Hi! If you're looking for Sunday Puzzle, it now posts on Friday evenings at 8 pm Eastern / 5 pm Pacific.
For those of you who missed it, here's a link to the first Friday night edition, featuring a 69-clue JulieCrostic (the solution to which may be of special interest to followers of Monday Murder Mystery in the Readers and Book Lovers group).
This week, since it's the first week of the new-day-and-time, I'm re-posting the Friday puzzle in this reminder diary. For anyone who forgot about the day change and missed out on the puzzle-solving party we had Friday, this will at least make it a little easier if you'd like to copy down the clues and try to solve the puzzle on your own.
But if you enjoy Sunday Puzzle, please mark on your calendar that the next one will appear Friday May 3 (at 8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific).
That will be our monthly potluck puzzle party, so if you've got a puzzle you'd like to share you can send it in advance to pucklady to include in the diary. (Or you can bring it along Friday night and post it in comments, and we'll paste it into the diary then.)
All right. Without too much further ado, here's a re-post of the puzzle which posted Friday night...
This is a JulieCrostic (named after Julie Waters, founder of Sunday Puzzle.)
If you're not familiar with JulieCrostics, don't panic! I've included an explanation of what they are and how they work directly below the puzzle.
This puzzle was designed for group solving, so those of you attempting to solve it on your own may have difficulty cracking all the clues (or in understanding why a word or phrase is the answer even after you've figured out from the letters what the answer must be). If you do get stuck, feel free to post a comment asking for help and I'll check in periodically to provide any requested help.
Or, for tonight's puzzle, you can simply look back to the Friday edition where this originally posted. Set your comment preferences to SHRINK, look over the comment subject lines to see which comment(s) deal with the clue you're stuck on, and expand that comment to get the help you need.
1. rotten person
2. muss up
3. betrayal
4. dirties
5. buggy dolly
6. stiffen
7. more restrained
8. agreements
9. county
10. people who got a job
11. woman who received something
12. supporting abortion rights, saying something good about obama obama, and disagreeing with rush, if you're a true republican
13. lukewarm
14. scorpion's leg
15. down payment
16. authoritarian
17. get points
18. class
19. makes up for
20. treasured
21. some say the world will come before this
22.
23. explosive d
24. flood
25. double dickie
26. snakes
27. these are often associated with snakes
28. something done with legs wide apart
29. playful
30. class follower
31. this can make a picture clearer
32. visual aid seller
33. sharpen
34. f scout
35. kings' predecessors
36. where you can often find batman and spider-man
37. extent
38. body
39. mimics
40. what we'll do later on (according to richard smith)
41. basketball player
42. one who keeps and files records
43. fire sound
44. hens
45. nonsense
46. co
47. small quantity
48. vehicle-free competition
49. provides temporarily
50. a dam or a gun could have this
51. flax
52. censored
53. sticks
54. reels
55. commonly wait first, get opinion after
56. bishop
57. task
58. badger
59. children of this were kings, originally
60. understandable
61. reject
62. sings
63. halos
64. animated editorial
65. irks
66. pincers
67. waves
68. slick
69. nothing
An Explanation of JulieCrostics
What you do is solve the clues and write the answers in rows.
All the rows have the same word-length pattern. If the first answer in one row has 5 letters, then the first answer in all the rows will have 5 letters.
Each word in a row contains all the letters of the previous word in that row, plus one new letter. Write the added letters in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does.
The vertical columns created by the added letters will spell out a word or phrase. The object of the puzzle is to solve all the clues and read the vertical message.
A few quick words of caution for any newcomers:
On Saturday nights I post introductory JulieCrostics (in our companion series, Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up). These feature straightforward clues and a minimum of monkey business, and I let you know up front how many rows there are and how many answers there are per row, which makes filling in the chart much easier.
The Sunday night (now Friday night!) puzzles are trickier. Not only are many of the clues more devious but also:
(a) The clues are grouped in bundles of 3 regardless of how many answers there actually are per row. (If the number of answers does not divide evenly by 3, I add blank clues to make it come out even.)
(b) Capitalization is omitted from the clues, making it hard sometimes to recognize that a word in the clue is a proper name rather than the word it appears to be
(c) Occasionally I fiddle with the punctuation, removing marks or adding marks to make a clue seem to say something other than what it really says.
Have fun -- and don't forget to come back next Friday night for the potluck party with pucklady!