?

ENTREE #4

Name a two-word branch of scientific study. 

Rearrange the letters in one of its words to form a new word. That new word — along with the other word in the two-word branch of scientific study — form a possible two-word synonym of cardiology.

What is this branch of scientific study?

What is the possible two-word synonym of cardiology?

ENTREE #5

Name a branch of scientific study associated with the body. 

Rearrange its letters to name something in your fridge that would likely be bad for your
body if you ate it. 

What branch of science is it?

What might be in your fridge?

Hint: If you ate massive quantities of the this thing in your fridge you might end up in a clinic that has the same name of what you ate.

ENTREE #6

Name a branch of a branch of astronomy dealing especially with the behavior, physical properties, and dynamic processes of celestial objects and phenomena. 

Rearrange the its letters to spell an alliterative two-word description of a glib, pretend-to-know-it-all talking head on the CNN, Fox News or MSNBC television networks. 

What branch of astronomy is it?

What is the two-word description?

ENTREE #7

Name a science of the mind and of behavior. Rearrange the letters to spell two prefixes – one relating to height or elevation, the other
relating to carbohydrates, especially sugar. 

What is this science of the mind and of behavior?

What are the two prefixes?

ENTREE #8

Name a branch of science that studies critters that produce a particular food. 

Drop the third letter to name what Bill Clinton delivered in 1998, what Tiger Woods delivered in 2010, what the Catholic church gave the the Jewish community in 1965, and what Canada gave to Indigenous Inuit People in 2019

What branch of science is it?

What did Woods and Clinton deliver, and what did the Catholic Church and Canada give?

ENTREE #9

Name a branch of scientific study. Rearrange the its letters to name two words related to a novel that is associated with this branch of study:

1. a seven-letter noun for a weapon used in the novel, and

2. a five-letter adjective that describes the title character.

What branch of science is it?

What are the noun and adjective?

What is the novel?

ENTREE #10

Many institutions of higher learning _____ the principles of an “artistic science,” the practice of which results in concrete things. Firms that build these concrete things may _______ graduates of these institutions in hopes of hiring them.

Rearrange the letters in the the twelve-letter word for this “artistic science” to spell the five-letter and seven-letter verbs in the blanks.

What are these verbs?

What is this “artistic science?” 

Dessert Menu

Dialectical Dessert:

Actor, mascot, tater-prepper

The first, seventh and eighth letters in a 12-letter word can be rearranged to spell a dialectical variation of a verb that can mean “to leave immediately.” Have those three letters “leave the word immediately,” leaving a surname of an actor and a first name of a second actor.

The first actor has the same first name as an unofficial mascot of an annual holiday parade. The second actor’s surname is an anagram of a person who prepares potatoes on that holiday.

What is the 12-letter word?

What is the a dialectical variation of the verb that can mean “to leave immediately?”

Who are the actors?

Who is the mascot of the annual holiday parade?

Who prepares the holiday potatoes?

Hint: The actors were both born in the 1950s.

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.