Q: Think of a famous actress -- first and last names. Swap the first letter of each name (e.g. Lana Turner would become Tana Lurner). Say the result out loud, and phonetically you'll get some advice on fermenting milk. What is it?Take the name of the actress. For each letter, if it appears more than once, keep only half the instances (round up if necessary -- half of 3 is 1.5, but you'd keep 2 letters). Rearrange those letters to get a piece of outerwear.
Edit: The remaining letters anagram to BODYWARMER
A: DREW BARRYMORE, "BREW DAIRY MORE"
Great advice from Skydiveboy. Make tasty things!
ReplyDeleteA key word in the answer is among the oldest words of English, and it's nearly unchanged from its Proto-Indo-European root.
ReplyDeleteRemove the first three letters from both the first and last names. Rearrange. You get something in which you do not want fermentation.
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DeleteSorry, Rob. I just realized that the answer to my question is probably "yes."
DeleteHmmmm, I tried to do what Blaine says, but I can't get a piece of outerwear. I can get something that seems like it *could* be a piece of outerwear, but in fact refers to something else. I can also get where I keep some of my outerwear.
ReplyDeleteAh, I see! It can indeed refer to a piece of outerwear!
DeleteChiefly British.
DeleteCongratulations, skydiveboy!
ReplyDeleteI'm confused by the stipulation. Blaine wrote
ReplyDelete"Think of a famous actress -- first and last names. Swap the first letter of each name (e.g. Lana Turner would become Tana Lurner). Say the result out loud, and you'll get some advice on fermenting milk. What is it?"
and this is consistent with Will's example, but the official explanation (on-air and written) mentions swapping the last letters as well:
"Think of a famous actress -- first and last names. Interchange the first and last letters of those names. That is, move the first letter of the first name to the start of the last name, and the first letter of the last name to the start of the first name. Say the result out loud, and you'll get some advice on fermenting milk. What is it?
What is the correct stipulation here?
Got it from the composer himself at the end of the last thread. The 'official explanation' is wrong; the last letters stay where they are; you're basically looking for a spoonerism.
DeleteA spoonerism often swaps the initial sounds (crushing blow -> blushing crow) but the puzzle only mentions the initial letters. Technically still a spoonerism but worth noting in case.
DeleteRight, and the combination of switching the letters but then getting the advice phonetically makes the puzzle more challenging.
DeleteThanks for clarifying. Blaine's version is much clearer than the on-air version. Came here first for that reason.
DeleteCrito, thanks for getting the correct stipulation. Annoying that NPR got it wrong, but so be it. Hopefully someone can reach out to them so they can at least correct the website.
DeleteNice one, sdb. I've had the answer for a while, but thus far I'm struggling to come up with a hint.
ReplyDeleteSDB strikes again! Congratulations and thank you to Blaine and Co. for the useful clarifications.
ReplyDeleteThe actress’s middle name is a variant spelling and homophone of the first word of a famous 2-word play and film.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's popular with a lot of amateur theatrical groups.
DeleteNice clue, Dr. K, but I’m wondering if a "2-word play" would have an intermission after the first one?
Delete😊
DeleteTwo-word plays got me thinking about “flash fiction.” My favorite, often mistakenly attributed to Hemmingway, is: "For sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”
DeleteThe homophone of the middle name is also the first name of another famous actress.
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ReplyDeletePossibly TMI, I think
DeleteExcellent clue. Is that name also perhaps the first name of the mother of a contemporary actress of the actress in question?
DeleteBased on the requirements of the puzzle, I can rule out Susan Sarandon and Marilyn Monroe
ReplyDeleteAs I was looking through lists of actresses, it was interesting how many had the same letter starting the first name and last name.
DeleteHmmm...I don't know if I have the right solution, but I like it nonetheless. The answer and the puzzle, that is. Was it "partially", or even "fully" inspired by an episode of a certain late night talk show?
ReplyDeleteFirst name could be something done in the past.
