Hey, wait a minute! Wasn't Coming soon... the title of last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diary? What is this, a re-run or something? Hmmm...
In addition to tonight's JulieCrostic, tonight's diary also contains a Sunday Puzzle Workshop session which demonstrates step-by-step how to solve the unsolved Crypto-Gremlin puzzle from two weeks ago.
Come on down and join the party! Plenty of tricks and treats on the table for those who get here early.
Tonight's feature puzzle is a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with JulieCrostics you can find complete instructions for solving them, along with introductory puzzles and examples of solved puzzles, in our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up. (Or you can ask any questions you have in the comment section of this diary and I or one of the other regulars will be glad to help.)
The JulieCrostics posted in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up are fairly straightforward. Over here, though, we're often plagued by puzzle gremlins who like to tamper with the puzzles. They like to remove or alter my capitalization and punctuation. Occasionally they remove spaces between words, or add spaces into words. And they're especially fond of bunching the clues into tidy little bundles of 3, regardless of how many answers there actually are in a row. It doesn't look like they did too much mischief this week, but even so it might be wise to be alert for any tricks they've pulled.
1. often followed by 1 at the mall
2. flash character
3. Doonesbury character
4. augured
5. acted ghostly
6. loaded
7. foreign bread
8. stain
9. supple
10. crash or power
11. kind of dog often found at sea
12. kind of threat
13. kind of worm
14. fictional assassin
15. arm exercise
16. field mouse
17. split in two
18. nook
19. twitches
20. checks
21. Copperfield specialty
22. Sunday Puzzle song
23. kind of sport
24. automatic test
25. Helen's predecessors
26. McDonnell's strip
27. pornographic
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
Sunday Puzzle Workshop
Two weeks ago I posted a Crypto-Gremlin featuring what I think is a great quote related to the recent Congressional shenanigans. No one solved it then, or when I reposted it last week, so this week I'll provide a demonstration of how to solve it.
(If you're not familiar with Crypto-Gremlins, they're a special kind of cryptogram -- ones which can't be solved by online programs which run through and test out every possible letter substitution, but which can be solved by reasoning and creative thinking. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle you can find a detailed explanation of how they work here.)
An bye'ud upnewm js'ts cstsly prbn kner ups Oserus ... jr ujseud-yes pymls vnanimously lrebn upsey ups csloyes frlldnezr tymus ups vnanimously tyusbn vyld ups gnooms upsd jsls vnanimouslnezd.
* Iyiy Fylwslm, Ly-Useed
The words in bold are a quote; the unbolded words tell who said it.
The ellipsis in the quote represents the words where we had, which were removed in most printings of this quote in order to make the quote read better.
Strictly speaking, the quote would also read better if the word isvyls appeared in between cstsly and prbn. But the person saying this neglected to include that word -- a common grammatical error -- so I omitted it from the encrypted text as well, to keep the quote accurate.
Okay, ready for the demonstration?
1. First go to the American Cryptogram Association site and open up their handy little cipher-solving tool. Copy the text of the Crypto-Gremlin into the block provided. This will make doing letter substitutions a lot easier.
2. Looking over the text, there are two words with apostrophes. One ends with -e'ud and one ends with -s'ts. That means it's likely either E=N U=T or S=N T=T. But the latter isn't really possible, since letters aren't supposed to stand for themselves. So try substituting N for E and T for U.
3. It's useful to look for 3-letter words when tackling a Crypto-Gremlin. 1-letter words are impossible; 2-letter words might be genuine, or might be 1-letter words with an additional letter; and any word of 4 or more letters could be genuine length, have a letter added at the beginning, a letter added at the end, or both. But 3-letter words are almost always going to be genuine in length since to be otherwise they would need to consist of either 2 consonants or 2 vowels. And if we find a 3-letter words of the pattern consonant-consonant-vowel there's a very good chance it stands for the word THE.
In this case we do indeed have a 3-letter word: UPS. And we've already guessed it starts with T, so THE is looking extremely likely. Plug in P=H and S=E.
4. The enciphered text UJSEUD-YES now reads t~ent~ - ~ne.The second part of the hyphenated word must be ONE (and this doesn't need an added consonant at the beginning because the O is pronounced with a consonant sound, like the w in won.) So substitute Y=O. That means the first part must be TWENTY, so substitute J=W and D=Y.
5. BYE'UD must be either DON'T or WON'T. The W is already accounted for, so B must be D. Plug that in.
6. We can now see that the two letter word JR is W~. That can't be WE, since E is already accounted for; therefore the W is a false addition, it's a 1-letter word, and since it's not capitalized it must be A. Plug in R=A.
7. All the vowels are now accounted for except I and U. Looking at the first word of the text, AN, we can see that N must be I (and this is the word I). Which means the other remaining encrypted-text vowel, M, must translate to U. plug these in.
8. UPNEWM must be THINK (with a false U added to the end). Plug in W=K.
9. OSERUS must be SENATE. Plug in O=S.
10. At this point it's pretty easy to fill in all the rest. VNANIMOUSLY is FILIBUSTER, and we have:
li don'ty thinku we've pevero hadi ~ina the senate ... wa twenty-one houre filibustero randi theno the persone carryinga voute the filibustero votedi fory the ~issue they were filibusteringy. * bobo corkeru, ro-tenny
Cleaned up, that reads:
I don't think we've ever [before] had in the senate ... a twenty-one hour filibuster and then the person carrying out the filibuster voted for the issue they were filibustering.
* Bob Corker, R-Tenn
It's a pleasure to see a Republican making a reasonable comment, and I was doubly pleased at this instance since Corker is one of my senators (and one about whom I can't usually find that much good to say).