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).
I'm away until September, harvesting blueberries in Maine, but I've queued up a series of Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diaries to entertain you until I return.
The theme for these diaries is Summer Songfest. Each week you'll get a puzzle spotlighting a noteworthy song and a YouTube clip of the song featured in the previous week's puzzle.
First up, the answers to last week's puzzle.
The clues were:
1. Thomas / 2. stay / 3. baggage
4. good right / 5. Khayyam / 6. house
7. dish / 8. Spaghetti Sauce / 9. cane
10. bull / 11. half / 12. West
13. when / 14. put / 15. temper
16. get / 17. belt / 18. coach
The answers were:
Cal M calm I claim
arm O Omar N manor
rag U Ragu S sugar
pit N pint O Point
say T stay N nasty
set A seat G stage
The verticals read MOUNTA INSONG (which, properly spaced, spell out the title of the beautiful 1978 "Mountain Song" by Holly Near)
All right, on to tonight's puzzle.
Tonight's JulieCrostic has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row. Four of the answers are proper names.
IMPORTANT NOTE! Every clue in tonight's puzzle is a familiar phrase, name, or hyphenated word from which one word is missing. The missing word is the answer to the clue.
If, for example, the clue reads free, some possible answers would be will [free will], trade [free trade], scot [scot free], and duty [duty-free].
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, you can jump right in; if you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
(Also if you're new, a request: please don't post any answers or other spoilers in comment subject lines. Instead, please put any guesses at possible answers into the comment itself. Thanks!)
Okay, I think that covers the basics. Here are the clues. Have fun!
1. Common
2. Shift
3. Rocket's red
4. Alamos
5. Napoleon
6. Change
7. Canal
8. Drop
9. Dutch
10. Also
11. And rave
12. U.S.
13. Garden
14. Prayer
15. Humble
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!