Welcome once again to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up!
Every Sunday evening, at 8:30 New York time / 5:30 California time, we have a puzzle party featuring puzzles suitable for group solving. That's tomorrow night.
And every Saturday evening, at 8:30 New York time / 5:30 California time, we have a warm-up party to help folks get their brains in gear for Sunday. That's what this is.
If you haven't taken part in Sunday Puzzle before, tonight's diary is a good opportunity to become familiar with the kinds of puzzles we feature there. On tap tonight: a new JulieCrostic, plus a demonstration of how to solve Crypto-Gremlins.
Last month in Sunday Puzzle I posed a set of five Crypto-Gremlins, all of which remain unsolved. Here's the first of the set:
Bowl mewcexeclous and gisobmp go uoa rnord fdwmfeswfs rsuums neyl temo mlwqlmrs, xowcd and aeuuewvup yoffskrmo rns kswourp kdzl jeykiemdwyswre tewo bdicsio rd aoidlms rns fdwmfeswfs kdzl rns fdyylwerp xdxsip qerml mewqlmrefs, aemo tewo isouerp mstkismmewvs rns nevnsmro ismksfrd zdie rns uoa.
Crypto-Gremlins are a special kind of cryptogram. You can find a full explanation of what they are and how the differ from regular cryptograms
here.
I'll be providing a walk-through demonstration tonight of how to crack the code and read the message. But that will take a lot of lines to do. In order not to clog up the diary (and to let you get to the JulieCrostic more quickly), I'll provide the demonstration in tonight's tip jar.
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
All right, if you're a Sunday Puzzle regular here's what you've probably been waiting for: tonight's JulieCrostic!
I occasionally do themes in the verticals. Last summer the theme was great currently-published comic book series. In the early fall it was Hell To Pay candidates. In November it was things to be thankful for. And January was a theme-free month. Well, tonight's verticals will give you a hint to what the theme this month will be.
NOTE: If you're new and don't know what JulieCrostics are, don't panic. A full explanation of how these puzzles work, including an example of a solved puzzle, appears directly below the clues for tonight's puzzle.)
1. large body
2. devoted followers
3. sword
4. flat-bottomed vessels
5. mixes up
6. blue
7. fruit drinks
8. comforted
9. removed
10. prepares
11. embarrassed
12. sketched
13. propelled a boat
14. very small staff
15. one who gives something
16. go wrong
17. uncommon
18. traveler
19. one who grows things
20. delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787
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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 4 rows with 5 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.
As an example of how this works, here are the clues and answers to last week's puzzle:
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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. piece of property
2. missing
3. what Jim Greer did
4. state which may be taking up marriage equality in 2014
5. group which organized most of the Freedom Rides
6. smoke screen
7. commercials
8. helps
9. thoughts
10. what Bernanke is chief of
11. provide
12. liberated
13. related people or things
14. URL
15. walk provocatively
16. Rush Limbaugh
17. Supernatural angel
18. worst, best and nut
the answer to last week's puzzle:
lot S lost E stole
ORE. C CORE V cover
ads I aids I ideas
Fed E feed R freed
ilk N link S slink
ass C Cass E cases
The verticals read
SCIENC EVERSE -- which, when properly spaced, spells
science verse.
This was a double hint toward the solution of the next day's Sunday Puzzle:
(1) All the vertical words in the Sunday Puzzle (SPIRE, FORM, AN, TROLLED, SORT, QUEST and STABLE) shared the characteristic that the letters CON could be added in front to make new words (conSPIRE, conFORM, ConAN, conTROLLED, conSORT, conQUEST and conSTABLE). Similarly, SCIENCE and VERSE can become conSCIENCE and conVERSE.
(2) The word converse also describes the relationship between the two JulieCrostics the Sunday Puzzlers were working on: one had in its verticals four interesting foreign words for which there is no English equivalent, but did not include the definitions so the puzzlers needed to discover those to solve the puzzle; the other included in its clues the definitions of those four words, but the puzzlers needed to discover what the words were in order to crack the clues.