ReplyDeleteTake the name of a character played by the actress. Remove the 1st and 6th letters, and rearrange to get another name for that character in the same movie.
ReplyDeleteDrew Barrymore played Cinderella in Ever After. Remove the C and R from Cinderella and rearrange to get Danielle, Cinderella's name in Ever After.
DeleteOops——sorry😷
ReplyDeleteOne of the comments above was very helpful to me, but I'm not complaining.
ReplyDeleteNeither was Dave
DeleteI did not know about that appearance, as I do not watch TV, but now that I've seen it, perhaps I need to reconsider in order to keep abreast of things.
DeleteCongrats, SDB. Another good one from the pen of my favorite skydiver.
ReplyDeleteA big thank you to all for the kind posts. And I am sorry I did not catch the printed error days ago when Will emailed me his presentation page. I read it quickly and understood why he changed how I coined it, and that is because so many do not understand what a spoonerism is, and this way he did not need to explain, as he usually does. So I did not read it carefully enough to notice the error, but jan did! I suspect he was first to catch it because he long ago learned to reread the puzzles very carefully to avoid misunderstandings. I applaud jan for being Tarp as a Shack today!
ReplyDeleteMozel Tov Mark. What do you think her ancestors would say?
ReplyDelete"Break a leg."
DeleteThis actress is someone my wife loves to hate!
DeleteRemove the first letter of one of the actress's films to get something associated with the theme. Add two letters to the end of the second word in a different title from her filmography to get something you can put it in.
ReplyDeleteFun puzzle though perhaps with a small liberty taken on the word play (imo). That said, I'll join the host of other bloggers in sending kudos to our very own SDB!
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DeleteA crossword with the theme of movie star spoonerisms appeared in a national newspaper over 7 years ago. The constructor lists this week's answer as one that he left out. I'll post a link on Thursday, but I just had to mention CUSTER BEATEN.
ReplyDeleteThat has always been my favorite of all the NPR Sunday Puzzles. I still remember hearing it while still in bed and getting the answer right away because it said something about a newspaper headline in 1876. So I instantly knew it had to be about Custer and the Battle at Greesygrass.
DeleteI found the puzzle. Thanks for mentioning it. Could not find where he mentions this person for today's puzzle.
DeleteA friend of mine told me of an article that appeared in the LA Times many years ago when Aristotle Onassis was house shopping in Beverly Hills. One of the places that intrigued him most was the mansion that Buster Keaton had once built for his then-wife Natalie Talmadge. The next day a photo appeared in the Times showing Onassis in front of the house with the caption "Aristotle contemplating the home of Buster."
DeleteCongratulations SDB! Fun puzzle.
ReplyDeleteI'm feeling a little amiss. Got *an* answer pretty quickly, but it's a bit of a "Dad pun." I'm thinking it is the intended answer, but it doesn't seem to match Blaine's clue, unless Blaine's being a little circumspect, as is his nature. Do I keep looking for something else? Or has our dear SDB unleashed a bit of a Dad pun on us?
ReplyDeleteRemove four letters from the last name of the actress. If you remove the correct letters, you''ll look at the remaining letters and say, "That's it."
ReplyDeleteIn honor of Mr. Scott and all his fellow skydivers:
ReplyDeleteIn the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
DeleteI feel like I keep getting closer and closer to figuring out who you are, ZenoCosini, but never quite getting there. Maybe it's impossible.
I have another thing to say, about what is possibly my favorite line of poetry, but I'm going to save it for Thursday because in conjunction with some other clues it might be TMI.
Seriously? This is the puzzle from the source of constant carping about easy puzzles?
ReplyDeleteThe name anagrams to a description of Christmas clothing.
ReplyDeleteSue Gwaltrey ?
DeleteMerry wardrobe.
DeleteUgly sweater
DeleteWhy would anyone invest in the stock market, or gamble at a casino, when you can bet money on Democrats caving in to the enemy and never lose?
ReplyDeleteWell stated!
