Why am I stuck thinking of Lyft and their pink branding?Q: Name a company that's known for transportation. Move the first two letters to the end. Reverse everything. Insert the name of an international tourist destination. And you'll get the name of a game that involves transportation. What things are these?
Edit: If you replace the last two letters in each word of the game with a Y (why?) you get MARY KAY known for their pink cars.
A: AMTRAK --> MA(RIO)KART --> MARIO KART
Take the name of the game. Remove three letters. Rearrange. You get a weapon.
ReplyDeleteNot in the street!
ReplyDelete(Go-karts aren't street legal where I live.)
DeleteThe game that involves transportation has four state postal abbreviations in a row.
ReplyDeleteQuite true.
DeleteCute observation
DeleteWhen I lived in one of those four states I was given directions to another of the three. But I can't repeat them in mixed company.
DeleteI don't want to say how many of those states I've lived in.
DeleteGot the answer. Congrats to the creator but you have to admit this is one of the most convoluted sets of puzzle instructions you’ve ever seen. No clue here. And what kind of “ask” is, “What things are these?”
ReplyDeleteI thought this was harder than last week's puzzle but there were only 300 correct submissions to that one so what do I know?
ReplyDeleteA lot of colleges
DeleteYou can rule out Amazon.....or can you?
ReplyDeleteYou’ve delivered quite a clue!
Delete21 years apart.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Chuck re the convoluted instructions. But fun puzzle nevertheless.
ReplyDeleteIf you take the first two and last two letters of the game and reverse them, you get another form of transportation (that some may find familiar).
I'm reminded of one of Blaine's holiday videos, I think.
ReplyDeletepi-0.04
ReplyDeleteSince pi=3.14, then pi-0.04=3.10. March 10 is Mario Day.
DeleteThis one has me going in circles
ReplyDeleteMusical clue: Arlo Guthrie.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what both JAWS and Lorenzo posted at the end of last week's blog re: this puzzle. However, that being said, I ended up enjoying it because, although I never heard of the game, I was able to basically solve it while still in bed. I then had to google to see if I actually had solved it.
ReplyDeletePretty much the same for me, except I was not in bed! (I was nine timezones from you.)
DeleteI am so very envious!
DeleteMusical Clues: Sha Na Na, Allman Brothers Band, and Ben Jaeger.
ReplyDeleteIt took me a while to get this. Like sdb, I had never before heard of the “game that involved transportation,” so I had to guess and then research it. Live and learn.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the answer to last week’s puzzle included three states. This week’s excluded four.
This is one I got right away, although I lucked out because the first company I thought of was the correct one. I can say I have partaken of the company's transportation as well as played the game, but have never been to the travel destination and would have to think of a different travel company to use should I ever go there.
ReplyDeleteI figured there would be a generational divide, as there often is, in knowing the game. That said, I babysat children in the 1980s who played the game.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe it existed in the 1980s.
Delete1990a
DeleteTough puzzle this week. I wondered how people were getting it so quickly without knowing the game, but then I realized they must have lucked into the right company at the outset, like Courtney. That gave me a fresh start that led to success. (I also did not know the game.)
ReplyDeleteI finally figured it out today while driving from Vermont to the Mid-Atlantic region. It helped that I saw the name of the transportation company a few times. It helped me keep track of which letters end up where as you move them around.
ReplyDeleteTimely, again.
ReplyDeleteI guess the wording “international tourist destination” rules out domestic destinations like Chicago or New Orleans…
ReplyDeleteWhy couldn't an international tourist end up in Chicago or New Orleans? 😜
DeleteI too considered that possibility, and after trying to make the Kennedy Center and the Reflecting Pool work with no joy, I realized Will would not have worded it that way if it were in our country, so I immediately put my attention on Auschwitz.
DeleteOver 2 million visitors to Auschwitz annually. Most left alive.
DeleteI think I've mentioned here before that I live just one block from Seattle's largest cemetery, and that I walk there a lot. Sometimes as I am walking back to the gate to leave, and I approach someone I don't know who is walking in, I might say, "I always feel fortunate to get out of here alive; so many don't." Only about half seem to get the joke.
DeleteMany are dying to get in there.
DeleteYes, and that old joke is buried there too.
DeleteTrue story: it was coming up on the 50th anniversary of my Dad's death, and I wanted to visit his grave for the very first time. (I was just 14 when he passed.) Unfortunately, we didn't get a tombstone or even a marker for his grave. So I called the cemetery to see if they could help me. I gave the nice lady all the info I could recall. This is what she said: "I'll see what I can dig up, and call you back." I don't think she realized how it sounded, but I just chuckled.
