Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
For the past couple months we've been having a summer songfest, with the answer to the weekly puzzle being a song title. A clip of the the song is then featured in the next week's diary. Last week's answer was Circle Game (performed in the clip at the top of tonight's diary by Joni Mitchell at Carnegie Hall in 1972). The answer two weeks ago was also Circle Game.
(If I were evil, I'd have Circle Game be the answer tonight for a third week in a row...)
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be new-puzzler-friendly. So if you've never tried Sunday Puzzle before, and are scared to dive in the deep end, come on and dip your toes in here.
Tonight's puzzle is a JulieCrostic.
If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic -- you'll find full instructions for solving JulieCrostics directly below tonight's puzzle. And to show you what a finished puzzle looks like, here's the completed grid for last week's puzzle .
mined C minced E endemic
nosed I onside G Gideons
spats R straps A satraps
a ream C camera M macrame
motes L motels E omelets
The verticals read CIRCL EGAME. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Circle Game, one of Joni Mitchell's signature songs.
Tonight's puzzle has 4 rows, with 4 answers per row. Here are the clues. Hope you like the puzzle -- and hope you enjoy the featured song once you figure out what it is.
1. Spike's lover
2. impolite
3. beneath
4. spoiled
5. finish
6. provide on a temporary basis
7. of days gone by
8. age or eagle
9. fall behind
10. strong wind
11. big
12. mess up
13. government agent
14. like many on the right when it comes to hearing about problems people face
15. went
16. pay part or all
For those of you new to Sunday Puzzle, here's an explanation of
How JulieCrostics Work:
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns. For the warm-up puzzles on Saturday I generally tell you how many rows and columns there are in the grid; for the regular puzzles on Sunday that's usually left to the solvers to figure out.
All the rows in the grid will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of answers). All the answers in a column will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of letters). And the words in each column are one letter longer than the words in the column to its left. That's because...
Each word in a row has all the letters of the word before it plus one new letter. For instance, if the clues for a row were (1) Alaska governor, (2) mountainous, and (3) clarify, the answers would be PALIN, ALPINE ( = PALIN + E), and EXPLAIN ( = ALPINE + X).
Write the added letter in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. For the row in the example you'd write:
PALIN E ALPINE X EXPLAIN
When you have solved all the clues and written down all the added letters, the added letters will form columns that spell out a message of some sort. It might be a person's name, it might be the title of a book, it might be a familiar phrase, or it might be a series of related words. Your challenge is to solve all the clues, fill in the vertical columns, and figure out what the vertical columns mean.