DeleteSchumer and the eight seem to have misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "Quit when you're ahead."
DeleteI finally got Blaine's hint.
ReplyDeleteThe first name of this actress read out loud in the reverse order sounds like something she would use when playing a role.
ReplyDeleteWhile I see where the clues here are going, I have an alternate answer that has a connection to a 2021 puzzle, advice on how you know your fermentation process is going well. And, end result of too much of it.
ReplyDeleteMy comment is a reference to "Rachel Weisz," and that in the dairy fermentation process "whey shall rise." I believe pronunciation is more toward an S sound than a Z, but close enough in the way this NPR puzzle was presented, as I say it out loud. My reference to a 2021 puzzle is to Rachel's spouse Daniel Craig as 007 and then reversed LOO (where too much yogurt can lead to). I submitted "Drew Barrymore" with "Rachel Weisz" as an alternative.
DeleteRachel Weisz has (I believe) German or Swiss Jewish heritage and pronounces her last name like "vice," so I don't think she spoonerizes to "Whey Shall Rise," more like "Vey Chell Rice"
DeleteI'm reminded of ice cream at Hollywood Studios
ReplyDeleteKailua over vanilla ice cream? Interesting idea…
DeleteDREW BARRYMORE; BREW DAIRY MORE
ReplyDelete"Every time, every single time" refers to ET, DREW BARRYMORE'S breakout film as a child.
DREW BARRYMORE —> BREW DAIRY MORE
ReplyDeleteHINT: “The actress’s middle name is a variant spelling and homophone of the first word of a famous 2-word play and film.”
Blythe —> Blithe Spirit (The title comes from Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”)
DREW BARRYMORE --> BREW DAIRY MORE
ReplyDelete> A crossword with the theme of movie star spoonerisms appeared in a national newspaper over 7 years ago. The constructor lists this week's answer as one that he left out. I'll post a link on Thursday, but I just had to mention CUSTER BEATEN.
“Silver Screen Spoonerisms”
Jan, Thanks for the link and Brew Dairy More listing on there.
DeleteI noted that a key word in the answer is among the oldest words of English, and it's nearly unchanged from its Proto-Indo-European root.
ReplyDeleteThat's 'brew'.
DREW BARRYMORE --> BREW DAIRY MORE
ReplyDeleteCute puzzle, SDB. A bit of a "dad pun," though. I couldn't find a clue that wasn't TMI, since Drew is omnipresent.
Also, is this yet another one where Will pronounces things differently than I do? I say "Barrymore" as Barry. For it to spoonerize, we would need to say her last name to rhyme with DAIRY, which is close to DAY. Not Barry, which is close to the short A in BAT? Am I missing this?
DeleteIt's the famous Mary-merry-marry merger!
DeleteWill is like a majority of Americans (including, presumably, SDB) who pronounce those three words the same. West of the Hudson, it's a very large majority.
I'm eastern, myself, and don't pronounce them the same.
Ben, I can see how you might describe it as a Dad Joke, but I cannot agree with you. It is a spoonerism, and it happens that part of it may be described as a pun, but that is frequently how spoonerisms work. Also I did not word it the way it was presented. I wrote it as a spoonerism. Here is a definition I just googled for you:
DeleteDictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
dad joke
nouninformal
an unoriginal or predictable joke, especially a pun, of a type supposedly told by fathers.
"he makes a lot of corny dad jokes"
I tend to think of a dad joke as being extremely obvious and repeated over and over. Spoonerising this name does not seem to fit that definition. It may appear to be obvious once you know the answer, but it apparently did not reveal itself as a dad joke would. It needed to be pointed out, and that is what the puzzle is doing.
An example that comes to mind is about ten years ago when I was in a supermarket and walking by the deli counter and saw their main meat brand sign hanging from the ceiling that simply said BOARS HEAD. I immediately spoonerised it and came up with WHORE'S BED. Now part of that is also a pun, but when making spoonerising one doesn't even consider it in that context. So, I would say it may be argued either way.
