Welcome to Sunday Puzzle -- a weekly party for people who enjoy working together to solve challenging problems.
On tap tonight: a new JulieCrostic, a new Mystery Puzzle, and a puzzle about last week's puzzle. Speaking of which ...
The YouTube clip posted above is the song "Silo", sung by Judy Small.
Silo was the answer to all three of last week's JulieCrostics. I love the song, and had constructed a JulieCrostic in order to use it in the summer songfest which is in progress over in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
But I was a little hesitant to post such a short puzzle so hadn't queued it up.
The gremlins, sensing my hesitation, came up with a gremlinny solution: they constructed two JulieCrostics of their own for the song title. But instead of doing 2 rows of 3 answers, as I had done, they did 1 row of 5 answers -- and their answer-length pattern (for both puzzles!) was 8-9-10-11-12.
They claim that sets a new record (the previous record being the one set by pucklady 3 years ago for a 9-10-11). I argued that a single-line puzzle shouldn't count, but they pointed out that there's nothing in the rule book specifying how many lines a JulieCrostic has to have and have been gloating ever since that they now hold first and second place for longest-word-length JulieCrostics until someone manages to get to thirteen.
Well, I don't know about that. But speaking about last week's puzzle:
Puzzle # 1: helpful hints
Because I couldn't be here for last week's puzzle party to provide help in case it was needed, I provided a generous number of hints to the puzzle solution. How many of the hints can you find?
I'll post a list of all the hints, and their meaning, in a comment about half an hour an hour after this diary posts.
Puzzle # 2:
tonight's JulieCrostic
NOTE: if you're not familiar with JulieCrostics, you can find a complete explanation of the rules, along with an example of a solved puzzle, over in last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
But beware: as usual, the gremlins have done a bit of tampering with my clues. They were pretty good this week about leaving my capitalization and punctuation alone (although I think they fiddled with those in at least one clue while I wasn't looking)
.
The main thing to be aware of tonight, though, is that the gremlins added a duplicate row. In constructing tonight's puzzle there was one row for which I'd come up with two possible answer sets, and I was having a hard time choosing which one I liked better. I finally chose one -- but was torn about not using the other one and had been considering substituting it into the puzzle instead.
The gremlins decided to solve my problem by adding the clues for the alternate version of answers into the puzzle. So there are two consecutive rows in the puzzle with identical vertical letters. Please keep that in mind when trying to read the verticals.
Oh -- and as usual, the gremlins bunched the clues into tidy little bundles of 3, regardless of how many answers there actually are in the rows. (If the number of clues doesn't divide evenly by 3, they add a placeholder clue or two -- clues for words such as empty, or blank, or vacant, or void, etc. -- to fill out the final bundle.)
Have fun! (I think science said he'll be absent tonight, so this one may take a while to solve...)
1. kind of television
2. Adams, Evans, Harrison, Kennedy, or Volcano
3. cryptic Lee
4. damaged reputation
5. DC's mademoiselle
6. Augusta resident
7. telephone tapper
8. aviators
9. very enjoyable experience
10. bulges
11. waterside inns
12. kind of value
13. make-up
14. gasoline component
15. osculation
16. 3 x 5
17. magazine banned from being sold in Massachusetts due to a slur against Santa Claus
18. lawyer's wig
19. something which is stuck in a pastry
20. anti-war protestor, starting in the early '60s
21. epic epic!
22. Derrick Morgan
23. everything except the answer
24. person called the same as another
25. the dragon, laughing freely, may follow
26. dislike
27. display
28. vipers
29. optical device
30. strip
31. something to be or be beside
32. crimes
33. lumps
34. reverses
35. echo
36. accrues
37. confront
38. French banana
39. eastern or desert flying insect eaters
40. people who like to argue
41. kind of nest
42. fifty in Deutsche
Puzzle # 3: mystery puzzle
Actually, six mystery puzzles. Can you figure out what these six things are?
1. an angry blood-sucker
2. mother of mother of Paquin, mother of mother of Pavlova, mother of mother of Karenina ...
3. "Arf! Arf! Arf!"
4. Maggie's husband's astonished admiration
5. concerning public transportation
6. imitation bird call