Welcome to Sunday Puzzle -- a weekly opportunity 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.
If you're new to Sunday Puzzle you might also enjoy Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, which features introductory puzzles to practice on.
On tap this morning: a 24-clue acrostic; some new Spoonerism puzzles; and a mini-crossword. The puzzles and the party are waiting for you just below the DK squiggle
Puzzle # 1: JulieCrostic.
If you aren't familiar with JulieCrostics you can find an explanation of how they work, an example of a completed puzzle, and a sample puzzle to practice on over in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
There are a few differences between the warm-up puzzles and the Sunday morning ones, though:
(1) In the Saturday night warm-up puzzles the clues are mostly straightforward definitions and synonyms. In these Sunday morning puzzles, the clues are often a little more devious.
(2) In the warm-up puzzles all the clues in a row are grouped together, so you know from the start how many answers are in the rows; but in the Sunday morning puzzles, I group the clues in bunches of 3 regardless of how many answers there actually are per row. (If the number of actual clues doesn't divide evenly by 3, I add in place-holder clues such as blank or I have no clue to fill out the last group.) Figuring out the grid pattern -- how many rows there are, and how many answers there are per row -- is part of the challenge.
(3) Some weeks (such as today) all the words in the clues are in lower case and you have to provide your own capitalization.
If you'd like to solve the puzzle on your own, you can set comments to Hide or Shrink. Or, if you'd like to be part of the team effort, set your comments to Expand; this will let you see what others are saying so you can pool your efforts with theirs and make a party out of solving the puzzle.
1. name of fried green tomatoes writer
2. fish
3. gabriel maalik
4. tantalizes
5. ward off
6. thieves' leaders
7. anger
8. farewell
9. anger
10. slacker
11. angered
12. unknown in comics
13. repeat
14. watchtower
15. anger
16. hymn
17. holy drug
18. salable items
19. gambles
20. rubberneckers
21. examine closely
22. clenched iron
23. palms off
24. sentimental people
Puzzle # 2: Spoonerisms
Spoonerisms are phrases in which the starting letters of some of the words have been swapped, creating a new phrase. The website Fun With Words provides some good examples:
Tease my ears (Ease my tears)
A lack of pies (A pack of lies)
Wave the sails (Save the whales)
For these puzzles, I take familiar phrases and Spoonerized them. I then write a paraphrase of the new phrase, without using any words which appear in either the original or the Spoonerized phrase. Your challenge is to figure out what the phrases are.
As a bit of help for solvers, I've included (in parentheses) the number of words in the original phrase. I've also arranged the Spoonerisms in alphabetical order of the original phrases.
1. cubbyholes for marijuana (2)
2. put necklace on well-behaved crow (4)
3. remove unwanted plants, then harvest the crop (4)
4. chomp on crow (3)
Puzzle # 3: Mini-Crossword
Finally for this morning, here's a mini-crossword.
(It's a cryptic crossword. If you're not familiar with this type of puzzle you can find a good explanation of how to solve cryptic clues here.)
1-across: Often blue kind of candy.
1-down: Mr. Rogers employs crazy men, so he's a loser.
2-down: Rush Limbaugh goes to hospital to get grease.
3-down: Either way there's no candidate for president and vice president.
4-across: This usually comes first for one committee member.
5-down, 5-across, 6-across: 320 minutes after this diary goes up in California, lone teen vet goes crazy.