DeleteReminds me of the time we were heading to Long Island a few summers ago. We'd made reservations for the Bridgeport-Port Jefferson ferry to avoid having to drive through the city. Got a call halfway through Connecticut. If was the ferry company to tell me the trip had been cancelled, because the boat had gone down. She was using the term the way you'd describe a computer system going down, but I was envisioning a shipwreck.
DeleteWell speaking of ups and downs. I found out the cemetery grounds workers do not get along with those who work in their crematorium. It seems the latter feel the former are beneath them.
DeleteEither way is a sad way to urn a living.
DeleteTrue, but at their days end they all get a bier.
DeleteJan, did they refund your ferry fare? If not, that's not fair.
DeleteI doubt they refunded it, but most likely carried it over.
DeleteOr buried it at sea.
DeleteThey were swamped with requests.
Delete"Sound"s like it.
DeleteJust write it off as a sunk cost.
DeleteYou might be able to float aloane.
DeleteIt’s always hard to gauge what path the comments on a post will take. I’m in grave danger of making some bad puns here…
DeleteJust good puns please. The bad ones are killing us.
DeleteJust make sure the pun-ctuation is correct.
DeleteMay I take it then that we are all not impugned?
DeleteThere's something about this thread that Styx in my craw.
DeleteChicago and New Orleans are the end points of The City of New Orleans, one of Amtrak’s better known lines
DeleteYou all just think you're drop dead funny don't you
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me that when I was operating skydiving centers, I believed a major reason I was so successful was that I treated both my staff and students with respect, and always maintained an open door policy.
DeleteI have a pretty good skydiving joke, but it probably won't land well.
DeleteSDB, I suspect your dropouts were well-grounded
Delete… and that they landed on their feet
DeleteEven the failures made a lasting impression.
DeleteAs I said to Will Shortz back when I was the on air winner, "I was always proud my school could claim a 100% student dropout rate." There were no exceptions.
DeleteI don't think I'm drop dead funny. I think I'm alive funny.
DeleteEither way I don't advise becoming a standup comedian unless you don't mind people laughing at you. It can be very disconcerting, as it was for Leonard Bernstein after he retired.
DeleteAs the Funeral Director said, “You can make a good living out of the dying.”
DeleteDon't forget the funeral directors who push their layaway plans.
Deletereminds me of a classic travel-related joke...
ReplyDelete(My friend went to Indonesia. Jakarta? No, she flew.)
DeleteI predict fewer correct entries this week than last
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree with that prediction. At least last week, you find (or generate) an alphabetical list of U.S. colleges and universities and then scan it for two adjacent ones that differed only by the last letter in order to find what would likely be half the answer. This week it was just muddling through the convoluted steps (forward or backwards) and hopefully stumbling across something that worked.
DeleteAMTRAK + RIO —> MARIO KART
ReplyDelete“[T]he answer to last week’s puzzle included three states. This week’s excluded four.”
The three “included” states from last week’s puzzle were Illinois, Indiana, and North Carolina. (The four colleges of the answer were located in those three states.) The four “excluded” states from this week’s puzzle were Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, and South Dakota, the only four states where Amtrak does not provide service.
AMTRAK, RIO, MARIO KART
ReplyDelete> 21 years apart.
AMTRAK was founded in 1971. MARIO KART debuted in 1992.
> I'm reminded of one of Blaine's holiday videos, I think.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Blaine, but I recall one of your videos showed you costumed as MARIO.
> Musical clue: Arlo Guthrie.
In 1971, the same year that Steve Goodman wrote Arlo's hit song, "City of New Orleans" (and the first year of the company's existence), AMTRAK's City of New Orleans derailed and crashed in Salem, IL, killing 11 and injuring 163.
> Timely, again.
This week, AMTRAK and NJ Transit start five weeks of service reductions to complete the cutover from the century-old Portal Bridge to its new replacement.
> Over 2 million visitors to Auschwitz annually. Most left alive.
More than twice as many as were murdered there during WWII. Most of whom arrived by rail, though not on AMTRAK.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, liberated on January 27, 1945, was the largest extermination camp during the Nazi era. At least 1.1 million people were murdered there by the Nazis, more than in any other site during World War II.
DeleteYou are correct, I've dressed as Mario several times over the years. If anyone missed it, it's in the cosplay section of our compilation video from 2025. The password is silver.
DeleteNodd's observation was true with a capital T:
ReplyDeleteMA+RI+OK+AR+T
AMTRAK is KARMA backwards with a T inside. If nobody has made a puzzle out of that yet, someone should.
I wrote, “Take the name of the game. Remove three letters. Rearrange. You get a weapon.” That’s MORTAR.
ReplyDeleteAMTRAK, RIO, MARIO KART
ReplyDeleteI offered Musical Clues of Sha Na Na, Allman Brothers Band, and Ben Jaeger.
