Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly series for people who enjoy light mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, and odd bits of trivia.
The theme of the warm-up puzzles in recent weeks has been good quotes. Last week's quote, solved by JoeXM, was: "If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito."
Here's tonight's quote:
Los thustle tncknbyleum loylh Onaayum Banclecy inaas celh gs los csply Dustnkscle cews los Hcnlsky Tlylstm: Gnaae Runtlean loncrtm tos'ty zenczs le inch.
Of course, you'll need to decode it first if you want to read it...
Tonight's diary includes:
- Instructions for decoding Crypto-Gremlins
- a step-by-step demonstration of how to solve a Crypto-Gremlin,
- a new JulieCrostic (revealing the source of tonight's quote)
- DKU notes on last week's JulieCrostic
I: Instructions for solving Crypto-Gremlins
For anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, please note that the encoded quote is not a regular cryptogram; it's a Crypto-Gremlin. Crypto-Gremlins are a special kind of cryptogram. 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.)
II: Sunday Puzzle Workshop: how to solve a Crypto-Gremlin
Crypto-Gremlins may look complicated at first, but they're actually pretty easy to solve once you get the hang of them. Here's a step-by-step walk-through of how to solve last week's puzzle.
The coded text for last week quote was:
Maxi one wdatze one zihy wnn prissy wn rizy bi faxxyhytuy, who psyycatly data bi usnpyfa hnnri jawdo bi rnpmeawn.
- 1. make a list of the word-ending letters. There are 6 word-ending letters in the message text: I, E, Y, N, O and A. These are the substitutions for the standard vowels a, e, i, o, u and y. We don't know yet which of these letters stands for which vowel, but we do now know which letters in the message text are vowels and which are consonants.
- 2: look for 3-letter words. There are three 3-letter words: ONE (which occurs twice), WNN, and WHO.
ONE is composed entirely of vowels, so it's almost certain to be you. Plug in O=y, N=o, and E=u.
With N=o, we can now see that WNN is _oo. That's almost certainly too. Plug in W=t.
That shows that WHO is t_y. Since H is a consonant, the word must be try. Plug in H=r.
- 3. Now look at PSYYCATLY. It has a double Y. We know that Y is a vowel, and the only vowels which appear commonly in doubles like this are o and e. Since o is already taken, it must be an e. Plug in Y=e.
- 4. Since of the 6 vowels e, o, u, and y are now accounted for, that leaves only a and i. And since of our 6 word-ending letters E, Y, N, and O are accounted for, that leaves only I and A. Since letters in cryptograms don't stand for themselves that means I=a and A=i. Plug those substitutions in.
- 5. Now look at JAWDO, which is _it_y. There aren't many consonants which could follow the T, especially if the Y is an add-on letter as it appears to be. The obvious choice is h in with. Plug in J=w, D=h.
- 6. WDATZE now translates to thi__u. If the u is an add-on, as seems probably, then there are only a handful of common 5-letter words starting with thi, and the only one which is a verb is think. Plug in T=n, Z=k.
- 7. PRISSY now translates to __a__e, with a double-consonant following the a. The letters n, r, and t are already taken. We can rule out s, since letters don't stand for themselves. The obvious choice among the remaining letters is l. Which means the e at the end is an add-on and the word is small. Plug in S=l, P=s, R=m.
- 8. What we have for the quotation now is: -i-a you thinku you kare too smalle to make -a -i--eren-e, try slee-in-e hini -a -lose-i rooma withy -a mos-uito.
It's easy to see that the first word, MAXI, translates to if, the tenth word, FAXXYHYTUY, translates to difference, the twelfth word, PSYYCATLY, translates to sleeping, and the final word, RNPMEAWN, translates to mosquito. Plugging in X=f, F=d, U=c, C=p, L=g, and M=Q, we can now read the entire sentence: qifa you thinku you kare too smalle to make -a difference, try sleepinge hini -a closedi rooma withy -a mosquito.
Final translation: If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.
III: DKU notes for last week's diary:
The clues and answers in Sunday Puzzle diaries generally include a number of political and cultural references. last week's diary included the following:
1. prominent LGBT rights group
The answer was
HRC (which stands for
Human Rights Campaign).
As their website states (and Wikipedia concurs), HRC is "the largest civil rights organization working to achieve equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans... HRC envisions a world where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are embraced as full members of society at home, at work and in every community."
6. "Duck Soup", "The Producers", or the contest for the Republican presidential nomination
The answer was
farce.
Duck Soup and The Producers are considered to be two of the all-time great farces. The contest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination looks like it may give them a run for their money.
18. speak of Rush Limbaugh non-euphemistically
The answer was
swear.
(Rush Limbaugh is commonly considered to be a synonym for asshole.)
IV: tonight's JulieCrostic
In recent week's I've been using the JulieCrostic to identify the source of that week's quotation. But I already revealed the source of tonight's quotation two weeks ago, when I intended to use the quotation featured in tonight's diary. Unfortunately I screwed up and instead re-posted a quotation I'd used back in February. So tonight's JulieCrostic doesn't tell you the name of the person making this election prediction -- but it does tell you the name of one of the people who figures prominently in it.
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. Tonight's puzzle has 7 rows, with 3 answers per row. Here are the clues. Have fun, and I hope to see you in comments!
1. like
2. silvery-gray
3. money
4. gym class
5. something you might make with cherries
6. heap
7. west coast state
8. regulation
9. cry loudly
10. well-known Koch
11. directed
12. give on a temporary basis
13. highway
14. op or pop
15. synonym for 18
16. celebrity magazine
17. Big in California
18. kind of cherry
19. in the direction of
20. plaything
21. theatrical award
V: 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!