I am very appreciative of both comments. Thanks to you both.
DeleteYes, Crito, it's MERRY-MARY-MARRY all over again. We've been here before. Zero chance that BARRY for me sounds like what I put on my oatmeal (blue-straw-rasp), but I was raised East of the Hudson River, as you noted.
SDB, thanks for your reflections on dads and puns, and for your puzzles, of course.
My favorite was always "what's the difference between an epileptic oyster shucker and a prostitute with diarrhea?"
Even just the setup lands a good laugh.
I do not recall having heard that spoonerism before, but it sure is a pearl.
DeleteTotal Dad pun and lame puzzle. You nailed it Ben.
DeleteI was so pleased by the 'Blithe Spirit' theme. I love "Ode to a Skylark." "A poet hidden in the light of thought" is one of my favorite phrases in Romantic poetry. But I didn't want to point straight at that poem, because maybe by going backward it could supply someone with TMI?
ReplyDelete(In that same comment I said I almost knew who ZenoCosini is... but that wasn't a clue. It was just a joke. And I do know who it is, in the sense that this commenter posts sometimes under another name... right?)
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DeleteI quoted Shelley's "To a Skylark" both as a tribute to SDB and because, as Dr. K and Crito both hinted, it begins with "Hail to thee, blithe spirit." Herbert Arthur Chamberlayne Blyth, Drew Barrymore's great-grandfather, adopted the stage name of Maurice Barrymore because his father was strongly opposed to him taking up acting as a career.
DeleteWhile we are talking about pseudonyms, Italo Svevo was the nom de plume adopted by Ettore Schmitz, a businessman from Trieste, whose most famous work was "The Confessions of Zeno," the supposed memoirs of Zeno Cosini, a businessman from Trieste, written at the request of his psychoanalyst. I used to post as ItaloSvevo but switched to Zeno when I got a new laptop and had to start over. (I was not trying to hide anything--I have a difficult relationship with Google.)
It's a good book, BTW--I think all Blainesvilleans would enjoy the prologue on Zeno's attempts to give up smoking.
I knew you must also be Italo.
DeleteMy joke, of course -- that "I feel like I keep getting closer and closer to figuring out who you are, ZenoCosini, but never quite getting there" -- was that Zeno of Elea's paradoxes of motion deploy that idea, of getting closer and closer but never reaching the goal. Zeno lived over a thousand years before Crito, but we knew all about him!
Drew Barrymore, brew dairy more.
ReplyDeleteI wrote, “Remove the first three letters from both the first and last names. Rearrange. You get something in which you do not want fermentation.” In a WORMERY, if you try to compost too many wet food items, alcohol and heat may be produced, and that’s bad for the worms.
ReplyDeleteI thought "rearrange" might allow for inverting, so I thought you were cluing MEMORY. Later I noticed the double R, so it was moot.
DeletePuzzleria! is proud to pronounce that Plantsmith, "Our Master of Puzzling Perfection," is our featured guest puzzle-maker on this week's edition. His puzzles are always challenging, entertaining, informative and fun!
ReplyDeleteThis week, Plantsmith has prepared for us the following five posers in his "Delightfully Puzzley Appetizer":
~ “Snail” becomes a “Hail!”?
~ Weapon Word
~ Shortzwave Radio?
~ Jobs Good & Bad, and
~ Space in a Spice
We shall upload Puzzleria! very soon... this very afternoon!
Also on our menus this week:
* a Schpuzzle of the Week titled “Use your wit a bit to solve it!”
* a “Two-Birds-In-A-Bush Hors d’Oeuvre” titled “Swappin’ while stoppin’ ‘n’ sniffin’”
* a Psychological Slice titled “Where often is heard a disgustfulsome word...”
* a Track & Elysian Fields Dessert titled “Hosannas!” during Heavenly hurdling, and
* eleven Riffing Off Shortz And Scott Entrees titled “Did Drew Barrymore Brew Dairy More?” (including seven composed by Nodd and two composed by Tortitude).