Sha Na Na had a member called Bowser
Allmans had a record when I was a kid called Eat a Peach
Beni Jaeger had a band called Toad.
Toad and Bowser and Peach are all major charaters in MarioKart.
Amtrak, Rio->Mario Kart
ReplyDeleteAMTRAK + RIO = MARIO KART
ReplyDeleteAmtrak was one of the first transportation companies I considered, like the other obvious new means of transportation, but I then thought I would need to consider the game. I am not into games but Mario Bros. came to mind, although I never played it, and I noticed Rio and thought it just might be the location part, but I did not see how it would work with Mario Bros. I then did the reversing and got the answer, but had to google to see if it was valid because I never heard of it before.
Paul, that is a cool observation about KARMA and AMTRAK.
ReplyDeleteHuh, I guess I never gave a clue this week. I was wondering why I couldn't remember what clue I'd given. That's probably why.
AMTRAK, RIO, MARIO KART
ReplyDeleteI had mentioned that I figured it out while driving from Vermont to the mid-Atlantic. There really are multiple spots on the interstate highways where signs indicate that an Amtrak station is at the next exit. I drove past one, and spotted that the last 4 letters would reverse to KART. The answer jumped out at me.
My post:
ReplyDelete- “If you take the first two and last two letters of the game and reverse them, you get another form of transportation (that some may find familiar).”….. the result would be “tram” which has been involved in previous puzzles involving tramline and trampoline.
Clever, AND convoluted. I'm glad I didn't devote too much time to solving it. NEVER would've got there. I was trying to work backwards from MONOPOLY (4 Railroads...right?). Frikkin' video games. Did you know Jared Kushner and MBS (Kashoggi's torture/murder orderer and gleeful audience) love to sit on a couch together and play VIDEO GAMES. I prefer REAL life.
ReplyDeleteFellow Blainesvillians,
ReplyDeleteAfter we upload today's edition of Puzzleria!, we will have published "4T4!""4T4" (that is, "44") ingenious Cryptic Crossword puzzles, all courtesy of our friend Patrick J. Berry (aka "cranberry"). Patrick's "44th" cryptic treasure (titled "Turfy Roof? Furry Foot?... No, ‘Tis Patrick’s Number Forty-Four!) is filled with wordplay... ("Turfy Roof" "Furry Foot" & "Forty-Four," for example, are an anagrammatical-trio).
Patrick's "canvas" is a 15-by-15-square crossword grid. His palette is packed with every wordplayful pigment of the spectrum! He is a 'Picasso of the Across & Down!
We shall upload Puzzleria very soon this very afternoon.
Also on this week's menus:
~a Schpuzzle of the Week titled “Some Summits, Certainly Hued,”
~a Sunny Day! Hors d’Oeuvre titled “Sesame Seedy Streetlife,”
~a Spirited” Slice titled “Price stickers? Rice whiskey? Ice bags?”
~Period Piece Dessert titled “Let not anger rear its ugly head,” and
~eight riffs this week's "Shortz And Taubenslag National Public Radio Challenge Puzzle," titled "From Train Track To Kart Trak" (including seven composed by Nodd, "master-of-the-riff!")
So, Join us for some Jasper-Alabama-Style-Home-Baked-Berry-Pie!
LegoCryptypically
My clue: 'You can rule out Amazon.....or can you?" Most of the Amazon Rainforest and River are in Brazil.
ReplyDeleteAnyone here know why I always feel cold when I'm around my drafting table?
ReplyDeleteI just now heard on NPR that yesterday trump was in
ReplyDeleteWasilla, Alaska yesterday. I guess he thought if he stood on Sarah Palin's deck he would be able to see his hero, Putin, in Russia.
Yup. Five days.
ReplyDeleteEven Helen Keller would have been a better choice.
ReplyDeleteFive days, shall now be known as a, “Half-Scaramucci.”
ReplyDelete... or a deciTruss
ReplyDeleteAMTRAK, RIO, MARIO KART
ReplyDeleteYikes. Never posted a clue this week. October has been filled with surprises and lovely travel--all good, very good.
This week's puzzle, from the NPR Sunday morning newsletter: Take the last name of a well-known figure in music (11 letters). Drop the 9th and 10th letters. Say the result out loud. Phonetically, it will sound like two hot beverages, one after the other. Who is the figure in music, and what are the beverages?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOne of the beverages actually appears in the name.
ReplyDelete2 weeks in a row I solve the puzzle quickly, this time still in bed!
ReplyDeleteRemember the Wasp's short-lived glory.
ReplyDeleteI like the NPR morning newsletter. And I think the Blainesville crowd will do just fine with this puzzle.
ReplyDeleteYes, an easy one this week.
DeleteThe fame of this person is such that even hinting at their music would be TMI.
ReplyDeleteEasy.
ReplyDelete