Welcome once again to Sunday Puzzle -- a chance to exercise your wits, have fun, and occasionally learn the odd fact or two in the process.
Sunday Puzzle posts weekly, generally at 9:30 am Eastern time / 6:30 am Pacific time, and features puzzles suitable for group puzzle-solving.
I had intended for today's Sunday Puzzle diary to be a special math puzzles edition. But I'm running way late this week, am short on sleep and highly error-prone, and realized that I wouldn't be able to do a good job on the puzzles if I tried to post them this week.
So, change of plan; I'm going to postpone the math puzzle edition until next week. Instead, I'm running a special holiday-themed acrostic this week. (Yes, I know I'm a week off on the timing. Hey, at least I'm posting it in the right month.)
Here's the revised schedule for the next couple weeks:
today, October holiday puzzle
October 30, math puzzles edition
November 6, first Sunday of the month, potluck puzzle party
In addition to the acrostic there are 3 bonus puzzles -- and a DKU note from last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up. If you'd like to learn about a lie Herman Cain has been telling for the past 6 years, and which recently came to light when he said it once too often, keep reading...
Here are the clues for today's puzzle. If you are familiar with how JulieCrostics work, jump right in. If you're not, you can find complete instructions, including an example of a solved puzzle, over in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
1. there's no good solution for this (on-line or when texting, anyway)
2. regulatory agency
3. must
4. this can make you very sad
5. nickname for Rachel
6. Bryant
7. dog, wolf, or pain-killer
8. inexpensive pearls
9. what Hannity inspires
10. ceremony
11. belonging to certain people
12. come first, then look
13. multitude
14. kind of rider
15. for those who are uncertain, this is a theorem
16. Edward Westminster
17. opposite of 5, I hear
18. legendary loser
19. This sounds like a bunch of animals. (Or, sounded like. Understood?)
20. lack
21. animal noise
22. big bang
23. generally not regarded as sexy
24. voluptuous
As usual, I've grouped the clues in tidy little bundles of 3. That does not necessarily mean there are 3 answers to a row -- just that I'm fond grouping clues in bundles of 3. It's possible that the number of actual clues did not divide evenly by 3, and that I added dummy clues to make the number come out right. But don't worry; any placeholder clues will be easy to spot, as they will say something like "empty" or "pay no attention to this" or "don't take this seriously".
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Bonus Puzzles
Courtesy of Page-A-Day calendars, here are a few puzzles which people can work on without needing to worry too much about whether I made any mistakes.
bonus puzzle # 1:
Every answer is a famous man whose initials are C.C.
1. Explorer aboard the Santa Maria
2. Costar of ¡Three Amigos!
3. “Hi-De-Ho” jazz bandleader
4. 1960 Olympics boxing champ
5. Harding’s VP
6. “Twist”-ed singer
7. United Artists cofounder
8. The Teachings of Don Juan author
bonus puzzle # 2:
_ _ _ H E R
_ _ _ C H
C O M _ _ _
Write the same short word in each set of blanks to form three longer words. (The word you are looking for is 3 letters long.)
bonus puzzle # 3:
T _ _ _ _ E
S E _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ S P A N
Write the same short word in each set of blanks to form three longer words. (The word you are looking for is 4 letters long.)
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DKU note: Herman Cain demonstrates an inability to tell the truth (and a major lack of ability to do simple arithmetic).
In last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, I included this clue:
7. what Herman Cain did in CNN interview with Piers Morgan this week
The answer is LIED. And it's a lie which apparently much of the media still has not picked up on even though Cain has been telling it for 6 years.
Here is a video of Piers Morgan's interview with Cain. The video is 40 minutes long, but the relevant bit occurs about 2 minutes in and only lasts a couple of minutes. The clip is cued to start as the relevant segment begins, so you don't need to listen to what goes before -- and once the the relevant part is over, you can stop the clip.
WARNING: the clip begins to play automatically as soon as the window with the clip opens.
For those who don't want to watch the clip, here's a link to the site which fact-checked Cain's statement and discovered the discrepancy between what Cain says and what actually happened:
"Did Herman Cain Just Lie to Piers Morgan?"
And for those who just want the answer to what it was Cain said that wasn't true, and would prefer not being sent to another site to find it out, here's my summary:
Cain has been claiming for 6 years now that when he ran for senate in Georgia in 2004 he finished "an impressive second".
In the Piers Morgan interview he expands on that:
“I ran for us senate in 2004 and came in an impressive second... I almost pulled it off. I came within 2 percentage points.”
But in fact Cain came nowhere near winning. It was a 3-way race, with Johnny Isakson getting 53 % and Cain getting only 26 %. He finished second, but he lost by 27 percentage points.
As many people know, 27 percentage points is quite different from 2 percentage points. But apparently this is something which some Republicans have not yet learned (or have learned but consider to be only a theory). That could explain the math on some of their economic plans.