Welcome once again to Sunday Puzzle!
From now through September, the weekly Sunday Puzzle diary will go up at 7:30 pm Eastern (half an hour earlier than it had been posting the past year). But the Sunday Puzzle party will still be starting at the usual time of 8 Eastern / 5 Pacific.
For the first half hour the diary is up, people are asked not to post any answers. That will give more people a chance to discover the puzzles before they're solved, and that will give people a chance to see how much of the puzzle they can solve on their own before the communal solving starts.
Which gives you a choice:
(a) if you'd like some time to attempt the puzzles on your own, look for the diary when it publishes at 7:30 Eastern, copy down the puzzles, and see how much progress you're able to make before the party starts.
(b) If you're more interested in the group puzzle-solving party, come on by at the usual time of 8 pm Eastern and join in.
Either way, puzzle fun awaits you right below the orange squiggle...
I'm running way late so just a short simple JulieCrostic tonight. (If you're not familiar with what JulieCrostics are and how they work, you can find a complete explanation in our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up. Here's a link to last night's warm-up diary.)
1. reno, formerly
2. sharp turn
3. strip
4. type of missile
5. jumble
6. coquette
7. grant
8. aggregate
9. type of reading material intended for horny people
10. type of reading material intended for high school students
11. name of minnesota senator
12. hartman's predecessor
13. filibuster site
14. avery
15. depart
16. yes
17. republicans think this is a scandal
18. something one might put on [see note following puzzle for an additional bonus clue]
19. irrational example
20. gremlin
21. name for a right-wing commentator lacking balls
NOTE # 1: gremlin control
Lots of errors have been creeping into the puzzles of late. So as a small attempt at keeping the number of errors down I included clue # 20 ("gremlin") as a bribe to the puzzle gremlins.
The gremlins said they were quite pleased to be honored this way, and in return they would limit their mischief tonight to (a) bundling the clues into tidy little groups of 3 (regardless of how many answers per row their actually might be); (b) removing all the clue capitalization; and (c) tampering with the punctuation.
That sounded like quite a bit of mischief. So I added in a couple of Republican-related clues. Gremlins consider Republicans to be kindred spirits, so clues which mention Republicans tend to make them happy. In this case they were so happy they agreed to leave the punctuation in tonight's clues alone. So here are tonight's moderately gremlin-free clues. Have fun cracking them, and I hope to see you in comments.
NOTE # 2: a bonus clue.
You can anagram the letters in the answer for clue 18 (a common word which gets 34 million hits on Google) to get an alternate answer (a common word which gets 113 million hits on Google). So here's a clue for the alternate answer:
18. something one might put on