Hello, Puzzlers! AJ has a new book out! You can order "The Year of Living Constitutionally" right now!.
Puzzling with us today: our very own Chief Puzzle Officer, Greg Pliska.
Join host A.J. Jacobs and his guests as they puzzle–and laugh–their way through new spins on old favorites, like anagrams and palindromes, as well as quirky originals such as “Ask Chat GPT” and audio rebuses.
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"The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs" is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and is a co-production with Neuhaus Ideas.
Our executive producers are Neely Lohmann and Adam Neuhaus of Neuhaus Ideas, and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts.
The show is produced by Jody Avirgan and Brittani Brown of Roulette Productions.
Our Chief Puzzle Officer is Greg Pliska. Our associate producer is Andrea Schoenberg.
Hello, puzzlers, Welcome to the Puzzler Podcast. The soothing room tone at the end of your puzzling radio interview. I am your host, AJ Jacob, and I'm here at the Sleek iHeart Studios with Chief Puzzle Officer Greg Pliska.
Hello Greg, Hello Aj. The you know, the room tone here is really soothing.
Oh yeah, should we just be silent for thirty seconds? I think listeners would love that.
Yeah. Fortunately, they can skip ahead thirty seconds on their podcast at that point. Yeah, let's skip right over that part.
Well, we'll do that at the end. In the meantime, one of my favorite parts about our show is when it inspires our listeners to come up with puzzles themselves.
Agreed, love that.
It's great. And my friend Kristin Laski, who's a listener, Hello Kristin. She told me recently was inspired to write a puzzle for her son's birthday. Her son happens to love badminton. He was on the badminton team, okay, and her thought was, well, what if we take words with bad and turn them good so it's bad?
Oh? Yes, I like that.
So the clue would be this is a racket sport played in heaven.
I get it. How old is her son?
Her son is now he's going off to college.
Okay, good, he has the Badminton scholarship to Oxford.
Exactly. Well, in honor of Kristin, here is a puzzle. This is a bad to good puzzle. Everything gets a makeover. So all words containing the letters B, A, D, but you change them to G.
Probably it's probably not fair to ask us at the beginning? Are they always at the beginning of the word.
We're gonna start at the beginning, and then we're going to migrate into the middle like okay, good, all right, but good question? All right, Well what about this? This is a weasel like animal in heaven? A weasel like animal in heaven?
Well, a weasel like animal. It could be a ferret, but of course it's not ferret. That hasn't it's a badger. It's a good yer, a good yer. Exactly. I think I knew a guy named Mark Goodger once weird weird good fact. Yeah, hello Mark, exactly, how he's listening? All right?
Well, this R and B singer thankfully is alive. But one day, if she does pass on and goes to heaven, she might change her name too.
Oh wow, that you know. The minute you said R and B Singer, I was I've stopped listening to the rest of the clue because I was just running R and B Singer's bad in their names. I think you're going for Erica Goodoo.
Erica goodoo instead of Erica exactly, Queen of neo soul, wonderful saying.
All right, cool.
Next, we've got the Sopranos strip club. If Tony died and entered heaven, he might go to this.
Yeah. See, now, this is the pop culture gap in my knowledge. I watch the Sopranos. I did the foolish thing. I watched the last episode, which I meant nothing to me because I hadn't watched the whole series. What was that about? I don't get it?
And that was a controversial I know I.
Get it, so wait, so there, but I think I know the answer anyway. It's good a boom good. This is the basic thing about pop culture. You can know nothing, but it's still all comes somehow osmosis into your brain.
There, yeah, good for good for the Sopranos in your brain. What about if the Forbidden Dance were danced in heaven?
This is where I right, can pop culture is going to get some people. Uh, this would be the lumb gooda god exactly. Well, do you know that if you take the Greek letter lambda and you insert an a in it, you get lombarda.
I did not, but that is that could be.
A different puzzle. That's very the lombarda lambda.
Uh, lamp on a lamb. This is very important.
Right, yeah, okay, all.
Right, well we'll end. Since there were not a lot of options, we're gonna end. This one is not pop culture. It's almost the opposite of pop culture. It's like twelfth century pop culture. This is a French singing poet, a French roving, traveling singing poet right in the early Middle Ages might be a.
Well, now do I have to change it to the are we taking the French word for bad and the French word for good? No, going another level that singing poet. You're not talking about a specific person, You're talking about the general term for that person. That would be a true badour. So the heavenly version is the true goodoor, the true true exactly.
Well done, you got it even without watching this spring.
I probably shouldn't say the one I just thought of because it might be the extra credit. Well, tell me what it is and we'll cut it. If it is the extra credit a the famous sailor gun is way to Heaven or famous actor and comedian.
But I forgot oh good one, Yes I should have done that. No, but that's a good one. Thing. You on the spot are adding this which it is sin good good instead of sin good and the seven Seas or whatever it was called great one. Well, we do have one extra credit that is not sin good. It is instead if you do crossword puzzles, this one I think will come to you. If you are not a Crossford puzzler, then maybe not as easy. If they recreated a German spa town in heaven, this is what it might be called. All right, Well there you go. I was I hope it was a good puzzle for you.
It was not a bad puzzle, not at all.
And if you have thirty seconds, please go rate the puzzler on your favorite podcast platform because those ratings, believe or not, make a huge difference in those algorithms. So we will meet you here tomorrow for more puzzling puzzle that will puzzle you puzzlingly.
Hi puzzlers, Greg Pliska here with the extra credit answer from our previous show. On that show, we asked you to find the answer to this wordy girdy clue a dog drawing, and the answer is poodle doodle. Good luck puzzling, and we'll see you on the next one.