It's Sunday evening puzzle party time again!
On tap tonight: a brand-new JulieCrostic, a brand-new Crypto-Gremlin -- and a couple of holiday gifts from me to the Sunday Puzzlers. One's the story of an interesting bit of history concerning Robert Frost and Nikita Khruschev; the other...
As you may remember, last week's JulieCrostic spotlighted Neil Gaiman's book Fortunately The Milk:
This is quite possibly the most exciting adventure ever to be written about milk since Tolstoy's epic novel War and Milk. Also it has aliens, pirates, dinosaurs and wumpires in it (but not the handsome, misunderstood kind), also a never-adequately-explained-bowl-of-piranhas, not to mention a Volcano God.
And if you remember a bit farther back
(the September 7th warm-up diary, to be exact) one of the songs spotlighted during
Summer Songfest was the theme song to
Fireball XL5.
It's a great theme song, but here's something even better than a clip of the song being performed on tv: a clip of Neil Gaiman singing the Fireball XL5 theme song!
Trust me, this is good. Not only does this include an explanation of why Neil is singing this along with Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra, it includes an explanation of what Fireball XL5 was and how it came about.
Coming up next: Stewart Udall tells the tale of Robert Frost's 1962 visit to the Soviet Union, directly below the orange fireball. Plus puzzles! Come on down...
Here's your second year-end gift. Last night's warm-up diary featured a quote from Robert Frost:
"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel... A liberal would rather fuss with the Gordian Knot than cut it."
A somewhat strange quote to be spotlighting on Daily Kos -- but there's an even stranger story behind it. Here it is, as told 41 years ago by Stewart Udall -- the story of
Robert Frost's Last Adventure:
It is now 10 years since the curtains began to open on a nuclear showdown and the two great powers of the East and West confronted each other in the Cuban missile crisis. It was in late spring or early summer of 1962 that the Soviet Union began preparing to install about 60 offensive intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, well within range of the United States. The peoples of the world then watched, waited and were brought to the very edge of great danger before the crisis was ultimately met and the feared Armageddon averted.
Through some combination of simple coincidence, the compelling forces of history and a young American President's belief in the relationship of poetry and power, I found myself in the company of one of the world's great poets, Robert Frost, and one of its most powerful men, Nikita Khrushchev, as this most crucial and tense of dramas started to unfold. Neither Frost nor I, however, was aware that we were in the presence of one who had made such a fateful decision as Khrushchev had.
It is perhaps not outlandish to suggest that Frost's mission to Moscow helped set the stage for the relaxing of tensions that was to occur between his country and the Soviet Union in the years to come and, indeed, for the forming now of positive agreements toward greater cooperation and interchange between East and West. This was the very purpose of his trip...
Read
the whole story...
But perhaps first you'd like to try your hand at tonight's puzzles. Okay -- the story should still be there for you to enjoy later. Meanwhile, here's tonight's JulieCrostic:
NOTE: anyone who is unfamiliar with JulieCrostics and how they work can find a complete explanation in last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up
1. goat's follower (especially in the Middle East)
2. famous inventor's first name
3. rank in hero
4. potatoes
5. ornamental closet
6. make a pile
7. recently-invented class
8. kid in movies or comics
9. western state
10. tie
11. percolate
12. lighten
13. storyline continued over a number of episodes
14. horse follower
15. dash
16. descriptive of rush
17. wise followers
18. kind of chorus
19. to conjure with this
20. red deficiency
21. religious path
22. fall guy
23. famous Albert (or Alberta)
24. hulled kernels
25. kind of cone
26. cuddle and kiss
27. grippers
28. sandals
29. tarnish
30. large dark plain
31. he's a dick
32. orate in the fashion of verticals' first half
33. work before, work after
34. might be binary
35. combs
36. meal
37. Mr. Rogers, informally
38. money givers
39. Ann Horn
40. nuts
41. foreclosed property
42. prime representative of verticals' second half
43. back side
44. collections
45. commercial about oxygen in the mathemusician
Helpful Hints:
- Don't trust the clue capitalization; the Sunday Puzzle gremlins often capitalize words which don't need it and de-capitalize words which do.
