Do you like puzzles? Do you like political humor? Do you like a little Sunday night socializing with other puzzle fans? Do you like great music?
Then you're in luck! This week Sunday Puzzle has all four!
For starters, there's Phil Ochs singing "Song of My Returning" -- one of my favorite Phil Ochs songs, and one which is especially apt this week since the diary features two returnees. One of the returnees, obviously, is me. Who or what is the other?
That's one of tonight's puzzles. Today's diary also features a 30-clue JulieCrostic, a re-post of last week's mystery puzzle (which OldPhart correctly identified as Spoonerisms), and a new mystery puzzle.
Sunday Puzzle posts weekly, currently at it's new standard time of 8:30 pm Eastern time / 5:30 pm Pacific time, and features puzzles suitable for group puzzle-solving.
If you'd like to join the party, come on down below the fold...
Puzzle # 1: JulieCrostic
Here are the clues for tonight's JulieCrostic.
If you're new to Sunday Puzzle and not familiar with JulieCrostics, don't panic! You'll find a complete explanation of how these puzzles work, along with introductory puzzles and examples of completed puzzles, over in our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
There are a few differences between the warm-up puzzles and these. For instance:
1. I usually include a grid with the warm-up puzzles, so that you know right off how many answers there are per row and how many letters each answer has; for these, you need to figure that out on your own.
2. For these I bunch the clues together in bundles of 3, regardless of how many clues are actually in the rows. If the number of clues does not divide evenly by 3, I add place-holder clues at the end -- clues the answer to which are empty or blank or nothing to fill the last bundle out. For instance, if the lasts clues were 29. clueless and 30. good reason to vote for Romney instead of Obama this November, likely there are only 28 actual clues.
3. For the warm-up puzzles, I try to use mostly straightforward synonyms, definitions, or examples. For these regular puzzles, the clues are often more devious. But you can see that for yourself, below...
1. often descriptive of coulter, but even more descriptive of papa
2. type of oil
3. how to file claws
4. conventional regulation
5. unusual predecessors
6. land with trees or streets with snow
7. janet
8. lacking an important sensory organ
9. fancy
10. consume metal
11. restricted consumption
12. act of preying
13. something a person intending to break the law might do to the joint
14. certain shoe parts
15. demonstrates innocence
16. if they're free they lack long-term commitment; if they're not free, beware of their pointy objects!
17. remembers what comes before O
18. sign for discouraging door-to-door salespeople
19. part
20. devotee
21. twist
22. stewart is an example of one, as is taylor; serling, alas, is not
23. more than 552
24. free interruption of this is common in NH
25. and the man follows
26. roger who said, regarding his most famous accomplishment: "they acted as if I was doing something wrong..."
27. muhammad's wife
28. practicality
29. diamond, quartz, and topaz
30. end points
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Puzzle # 2: Spoonerisms
This is a re-post of the mystery puzzle which I contributed to last week's pot luck. OldPhart correctly figured out what kind of puzzle this is (Spoonerisms) and the answer to # 3 (similar to Romney's business => like Bain => bike lane). What are the original phrases and Spoonerized versions of the other four?
1. travel from Trafalgar Square to the Temple Bar (4)
2. travel to side protected from wind (2,3)
2. ermine (which resembles Rowling's bush): toss the vehicle to where it will be sheltered from the wind (7, 8)
3. similar to Romney's business (2)
4. vehicles lean over, causing onlookers to jeer (4)
5. device sailor uses to transmit voice (2, 1)
NOTE: The number in parentheses indicates the number of words in the answer phrase. (When two numbers appear, the second number is the number of words in the original phrase.)
note on 4: in the familiar form of the original phrase, a key word is singular rather than plural; but there's no reason the phrase can't refer to the plural of these things instead.
note on 2: in the original posting, the clue I provided was for only part of a longer phrase. The longer phrase is well known; the partial phrase is not. I have corrected this by providing a clue to a Spoonerism of the complete phrase, which is what I should have posted in the first place.
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Puzzle # 3: mystery puzzle!
What Obama would have if he appointed Ms. Torres to be head of a government department created in 1930.