WE INTERRUPT THIS DIARY FOR AN IMPORTANT NOTE:
The regular Sunday Puzzle will return on Sunday September 8th.
We respectfully request your attendance and participation.
- snicker -
the gremlins
WE NOW RETURN YOU TO THE WARM-UP DIARY, ALREADY IN PROGRESS
Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle [which, alas, is on recess until September.] [But on the bright side, your brain cells should be nicely warmed up by the time Sunday Puzzle returns].
From now through September is Summer Songfest. Each week the acrostic verticals spell out the title of a noteworthy song; and each week I'll provide a YouTube clip of the song from the previous week at the top of the diary.
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be new-puzzler-friendly. So if you've never tried Sunday Puzzle before, and are scared to dive in the deep end, come on and dip your toes in here. Tonight's puzzle is waiting for you right below...
This is a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic -- full instructions can be found directly below tonight's puzzle, along with the answers to last week's puzzle.
The song spelled out in tonight's verticals is one of my favorites -- and one I suspect none of you will have heard before.
At first I didn't think I'd be able to use this song in a JulieCrostic, partly the song title has a prime number of characters (making it hard to have vertical columns of equal length no matter how one divides it) but also because of another obstacle. But then I thought of a simple solution which solved both problems.
Tonight's puzzle has 7 rows, with 3 answers per row. Hope you like the puzzle -- and hope you like the song when I post a YouTube of it next week.
1. sprightly
2. Tinkerbell
3. somewhat
4. collections
5. Daily Kos, The Smirking Chimp, and My Left Wing
6. Rush Limbaugh, for example
7. kind of model
8. the man who was Moto
9. high or holy
10. poetic event
11. most Republican leaders
12. sends insulting messages
13. ominous
14. woman in white
15. Ann-Margret told him bye bye
16. chickens
17. man who was asked to come back
18. safe places
19. great writer and great socialist
20. shoulder garment
21. sometimes seen off the coast of Maine
For those of you new to Sunday Puzzle, here's an explanation of
How JulieCrostics Work
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns. For the warm-up puzzles on Saturday I generally tell you how many rows and columns there are in the grid; for the regular puzzles on Sunday that's usually left to the solvers to figure out.
All the rows in the grid will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of answers). All the answers in a column will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of letters). And the words in each column are one letter longer than the words in the column to its left. That's because...
Each word in a row has all the letters of the word before it plus one new letter. For instance, if the clues for a row were (1) Alaska governor, (2) mountainous, and (3) clarify, the answers would be PALIN, ALPINE ( = PALIN + E), and EXPLAIN ( = ALPINE + X).
Write the added letter in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. For the row in the example you'd write:
PALIN E ALPINE X EXPLAIN
When you have solved all the clues and written down all the added letters, the added letters will form columns that spell out a message of some sort. It might be a person's name, it might be the title of a book, it might be a familiar phrase, or it might be a series of related words. Your challenge is to solve all the clues, fill in the vertical columns, and figure out what the vertical columns mean.
To show you what a completed puzzle looks like, here is the solution to last week's puzzle.
son J Jons H Johns
emu O moue S mouse
Ron H Horn O honor
row N worn C crown
hat B bath I habit
sad I dais E ideas
ick! R Rick T trick
ROK C cork Y rocky
The verticals spell out JOHNBIRC HSOCIETY. When properly spaced that spells out
"John Birch Society" (a classic
Chad Mitchell Trio song).