Tonight's puzzle is in celebration of a centennial worthy of noting. (An exact year for this centennial is a little difficult to pinpoint, but I think 2013 works well.) What centennial is it? Solve the puzzle and find out!
IMPORTANT NOTE: Before we get to tonight's puzzle, here's an idea I'd like people to think about, and which I'd like to try (perhaps starting 2 weeks from now?) if people are agreeable.
I think once the puzzles have been solved new people are less inclined to post comments. What if we were to adopt a new posting policy, where the diary would go up at a regular time and people could start working on the puzzles then -- BUT for the first hour people agree not to post any guesses or answers, just to work on the puzzles individually.
(People would still be free to post social comments during that first hour -- or for new people to ask questions about how the puzzles work -- or for folks to point out errors they think I may have made, so I can make any needed correction. But people would hold off on revealing any of their guesses.)
At the end of the 'hour of silence' the party begins and group solving commences.
(a) This gives folks an hour to discover the diary and start working on the puzzles. People who don't see the diary the moment it goes up will still have a good amount of time in which to discover it, read through the diary, and start working on the puzzles.
(b) This gives folks more time to see how much of the puzzles they can figure out on their own, before the group solving begins.
Please feel free to share your thoughts on this in comments or via KosMail. Meanwhile, here's tonight's puzzle!
As usual, the feature puzzle tonight is a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with JulieCrostics you can find introductory puzzles, and explanation of how they work, and examples of solved puzzles in our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
And as usual, the puzzle gremlins have been up to their mischief:
(1) The gremlins have bunched all the clues in tidy little bundles of three. That doesn't necessarily mean there are 3 answers to a row; it just means the gremlins like bundling up the clues that way.
(2) The gremlins have altered the capitalization, capitalizing some words which don't need capitalization and uncapitalizing some words which do.
(3) The gremlins have fiddled with the clue punctuation, taking out marks which should be there and inserting ones which shouldn't.
(4) On occasion the gremlins have even been known to remove spaces (so that what should be two words looks like one) or add spaces (so that what should be one word looks like two). I think tonight might be one of those occasions...
1. Busy bodies
2. Sick green buzzards thunder-bomb E. Cape Cod, Massachusetts? Keep at Guantanamo!
3. sharp steel weapons
4. one who arouses
5. set forth a theory
6. daring deeds
7. poem in praise of cannabis
8. self-propelled explosive
9. put forward
10. kind of bed
11. piggyback
12. minor planet
13. arduous
14. In the middle of a little curl! (The middle???)
15. doing well
16. petition participant
17. has a natural reaction to
18. aspirin, dry ice, and heroin
19. cute creatures with long tails and spots
20. The door's here in the middle; there's no out, to left and to the right; all which remains is alive.
21. jewel
22. rabbit pan
23. you might get tongued after this
24. affectation
25. crude
26. something which offers protection from moisture
27. kind of worship
28. sympathy or hunger
29. glide lightly
30. garment makers