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.

Merrymaking & “Anagramammals!” Do Poles weather Polar climes? French Expressionism Décapité? Doggerel’s metrical paws; Nashville Cats? Werewolves of London?” “Trombone me up a memory” of Tombstone Territory...

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

“Werewolves of London? Nashville Cats?”

Name a city in a song. 

Let A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. Replace its first two letters with the letter of the alphabet that represents their sum. The result, after inserting a space someplace, is a creature and where it might reside. 

What is this city?

What is the creature? 

Where might it reside?

Appetizer Menu

“Astronominative,” “Politerary” & “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Appetizer:

Merrymaking & “Anagramammals!”

An Out-of-this-world Singer! 

1.🌙🌠 Think of a well-known British singer. 

Place the first four letters of the first name after “moon” or “star” to form new words. 

Place the last five letters of the last name after
“star” to form a new word. 

Take the first six letters of the last name, plus the last letter of the first name, to form an adjective that one astronaut used to describe
his moon buggy ride. 

Who is the singer?

What are the three new words?

What is the moon buggy ride description?

Merrymaker or Misery Maker?

2.😊 Think of a ten-letter word for a person that makes many other people happy. Delete a letter and anagram to get a two-word phrase for a person that makes other people miserable. 

Who makes people happy? 

Who makes people miserable? 

A Name Full of Names

3. 👶👦👴Think of a common male name that is six letters long. 

Anagram the name into four separate three-letter pairs of relatively common names, including some nicknames. 

No names are repeated among the pairs of names. 

What is the six-letter name? 

What are the four pairs of names? 

“Anagramammals!”

4. 🐄🐈🐫🦌Name a famous living person in two words and a total of eight letters. 

Replace the first name’s last letter with a duplicate of the first name’s first letter. 

Rearrange these eight letters to name two mammals. Now take the original name, and duplicate the last letter of the last name. 

Rearrange these nine letters to name two additional mammals. 

Who is the person? 

What are the four mammals? 

Catchphrase Converts Into Character

5. 📺Think of a three-word catchphrase, sometimes separated by dashes, that was used by a popular TV character from the 1960s. 

Remove the second word, then replace the last letter of the last word with a copy of the first letter of the first word. 

Rearrange the letters to form the two-word informal name of a contemporary popular character. 

What is the catchphrase? 

What is the informal name of the contemporary character? 

A Most Literate Pol?

6. 👍👎👏Name a current American politician. 

When said aloud, the politician’s first and last names sound like letters of the alphabet. 

Insert another letter inside these letters to produce a world capital. 

The politician’s middle name also sounds like letters of the alphabet. 

Say the first, middle, and last names of the politician out loud. Take the letters that the names sound like, add the penultimate letter of the last name, and rearrange. You’ll get a scale. 

Who is the politician? 

What is the world capital? 

What is the scale? 

MENU

Climatological Hors d’Oeuvre:

Do Poles weather Polar climes?

Name a native or inhabitant of a country. 

Change three consonants to three different consonants to spell a word describing the climate of that country. 

What are these words?

Kirschwasser Slice:

Doggerel’s metrical paws

“Yes, my job ________ ______,

Yet I couldn’t ____ ____,”

So said _____ ____.

Complete the three lines of the above doggerel. 

Here are two suggestions for doing so:

1. Anagram the combined thirteen letters of the words in the first and fifth blanks to spell the profession (8 letters) and first name (5 letters) of a woman surnamed Schreiner.

Anagram the four letters of the word in the third blank to spell an issue this woman addressed during her life’s work, along with issues of agnosticism, independence, individualism, the professional aspirations of women, and life on the colonial frontier.

2. The words in the second, fourth and sixth blanks rhyme. Seven of the fourteen letters in those three words are the same letter. The three correct rhyming words – in order, second, fourth and sixth – together spell a word associated with schwas.

What words belong in the six blanks of the doggerel?

Who is the woman surnamed Schreiner and her profession?

What issue did she address?

What is the word associated with schwas?

Hint #1: Remove the space between the words in the third and fourth blanks to spell a synonym of “incautious” or “negligent.”

Hint #2: Add an eighteenth letter to the 17 letters in the odd-numbered blanks – namely add the letter that appears seven times in the even-numbered blanks. Anagram these eighteen letters to spell what you want to do to this puzzle (5 letters) and something Stradivarius was known to do (6 and 7 letters).

Riffing Off Shortz & Schwartz Slices:

“Trombone me up a memory” of Tombstone Territory...

The September 3rd NPR Puzzle challenge, created by Michael Schwartz of Florence, Oregon, reads:

Name certain musical instruments (plural). The first, third, fourth, and fifth letters spell something that holds the things named by the last five letters. What instruments are these?

Puzzleria!s Riffing-Off Shortz and Schwartz puzzles read:

ENTREE #1

“The _____ ‘Walla-to-Walla’ pine carpet covering the Great Northwest forest _____ was punctuated only occasionally by a fallen ____.” 

Rearrange the combined 14 letters in those three blanks to spell the hometown and state of a puzzle-maker.

What are the words in the three blanks?

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

ENTREE #2

Rearrange the 15 letters in the name of a puzzle-maker to spell three five-letter words:

1. a ballroom dance,

2. a word associated with a certain place, specifically back in the year 1929 – a place that begins with the first three letters of that
ballroom dance, and

3. a synonym of “ring” – as in when they ring the opening and closing bells at the New York Stock Exchange.

Who is this puzzle-maker?

What are the three words?

Note: Our Entree #3 riff-off this week is the brilliant handiwork of our friend Plantsmith, whose “Garden of Puzzley Delights” appeared on last week’s Puzzleria!... and appears regularly on Puzzleria!

