Good morning! If you like solving puzzles puzzles, you've come to the right diary. If you like a little bit of light political humor on a Sunday morning, and the occasional educational tidbit, you've also come to the right diary. If you're looking for pooties -- well, there are no pootie pictures in the diary today, but many of us have pooties in our homes or our signatures so feel free to talk about pooties while you're pondering the puzzles.
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. And once a month (the first Sunday of the month) we have a potluck party, when everyone is invited to share their favorite puzzles. That's next week, so now's a good time to start thinking about puzzles you might like to bring.
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: two JulieCrostics, a new set of One-Offs, and the answers to last week's unsolved Spoonerism puzzles.
(Sorry, no cryptic crossword this week, but I'll try to compose one as my contribution to next week's potluck.)
Puzzle # 1: today's JulieCrostic
(NOTE: 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.)
1. former green with bizarre ideas
2. roberts
3. famous monster
4. depend
5. shade of blue
6. part of a tower
7. truman
8. first moon
9. wild animals
10. whittle
11. kind of culture
12. clothes container
13. large number
14. england's neighbor
15. answer a question evasively and/or deceptively
16. incompetent secretary
17. sobs
18. marie and pierre
19. activist weiss
20. anti-semitic conspiracy theorist known for his lobby
21. well-known sydney
22. not as much
23. clinches
24. walkways
25. revolutionary guerrillas
26. vessel
27. component
28. 100% probability if this is dead
29. large island
30. not long ago
??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???
Intermission: answers to last week's unsolved puzzles.
Last week I posted a set of 4 Spoonerism puzzles:
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)
Of these, only # 3 was solved. (The answer: weed 'em and reap / read 'em and weep).
This was a set or related puzzles, the theme being reading and books. The answers to the unsolved puzzles were:
1. cubbyholes for marijuana (2)
boo nooks / new books
2. put necklace on well-behaved crow (4)
bead a rook / read a book
4. chomp on crow (3)
bite a rook / write a book
??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???
Puzzle # 3: One-Offs
No new Spoonerisms this week; instead, here's a set of One-Offs. In these puzzles, I take well-known phrases and change one letter of one word to create a new word. (The change can be the addition of a letter, the substraction of a letter, or the substitution of one letter for a different one.) Then I write a paraphrase of the new phrase that results from that single letter change, trying not to use any word in the paraphrase which appears either in the original or the altered phrase. Your challenge is to figure out what the phrases are.
As an aid in solving, I have provided in parentheses the number of words in the phrases. Usually these One-Off puzzles are listed in alphabetical order of the original phrases; today's set is not in alphabetical order, but they are arranged in a logical sequence.
OO-1: good fortune makes me very happy (3)
OO-2: this trio of musical pieces are ones which I wrote (3)
OO-3: sound of discomfort that mom's sibling makes (4)
OO-4: jog to benefit female soulmate (4)
OO-5: gamble wisely (2)
OO-6: tribal leader is needed (4)
OO-7: arithmetic (1)
OO-8: my plan is to cook up lots of food in hot oil (3)
??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???
Puzzle # 3: a bonus JulieCrostic
Hey, remember the days when it took all day (or sometimes longer!) to solve the acrostic?
Today I've included two acrostics. I usually try to compose puzzles which can be solved through team effort by noon, and the first acrostic falls into that category. But this second acrostic is intended to be a bit harder, to give people something to think about and play with during the week. I'm hoping this will give people at least a day or two of perplexment.
I'd suggest working on this one at leisure in your free time over the course of the week, returning occasionally to post what you come up with (in order to help the others who are working on it) and checking back once a day or so to see what progress others have made with it (in case they've figured out something you're still stuck on).
Unless, of course, this turns out to be a lot easier to crack than I intended and you finish it off this morning. (It is intended to be solvable -- just not intended to be solvable quickly.)
1. half of thirteen
2. clothe
3. jiggs' affliction
4. macho
5. once manly power, now an idiot
6. consumed in appalachia
7. no longer working
8. seabird
9. bjorling
10. fancy
11. irrelevant
12. same goes for this
13. hasn't been done yet
14. don't hold your breath waiting for the answer to this
15. tennis ball or frisbee