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 posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
For the past couple months we've been having a Summer Songfest. Each week the answer to the puzzle is the title of a song I've chosen to spotlight. Last week's answer was the Teen Titans theme song, which you can listen to (performed by Puffy AmiYumi) in the clip posted above.
Alas, summer is over! Even though it's only October, I have a fire going in the wood stove today and temperatures are expected to go down close to freezing tonight. So tonight's puzzle will feature the last song for this year's songfest.
The logical song to end on would be "No More Songs" -- but that song title has 11 letters, which makes puzzle construction a bit difficult. So what is the last song of the summer? To find out, come on down and solve tonight's puzzle!
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be new-puzzler-friendly. 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 a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic; I'm about to provide you full instructions. (If you already know how JulieCrostics work you can skip directly to the clues for tonight's diary, at the bottom of tonight's diary)
First, to show you what a finished puzzle looks like, here's the completed grid for last week's puzzle .
den T tend I tined T tinted
has E Ashe T haste H sheath
IRS E sire A raise E easier
pea N pane N panne M penman
bar T BART S brats E barest
The verticals read TEENT ITANS THEME. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Teen Titans theme.
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.
Think you've got the idea? Then here's a brand-new puzzle all set for you to solve!
Tonight's puzzle has 6 rows, with 3 answers per row, for a total of 18 clues. Here they are. Hope you like the puzzle -- and hope you enjoy the featured song once you figure out what it is.
1. big party
2. steam and bubble
3. customary ways
4. auction
5. sedimentary rock
6. pester
7. popular god
8. different
9. owl
10. modern, geologic, and Christian
11. take an oath
12. goes back and forth
13. afflictions
14. "___ well"
15. colleagues
16. school or lock
17. kind of riser
18. when Hannity is right