Update: We have a winner! A random number generator chose Andrew, whose entry was a neat trivia question. Congratulations, Andrew! (I’ll email you to get your mailing address.) Thanks to everyone who participated—I enjoyed the variety of puzzling approaches you came up with.
Hello! Eric Berlin’s book of variety puzzles will be published on Tuesday, July 30. Puzzlesnacks contains 110 word puzzles of all sorts. Some formats will be familiar to you and others will bend your brain in a fresh direction. They’re all designed to be accessible, not too tough—so a Rows Garden puzzle comes in a mini size, for example. I recognize puzzle formats that have been devised and/or used to great effect by such crossword legends as Mike Shenk, Henry Hook, and Patrick Berry.
Thanks to the publisher, we’ve got a copy of Puzzlesnacks to give away to a lucky Diary of a Crossword Fiend reader. To enter, leave a comment with something puzzly about a favorite snack. Write a crossword clue for it, anagram it, come up with a trivia question about it … or just type the snack’s name, if you’re feeling uncreative. We’ll choose one entrant at random to win the book. If you’re the winner, we’ll need your mailing address to get the book on its way to you.
Have fun puzzling!
Snack food crossword clue: Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox at the grill?
CHiPs! I appreciate the nostalgia for that era.
What classic movie theater snack is a spoonerism for a pair of movie genres – one of which, admittedly, is one you’re unlikely to see in a theater?
Nice. If you swap the order of the two genres and then add an S to the end, you get a spoonerism of another food (dunno if it’d be considered a snack) which I used in this puzzle.
I have always liked Corn Pops—even back when they were called Sugar Corn Pops. Especially when they were called Sugar Corn Pops. (See also: Super Sugar Smacks.)
Popcorn! And I’m sure there is cop porn out there.
Stolen from a crossword, but a certain nut you may eat for a snack is an overloaded letter bank for another snack food, a product made by Lay’s or Utz.
That’s a neat find! Do you remember whose crossword that came from?
Never noticed that POTATO CHIPS contained all the letters in PISTACHIOS.
Ace crime spawns a cold treat
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!
I’d say Oreo, but i think that’s been done already.
Heh.
Not entering, honest, but congrats on the book. While Saturday WSJ variety puzzles aren’t on the board here, I’ve really grown to like the challenge of fitting together the “rose gardens.” It can take a while.
There are now 3 rose garden subscription services!
http://Joonpahk.com
http://ariespuzzles.com
http://gardenpartycrosswords.com
Hey Evad, if you see this I posted some links to rows garden subscription sites, but I think I crossed the threshold for link spam so it got sent to moderation.
JohnH, if you like rows gardens (they are my favorite variety puzzle type, with Marching Bands close behind) there are now multiple subscription services out there. If you google “outside the box puzzles”, “Aries puzzles”, and “garden party crosswords” you can find them.
Shark, I’ve approved your comment. Yeah, more than a couple links sends comments to the moderation queue.
Trivia!
What do nachos, Granny Smith apples, German chocolate cake, margaritas, and sandwiches haves in common?
I learned that about Granny Smith apples via a Learned League trivia question!
What’s the answer to this trivia question? I am beyond stumped on this.
Is it just that they’re named for people?
Yes. Granny Smith was an Australian, I learned from Learned League (I got that question wrong). The Earl of Sandwich, I knew. Didn’t remember (if I knew before) about Samuel German’s chocolate. And there are a lot of spurious margarita theories out there—that one might not actually be named after a person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarita#Origin
This snack is a crunchy homophone of a unit of weight of a precious stone, a unit of purity of a particular metal, and an editing grapheme.
There’s always gotta be that one person who insists on vegetables when everyone else is hitting up the junk food! But I did eat my last mini-pack of baby carrots today, so you’re not wrong.
Saturday crossword clue: Ten, in modern slang
I’m stumped. Anyone figure this one out?
“Mmmmm. Donuts!!!”
@zevonfan here is a regular Homer Simpson, I see! DO you prefer lowbrow Dunkin Donuts and Krispy Kreme, or the more artisanal donuts that cost $3, or …?
My best attempt at a classic crossword clue:
What to say when you get shot?
Cheese! Well done, JJ. This one stumped for a while, and then I figured it out, and then I forgot it and had to figure it out again.
Thanks! That was my first attempt at a crossword clue, I think now I’m hooked.
Also, reading through I forgot I was the one who wrote it and it took me 5 seconds to answer my own clue.
Italian treat whose name comes from its twice-baked nature.
Incidentally, the German analogue has a recognizable cognate to English.
Biscotti! I did not know this.
Nor had I noticed, @pannonica, that Zwieback (twice-baked) bears a striking resemblance to biscotti. I wonder if Italians give their teething bambinos biscotti to chew on.
“Ich will ein Berlin(er)”
Gotta love a jelly doughnut! Not to mention the double-play on JFK’s flawed German and Eric Berlin’s name.
My first cryptic clue.
Anguished groan and the French.
@Sam, I am stumped on this one! Has anyone else figured it out?
I think it might be GRANOLA. “Anguished” GROAN=GRANO + LA (“the” in French)
Ah! Without “anguishing” the word GROAN, I was trying to tack LE on to the end of a word that’s used as an anguished groan. Best I could come up with was a CRUMBLE.
Endless cream filling between two discs! (4)
“Cream” minus its ends (plus the A before the M) stuffed inside two discs (the letter “O” twice) gives you O+re+o, and the cryptic clue “!” signals that the entire clue is also a definition of the answer. Nice one!
I had used “endless” to mean “without just the M on the end” (so, the filling of CREA or RE). But I think that endless is more commonly used to mean “without first or last letters” as you parsed it, so my bad.
My favorite snack is nut glee.
I’m not a coconut fan, but I have no problem with others loving the Almond Joy. Now, make a Pecan Happiness with caramel and chocolate, and I’ll have my own nut glee.