I won't be home for another couple of days, and had been planning to wait until next Sunday to resume the regular Sunday Puzzle series.
But two of the gremlins woke me up one night recently, and one of them sort of snickered to me, Hey, you know that additional Summer Songfest warm-up puzzle you made but weren't planning to use because you already have enough queued up to last until you get home and because you thought maybe it needed something more?
I knew immediately which one they were referring to. It was the one I was still debating on a subtitle for. I liked Small Wonder or Small Delight, but thought those might be inappropriate, and I liked Superman's girlfriend might be confused but you don't have to be but thought that might be a little long. Anyway, I nodded yes, curious to hear what the gremlins had in mind.
Well, the gremlin said with a perfectly straight and sincere face this time, we think you should use it to re-start the regular Sunday Puzzle. It's so easy that you don't need to be there when it goes up, so you can re-start a week earlier to let folks know that Sunday Puzzle is back.
I waited for the muffled giggles and suppressed snickering. There were none.
So I asked directly, "What mischief are you gremlins planning?"
Us? The first one asked with a totally surprised and innocent look on its face.
We'll be good, we promise, the other one said with an equally innocent look.
Hmmm. They'd given me their word they'd behave themselves. What good possibly go wrong?
So I went ahead, typed it up on a library computer on a day when I was able to bike into Cherryfield, and queued it up...
... Well, the next time I was able to go online I decided to check the diary to make sure I hadn't made any typoes or other embarrassing mistakes -- and I was surprised to see that what was displayed wasn't what I'd typed. (I also discovered I was locked out of editing.)
That evening I managed to get hold of the gremlins. "What did you do to the diary???" I asked. "You promised you wouldn't do anything to it!"
No, we didn't, the first one said. I stared in astonishment.
Really, we didn't, the second one said. What we said was that we'd be good.
And we were, said the first one. Very good!
Good? We were great!
There was nothing I could do so I went into my tent, zipped it shut, and eventually fell into a troubled sleep. But the next time I was able to go online I checked the puzzle again and they were right.
Here's the puzzle... Or, actually, here are the three puzzles. There's mine, and there are also two from the gremlins. They won't let me tell you what order the puzzles are in, so I guess you'll have to figure that out for yourselves. (And they forgot to leave any space between one puzzle and the next, and they continued the clue numbering from one puzzle to the next to avoid the confusion of having two clue # 1's, two clue # 2's, two clue # 3's, etc., so you'll also have to figure out for yourselves where one puzzle ends and the next one begins.)
But as a show of their sincerity, they refrained from tampering with the clues this time. All my capitalization, punctuation and word spacing are intact -- and all their clues are correctly capitalized, punctuated and spaced as well!
(They did, as usual, group all the clues into tidy bundles of 3, regardless of how many clues are actually in the rows. Old habits die hard.)
Here are the 3 puzzles! Have fun with them, and I'll be back next week with a new non-gremlinized puzzle for you to enjoy and with help for these one if any parts go unsolved.
PS: if you do have any trouble solving the puzzle, here's another small hint: all the answers to my clues are common single-word answers, but one of the gremlins' answers is a two-word phrase.
1. false display in the UK
2. something to keep dogs and cats from damaging doors
3. focal points
4. groups with as many members as 99 others
5. advance choice
6. Sounds like where you'd find Columbus, Manhattan, Boulder, Harlem, and Stanford
7. the lord of the follower
8. climb
9. examines eggs for freshness
10. worries
11. kitchen tool
12. what Jack Benny never reached
13. doorway
14. reborn with new vigor
15. smooth mutated fruit
16. related to population figures from years not ending in zero
17. allergies
18. a precursor to doing