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. Each week the answer to the puzzle is the title of a song I've chosen to spotlight. Last week's answer was Eleanor Rigby -- which you can enjoy in the 5-minute Beatles' cartoon posted at the top of tonight's diary. (Or, if you don't care for the story and just want to hear the song, you can skip directly to it here.)
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. A new puzzle featuring one of my favorite songs (one a lot fewer people will be familiar with than last week's song!) can be found right below the orange squiggle.
Tonight's puzzle is a JulieCrostic.
If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic -- full instructions for solving JulieCrostics are included. (If you already know how JulieCrostics work you can skip directly to the clues for tonight's diary, at the bottom of tonight's diary)
First, to show you what a finished puzzle looks like, here's the completed grid for last week's puzzle.
Dru E rude N under I ruined
end L lend O olden G golden
lag E gale R large B garble
fed A deaf R fared Y defray
The verticals read ELEA NORR IGBY. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Eleanor Rigby.
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.
Think you've got the idea? Then here's a brand-new puzzle all set for you to solve!
Tonight's puzzle has 3 rows, with 4 answers per row, for a total of 12 clues. Here they are. Hope you like the puzzle -- and hope you enjoy the featured song once you figure out what it is.
1. ventilates
2. generally not welcome when found in foods
3. root vegetable
4. buns, bowls and beehives
5. thick slice
6. bundles
7. weasel-like animals
8. animal lodging places
9. only
10. bella, integra, and vera
11. something often associated with angels
12. something often associated with Rush Limbaugh
PS: If you enjoyed tonight's puzzle, we'd love to have you join us tomorrow night, same posting time as tonight, for the regular Sunday Puzzle!