Boatswain: "What did you think of Cap'n Ahab's account of his quest for the Great White Whale?"  
Swabbie: "I'd've followed it better had he told it in chromonautical* order."

*Thanks to Codename Gimmick for coining this word and inspiring the pun.

When one is put "on hold," why does the telephone operator automatically send one to the Muzak Room?  Why can't one request the Solarium (for weather reports), the Library (for audio books), the Conservatory (for gardening tips), the Parlor (for live chat), the Ballroom (for toe-tapping), or the Zen Room (for silence)?  I, for one, would prefer being ushered to the Secret Passage.

Tapping on a Person’s Left Shoulder While Standing at the Right

Piecing together the secret of Hermes Trismegistus . . .


 

Not all designers think outside the hat box.

The clever baker was noted for his breadth of vision.

This puzzle grid contains several big words. Can you find them?

• 7-letter words: 8
• 8-letter words: 4
• 9-letter words: 2

All letters in the word must touch (in any direction), and no square may be reused. One of the 9-letter words refers to a society of amateur musicians.

Click to display solutions

Is the universe truly a clockwork contraption?  A close-up of the sun's surface shows how ancient humans first learned to tell time.

Museum goer studying map with docent: "I've been through Impressionism, Expressionism, Deco, Nouveau, Bauhaus, Rococo, Byzantine, Renaissance, Cubism, Gothic, Minimalism, Greek, and Neo-Plasticism.  But where do you house the Timeless art?"

I dreamed that my DNA contained strands of the legendary two-tailed, two-dotted semicolon.

George H.W. Bush famously mocked Ronald Reagan's supply-side policies as "Voodoo Economics."  Now someone has designed a Voodoo version of the Monopoly game.  Here's the Income Tax square, complete with a vévé for the spirit of tariffs.  The red lights are candles.  Here's another view of the card.

Piecing together the secret of happiness . . .


 

If Rainbows Were Architecture

What happens when an eccentric architect has the soul of a painter? He drafts a technicolor blueprint and creates elaborate canvasses out of brick and mortar. Portmeirion, the celebrated Italianate village on the west coast of Wales, and famous location of the 60’s cult television series "The Prisoner,” was built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis as a retirement project.

The fairy-tale hamlet he created (30 years before Disneyland) is like a three-dimensional picture postcard exhibiting an unparalleled array of colors. Portmeirion is often cited as an example of "picturesque architecture.” Picturesque simply means that something is proper to be pictured. In the picture that is Portmeirion, foreground and background are the real ground of a rainbow we can walk through.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at Colourlovers.com.]

Finally, someone has taken all the awkwardness out of spontaneous picnics!

This puzzle grid contains several big words. Can you find them?

• 7-letter words: 10
• 8-letter words: 4

All letters in the word must touch (in any direction), and no square may be reused. One of the 7-letter words is rather invigorating.

Click to display solutions