So, we welcome you to Plantsmith's "Garden of Puzzley Delights" and to our delightfully enlightening blog!
Thankyou all.
Lego!
My clue referenced joining the "host" of other bloggers sending kudos to SDB, with host referring to Drew's hosting of her daytime talk show. As indicated in my post from Sunday, I'm in the camp of thinking there was a small liberty taken in considering Barry and Dairy as rhymes (p.s. I'm an east coaster so that fits with Crito's theory).
ReplyDeleteDrew Barrymore, brew dairy more. I thought this might have been inspired by Drew Barrymore's 1995 appearance on Letterman where she flashed her "dairy" at him for his birthday. Hey.
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DeleteDrew Barrymore, Brew Darrymore (brew dairy more)
ReplyDeleteLast Sunday I said, “First name could be something done in the past.” Someone could have sketched the famous actor, John Barrymore, or drew his name in Charades.
Ben, Did your 12:51 PM post vanish?
ReplyDeleteGreat question. I don't see it. But I didn't delete it.
DeleteSorry, Blogger swallowed it up for "moderation" for some reason. I've approved it.
DeleteDrew Barrymore>> brew dairy more.
ReplyDeleteI’ve been making my own beers, wines, ciders, and mead for quite a while. After this suggestion, I think my next fermentation activity may be aimed at making some yogurt.
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ReplyDeleteDrew Barrymore, Brew Dairy More
ReplyDeleteI had posted the clue: Remove four letters from the last name of the actress. If you remove the correct letters, you''ll look at the remaining letters and say, "That's it."
If you remove the B, and "rry" from Barrymore, you are left with amore, as in That's amore! Now, you are probably stuck with Dean Martin in your head...
Drew Barrymore / Brew Dairy Mor2
ReplyDeleteOkay Nodd, this is for you, but others may chime in too.
ReplyDeleteYou may recall that Romeo arrived to discover Juliet apparently dead. My question to you is, How did he get there?
He came oVER ON A bus?
DeletePaul, I really like that. I however, was thinking he arrived in a Cad averhearse to pomp and crept in in the niche of time. Can you, Paul, bare with this?
DeleteBen,
ReplyDeleteBlaine has not noticed your missing post must have been removed by blogger. Can I cut&paste it back and see if it gets removed again, and then try to inform Blaine?
Blogger sent it to "moderation" (for whatever reason) and I've approved it.
DeleteOh, I see why it flagged it. Okay, please nobody post the answer.
DeleteLOL
DeleteWe could use a bit more moderation these days, but I would rather see it go in a different direction.
DREW BARRYMORE, BREW DAIRY MORE
ReplyDeleteYou do have to admit, it is an interesting way of putting it on the subject of fermenting milk.
pjbGotALaughOutOfThatOneForSure!
My hint "I'm reminded of ice cream at Hollywood Studios" is a reference to Dinosaur Gertie's in Walt Disney World, since Drew Barrymore's character in "E.T." was named Gertie.
ReplyDelete"Galloping Gertie" was the nickname for the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which famously collapsed into Puget Sound on November 7, 1940. The bridge earned its nickname because it swayed and undulated violently in even light winds, a phenomenon that was captured on film and studied extensively by engineers. Its collapse was a pivotal moment in engineering history, reshaping the way long-span suspension bridges are designed.
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ReplyDeleteC-A-P. Are you OK? I saw your post before you deleted it….
DeleteWe're here now.
DeleteThis week's challenge comes from Dave Shukan, of San Marino, Calif. Take the name of a famous person in American politics (6,6). Hidden in this name reading from left to right, but not in consecutive letters, is the name of a well-known place that's very dry, in 4 letters. Remove these letters. The remaining 8 letters in order from left to right will name another well-known, very dry place. What politician is this?
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Deleteach, failed to post my clever comment about not being the one who started the fire!
ReplyDelete