Welcome to the first Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up of 2015. These diaries are a weekly Saturday night opportunity to have a little fun and to warm up your wits for the regular Sunday Puzzle (which posts 24 hours from now).
One of the things I find hardest about creating a new JulieCrostic each week is deciding what to use for the puzzle answer. That's why I like having a theme; it makes it a little easier for me to decide what to have the verticals will spell out. It's a new year, so time for a new theme. The answer to tonight's puzzle will tell you what I'm thinking of using for this month's theme.
Also tonight: a new Crypto-Gremlin. (But don't feel you need to solve it tonight. If no one posts the answer tonight, I'll contribute it to tomorrow's Potluck Puzzle Party.)
The puzzles are waiting for you right below The Orange Thing Which Dares Not Speak Its Name.
Here's tonight's JulieCrostic puzzle (so named in honor of Julie Waters, who founded the Sunday Puzzle series 7 years ago).
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row. 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!)
1. removable covers
2. adds ornamentation
3. workers' groups
4. festoon
5. heavily drug-affected
6. prepared food
7. dogs
8. wash vigorously
9. rectangular playing fields
10. imaginary big birds
11. thin ropes
12. philosophies
13. troop
14. child with shared birthday
15. partially close one's eye
And here's a bonus puzzle, a new Crypto-Gremlin:
"Cat which spur, crocnot spur wron uhfpucud wheft wron cankut. Fpc'ur zpyt ktccpekh koritoptut bpcad kh wzhgt caorbtop. Fpcr frtue'cd broyh, wheft fpcr ghytut kh gtuun."
Crypto-Gremlins are a special kind of cryptogram -- ones which can't be solved by online programs which run through and test out every possible letter substitution, but which can be solved by reasoning and creative thinking.
If you're not familiar with Crypto-Gremlins you can find a detailed explanation of how they work here. (And you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions here.)
BONUS PUZZLE! As you can see by the quotation marks, the Crypto-Gremlin is a quote. Who said it?
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!