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.
I'm away this weekend, so the gremlins volunteered to provide the puzzles tonight and tomorrow. I probably won't be able to take active part in the puzzle-solving party tonight or tomorrow but I'll read the comments as soon as I get a chance (and will pass any praise or criticism on to the gremlins).
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be new-puzzler-friendly. (Hopefully the gremlins are aware of that...) 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.
Here are the clues for tonight's JulieCrostic.
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, have at it! If you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 4 rows, with 3 answers per row. One answer is a 2-word phrase; one answer is capitalized; and one answer isn't what you think it is.
1. orderly
2. representative
3. snarl
4. clean
5. opposite of four, including 4
6. most popular US brand of coloring material
7. undiluted
8. have dinner at home
9. built-in
10. pin-like?
11. intended
12. male reproductive organ
For the benefit of anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, here are
instructions for solving JulieCrostics.
In JulieCrostics you are given a set of clues, such as these:
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns, like so:
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. say what's not so
2. resting
3. concede
then the answers might be LIE, IDLE (= LIE + D), and YIELD (= IDLE + Y)
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:
1. LIE D 2. IDLE Y 3. YIELD
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.
In the example given, the verticals read
DAIL YKOS. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Daily Kos!