Welcome to Sunday Puzzle -- a weekly opportunity to exercise your wits and to have some pie-fight-free fun!
I've been on the road the past 2 weeks so haven't had much time to construct and type up new puzzles. But the puzzle gremlins generously offered to provide tonight's acrostic puzzle.
Well, actually they offered to provide the puzzle for this week's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up. They said they had a great song they wanted to spotlight in the Summer Songfest going on there, and they even promised not to pull any many sneaky tricks. I decided it would not be wise to allow the gremlins anywhere near the warm-up series but thought it would be okay to let them provide the regular puzzle tonight.
So if you're in the mood to match wits with the gremlins, come on down!
Here is tonight's JulieCrostic, courtesy of the gremlins.
If you're not familiar with what JulieCrostics are and how they work you might want to visit our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up. It provides a complete explanation for the kind of acrostic we usually feature here, along with introductory puzzles you can practice on to gain skill. Here's a link to last night's warm-up diary.
As usual the gremlins have grouped the acrostic clues into tidy little bundles of three, regardless of how many answers there actually are in a row. It's possible there are 3 answers per row, but it's also possible there are more answers per row -- the gremlins didn't tell me what the grid pattern is for tonight's puzzle, so you'll need to figure that out for yourselves.
I see they've included capitalization in their clues. (When I provide the puzzle, they generally delete all my capitalization.) Knowing the gremlins, I suspect the capitalization may not be completely honest and that they may have added in a few capitals where they aren't needed and/or taken out some which are. So it might be wise not to rely too heavily on the capitalization being correct. (I'd be suspicious of their punctuation as well.) And it's always possible they've pulled some other trick as well.
But they did give their word to be on their best behavior, so tonight's puzzle shouldn't be too hard to crack. The verticals should spell out the title of a song, and they've assured me it's one which deserves spotlighting.
1. good beginning
2. alliance of the wealthiest
3. for example, the number of seas
4. one
5. this can be found in Seattle, Salem, and San Francisco
6. secret service
7. Henry's beginning
8. just stories about this
9. term for Rush Limbaugh?
10. Endor's beginning
11. Charlie's partner in '60s show
12. of destruction, perhaps
13. kind of list
14. hillbilly kettle
15. standard
16. ten again
17. there are nine cities here
18. M. Tru