- Also don't trust the clue punctuation; the gremlins often remove punctuation marks which should be there and insert ones which shouldn't.
- And you might be a little wary of word spacing as well; gremlins sometimes remove a space between two words which makes them run together or insert a space inside a word to make it appear to be two words.
- And especially don't trust the way the clues are grouped; the gremlins like to put the clues into tidy little bunches of three regardless of how many answers there actually are in a row.
- You should also be aware that the gremlins may have tampered slightly with my verticals; they don't seem to read quite the way I wrote them.
- Yes, there is a Rush Limbaugh clue in tonight's puzzle -- but only one. Don't be misled into thinking there are two.
- Yes, there is a comic book related clue in tonight's puzzle. In fact, there are two. Don't be misled into thinking there is only one.
- Clue 2 specifies a first name -- but the answer is actually a shortening of the person's first name by which the person was much more commonly known.
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
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Next puzzle! This is a Crypto-Gremlin -- a special kind of cryptogram which cannot be solved by the online programs that run through every possible letter substitution, but which can be solved by creative reasoning. If you're not familiar with Crypto-Gremlins you can find a complete explanation of how they work at the bottom of last night's warm-up diary.
Sweet adwckhah jtch milk ptlnb shtab dw yckdh mwci uwicltekadat. Utah ft lhcnw, Fk ewfh dgh aoheei rwmb xcwaadtvah cklw dgh owclklri.
* Mcwoi ft xweiolb vb Aiatlh Ui. Nhotak: "Fk Jlwy Ygw Dgh Lhzdw Schaknhldb Ykeek Vh!"
Helpful Hints:
1. Go to the American Cryptogram Association site and copy the text of the Crypto-Gremlin into the box of the handy letter-substitution tool they provide.
2. A good starting point in solving Crypto-Gremlins is to make a list of all the final letters of the encrypted words. This gives you a list of the vowels.
3. Another good starting point is to look over the encrypted text to see if there are any 3-letter words. If there's a word with the pattern consonant-consonant-vowel there's a good chance it's THE; if there's a word with the pattern vowel-vowel-vowel it's almost certainly YOU.
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
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Lastly, I'd like to talk a little about plans for Sunday Puzzle in 2014.
One thing I'd very much like to see in the coming year is more people getting a chance to host Sunday Puzzle.
Several reasons for this.
- 1. I think creating puzzles is a lot of fun and would like to share that fun.
- 2. The more different people we have creating the puzzles and hosting the diaries, the fresher the puzzles will be.
- 3. The more different people we have creating the puzzles and hosting the diaries, the better chance I think we have of catching the eyes of new people and attracting them to our circle.
And there's another important reason. There's a lot I'd like to get done this coming year, and I'm already way behind on things I need to get done. So if some of you would be interested in occasionally hosting Sunday Puzzle, that will give me a bit more time to try to get some of these things done.
Here's my tentative thought for 2014:
- (a) pucklady or science, if they're willing, would host the first-Sunday-of-the-month Potluck Puzzle Party;
- (b) third Sunday of the month would be officially designated as Guest-Host Sunday, when folks would be especially encouraged to volunteer to guest-host Sunday Puzzle;
- (c) folks would also be welcome to volunteer to guest-host any other Sunday they are interested in doing it;
- (d) I'll continue to provide puzzles for any Sunday which no one else volunteers to host.
(I'll also continue to provide the Warm-Up diaries on Saturday nights; those are much faster and easier for me to create. And I'm planning to continue doing the Monday recap diaries for at least another month, to see if that helps in attracting more people to the puzzle circle.)
How does that sound? Any thoughts and suggestions are welcome! Enjoy tonight's puzzles, and I'll see you in the comments.