Sunday Puzzle is a regular weekly series. The puzzle party begins Sunday mornings at 9:30 am Eastern time / 6:30 am Pacific time, and you're invited.
But the puzzles in the Sunday Puzzle series can sometimes be a little intimidating to newcomers. So now there's also Sunday Puzzle for beginners to give new people an introductory version of the types of puzzles you'll find in the regular series. Sunday Puzzle for beginners posts Saturday evenings at 8:30 pm Eastern time / 6:30 pm Pacific time.
Tomorrow morning's Sunday Puzzle diary features a 45-clue JulieCrostic. If you'd like a chance to warm up for that with a simpler puzzle, here's your chance. You'll find a pleasant little warm-up puzzle right below the fold...
If you've done JulieCrostics before, you can jump right in. If you haven't, don't panic; you'll find complete instructions, as well as a completed puzzle as an example, a little farther down the page.
This week's puzzle has 4 rows, with 4 answers per row. Here are the clues:
1. Maxim
2. Entices
3. Brilliance
4. End product
5. Carries out
6. People convinced by Glenn Beck's reasoning
7. Dipped in liquid
8. In disagreement with
9. Sources of frustration
10. Sources of illumination
11. Sources of sugar
12. Sources of medicine
13. Nap
14. Gets sleepy
15. Mockery
16. Morgan, Kidd, and Bonny
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Here are the rules for JulieCrostics:
Read the clues provided below, then fill in words to match the clues in the appropriately numbered spaces in the diagram.
Each word in a row has all the letters of the previous word in that row, plus one new letter. Write the new letter in the space between the answers. For example, if the answers in a row were TREE, METER, and REMOTE you'd place aN "M" in the box between TREE and METER and an "O" between METER and REMOTE.
When you have filled in all the spaces correctly, the columns formed by the added letters should spell out related words. It might be a person's name, such as CHARLES DICKENS (spelled out in two columns). It might be the title of a book or movie, such as GONEW ITHTH EWIND (spelled out in three columns). It might be almost anything. Your challenge is to figure out what the verticals say and what they mean.
As an example, here are the clues for last week's puzzle and the completed answer grid:
CLUES to last week's puzzle:
1. Giving a measured amount
2. Something James Randi will pay a million dollars for if you can do it successfully
3. Stock market shift
4. Decline
5. Things of value
6. Naps
7. Helper
8. Most shameless
9. Go without food
10. Journeys
11. Put in too much seasoning
12. Things which take you up
13. People holding hands in a darkened room
14. Kind of triangle
15. Washes
16. Transparency
17. 20th century dictator
18. Hispanics
19. Some people like to paint these
20. Official residences of diplomats to foreign countries
ANSWERS to last week's puzzle:
dosing W dowsing W Dow swing N downswing
assets I siestas R assister B brassiest
starve L travels O oversalt E elevators
seance L scalene S cleanses R clearness
Stalin O latinos E toenails G legations
The verticals read WILLO WROSE NBERG. Put 'em together with correct spacing and they spell out: Willow Rosenberg. (The diary sub-title, "rhymes with rich", was a hint to the solution: one word which rhymes with rich is witch.)
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Bonus Puzzle: help improve the way news is gathered and reported by making the AP reliable...
A few weeks ago pucklady invented a new kind of word ladder puzzle. The rules are simple. You start with a short word and work your way to a longer word. Each step, you add one letter and change one of the existing letters and rearrange them to form a new word.
For example, to get from CAT to TIGER, you might go
CAT
GATE [C becomes G, and add an E]
TIGER [A becomes I, and add an R]
Or to get from CAT to ELEPHANT, you could build the following ladder:
CAT
MACE
CRANE
CANAPE
CHEAPEN
ELEPHANT
Got the idea? Good!
The challenge for this week (as stated above) is to make the AP reliable. Here's a grid with the start and finish; have fun filling in the rungs!
AP
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_
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RELIABLE