ENTREE #3

Name a certain musical instrument. 

Move the second letter back four places in the alphabet stream (E becomes A, F becomes B, G becomes C, etc.) 

Drop the first letter. 

Switch the order of two adjacent letters.

The result is a personal care item.

The final three letters in this personal care item spell something that holds what is named by its first four letters (kinda like how a tomb holds bones).

What is this personal care item?

What is the musical instrument?

ENTREE #4

Name a 12-letter musical instrument. The first five letters spell a very popular brand of polymer-framed, short recoil-operated, locked-breech semi-automatic pistols.

The instrument’s 8th, 9th, 11th, 4th, 10th and 12th letters (if you insert an “a” between the 10th and 12th letters) spell the second, “alphabetical” part (the part expressed in letters) of an alphanumeric name of a “rimmed centerfire revolver cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson.” The numeric part of the name (which precedes the alphabetical part) is the eighth prime number, doubled.

What is this musical instrument?

What is the name of the brand of the semi-automatic pistols?

What is the name of the revolver cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson?

Hint: “One” may be the loneliest number, but it is definitely not a prime number.

ENTREE #5

Name an eight-letter musical instrument. The first, third and fifth letters spell a bluish-white lustrous low-melting crystalline metallic material that is sometimes combined with copper to form an alloy used in the
manufacture of these instruments. Remove these three letters.

The remaining letters, in reverse, spell the surname of a composer who sometimes incorporated this instrument in his compositions.

What is this musical instrument?

What is the metallic material used in forming the alloy?

Who is the composer?

ENTREE #6

Name certain musical instruments, in seven letters. Change the third letter to the next letter in the alphabet, followed by a space.

Place a space also after the sixth letter, followed by a two-letter first name and the seventh letter. These three letters sound like a
five-letter word for a narrow lane flanked by gutters.

The two words formed by the first six letters (including the new third letter), followed by this five-letter word, form a three-word term for a collection of music publishers and songwriters in New York City who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the leading composers and lyricists in this collection was a fellow surnamed Sherman who went by the two-letter first name mentioned earlier.

What are these musical instruments?

What is the three-word term for the New York City collection of music publishers and songwriters?

Hint: The two-letter first name plus the seventh letter spell the first name of a fictional character associated with “Open, Sesame!”

ENTREE #7

Name a three-syllable musical instrument. None of its letters repeat. Use these non-repetitive letters to spell:

* a brass instrument (four letters),

* a brass instrument that uses one of the non-repetitive letters twice (eight-letters),

* a part of a device that will allow you to listen
to recordings of these instruments (seven letters),

* a word describing the vocal range of a singer like Johnny Cash or Bing Crosby (eight-letters),

* the quality of tone distinctive of a particular singing voice or musical instrument (six letters),

* any of three notes on the “do re mi fa sol la ti do” tonal scale (two letters, two letters, two letters).

What are this three-syllable musical instrument and the eight words formed from it? 

ENTREE #8

Name a single-reed woodwind instrument. Its second, third, and last letters spell a slang term for a string instrument.

Its second and third letters spell the surname of an American (but Ukrainian-born of Polish parents) virtuoso on a much larger string
instrument.

The first, fourth, first, second, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth letters of the woodwind instrument – if you invert a copy of the eighth letter and insert it into the third position in this string of seven letters – spell a large brass instrument.

What is this single-reed woodwind instrument?

What is the large brass instrument?

What is the slang term for a string instrument?

What is the surname of the American virtuoso on a much larger string instrument?

ENTREE #9

Name a certain musical instrument. 

Remove a common preposition and the space its absence leaves. The result is a red Bordeaux wine. Take the same musical instrument. Move the last letter into the fourth position and remove the first letter to spell a place you might “seek out to go into” if you consume too much of that wine.

What is this red Bordeaux wine?

What place might you seek out after overconsumption of this wine?

ENTREE #10

Name a musical instrument named after a patriotic composer and conductor whose surname ends in a national abbreviation with which he is associated.

Remove this abbreviation from the instrument. The seven letters that remain can be rearranged to spell a two-word term (consisting of a possessive proper noun and a synonym of “sweetie”) that described Virginia Eliza Clemm, the likely inspiration for Annabel Lee.

What is this instument?

Who is its namesake?

What is the national abbreviation?

What is the two-word term for “sweetie” that described Virginia Eliza Clemm?

ENTREE #11

Name a musical instrument. The fifth, third and sixth letters spell a word that, when followed by the instrument, is a form of dance and movement in which the performer pretends to play an imaginary version of this instrument which often is coupled with loud singing or lip-synching.

The first, second and fourth letters of the instrument spell a shortened version (after abandoning a feline) of a six-letter word for a material often used as the strings for the acoustic version of the instrument that is the answer to this puzzle.

What is this instrument?

What is the form of dance and movement in which the performer pretends to play an imaginary version of this instrument?

What is the shortened version of the material used as the strings for the acoustic version of the instrument?

ENTREE #12

Name a musical instrument. Its first two-thirds spells a model of an automobile made by Honda. Its last one-third spells a model of an automobile made by the Saturn division of General Motors. 

What musical instrument is this?

What are the Honda and GM-Saturn automobile models?

Dessert Menu

“Bore of Babbel on” Dessert:

French Expressionism Décapité?

Remove the first letter from either one of two somewhat familiar two-word non-English expressions. 

Change three vowels to three different vowels and remove the space to form an English antonym of the expression. 

What are these expressions?

What is the English antonym?

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.