Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, your weekly source of acrostic puzzles suitable for light Saturday night entertainment.
Sunday Puzzle Warm-up, featuring puzzles suitable for individual solving, currently posts on Saturdays at 9:30 pm Eastern / 6:30 pm Pacific. The regular Sunday Puzzle, featuring more challenging puzzles intended for group solving, currently posts on Sundays at 8:30 pm Eastern / 5:30 pm Pacific.
Tonight's puzzle is waiting for you now! Come on down and see if you can solve it...
Recently I've been doing themes for the Saturday night puzzles. During the summer the theme was noteworthy currently-published comic books. In the two months leading up to the election the theme was Hell To Pay, spotlighting candidates running against particularly obnoxious opponents. And with the election over, I began a new theme a few weeks ago.
The first answer, 2 weeks ago, was SECOND TERM.
The second answer, 1 week ago, was SENATE MAJORITY.
Can you guess what the common theme is? Feel free to post your guesses in the comment section for tonight's puzzle.
But if you can't guess what the theme is yet, all is not lost. The answer should become clearer once you figure out the answer to tonight's puzzle.
NOTE: The following puzzle is a JulieCrostic, named after Julie Waters (the creator of the Sunday Puzzle series). If you're not familiar with JulieCrostics, don't panic! An explanation of how they work, and an example of a solved puzzle, are provided directly below tonight's puzzle.
1. well-known Shaolin monk
2. loved one
3. put up money for
4. broadcaster Alastair
5. slow or pressure
6. Nixon, for example
7. chairs
8. nap
9. good meals
10. like the followers or Manson, Moon, Hubbard or Joseph Smith
11. how a kitten behaves
12. sharply
13. bestows affection
14. high
15. farthest
16. large work boat
17. dressed
18. shorten
19. what members of the Tea Party lack
20. Eliot and Evaline
21. reduces
22. look upon unfavorably
23. nuts
24. useful for adding color
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
How to solve JulieCrostics
For those of you unfamiliar with this kind of puzzle, what you do is solve the clues and write the answers in rows. In tonight's puzzle there are 8 rows with 3 answers per row.
Each word in a row contains all the letters of the previous word, plus one new letter. Write the added letters in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. The vertical columns created by the added letters will spell out a word or phrase.
An example of how this looks is provided below.
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
last week's puzzle:
1. permit
2. for fear that
3. take without permission
4. Chris Wallace relation to Mike Wallace
5. dollar bills
6. John Paul's last name
7. long time
8. zilch
9. not a single person
10. pigpen
11. remain
12. roam
13. grimalkin
14. sense of what is appropriate and what isn't
15. found below the roof
16. pacifier
17. facade
18. Angelou and Patchen
19. noise
20. object
21. Mork's companion
the answer to last week's puzzle:
let S lest A steal
son E ones J Jones
eon N none O no one
sty A stay R stray
cat T tact I attic
sop E pose T poets
din M mind Y Mindy
The verticals read
SENATEM AJORITY -- which, properly spaced, spell out
senate majority.