Welcome to Sunday Puzzle -- a weekly party for those who enjoy having their wits (and sometimes their sanity) challenged.
I had a fairly simple puzzle planned for tonight. The vertical phrase I wanted to spotlight this week is fairly short, so it wasn't hard to come up with a set of answers which worked. Indeed, I was able to come up with two sets of answers...
And then, of course, I couldn't decide which set to use.
Enter the gremlins, ever helpful. We can take care of it! No problem! one said. And no tricks, the other one quickly added.
Well, that sounded good. I've been very short on time this week, so having them decide which version to run would be a big help. Both versions were good, so whichever one they chose would be fine. (And that would leave me time to write up a demonstration for how to solve the Crypto-Gremlin which went unsolved last week.) What could possibly go wrong?...
... So I left it to the gremlins to choose which set of clues/answers to use for tonight's JulieCrostic, and went about the other things I needed to get done. Friday I biked over to Dodson Branch 25 miles away, planted a few plum trees for a friend, and Saturday morning I got a ride from there to an all-day meeting. I had expected to get back from the meeting, stay over in Dodson Branch, and bike home early this morning, but wound up being able to bike back home last night instead. Got home fairly late, though, so waited for today to check and see how the gremlins had done.
Well, right away I could see something was wrong. The puzzle they had posted was considerably longer than the one I'd composed.
And then I saw why. They hadn't chosen between my two versions -- they'd posted both. And then they added a couple of their own. The puzzles are actually in a fairly logical order -- but they're all run together, so it's a little hard to see where one ends and the next begins.
I don't have time to clean up their work, so I'll have to leave it the way it is. But at least the gremlins were honest about no tricks. (Other than their usual practice of removing my capitalization, fiddling with the punctuation, occasionally adding or removing a space, and bunching the clues into tidy little bundles of 3 regardless of how many answers there actually are in the rows, that is.)
As a small bit of help, at least I can tell you that the answer to 75 is hyphenated and the answers to 34, 74 and 81 are 2-word phrases. Have fun, and I hope to see you in comments.
NOTE: If you're not familiar with what JulieCrostics are and how to solve them, you can find complete instructions along with an example of a solved puzzle in last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diary.
1. sharp turn
2. often comes before a...
3. remove dishes
4. article needing expansion
5. kind of boat
6. asner starred in this
7. common code
8. simon or simon
9. a favorite spot
10. multinational company on right-wing boycott lists
11. limbaugh has a big one (as do hannity, beck and o'reilly)
12. missing
13. monthly magazine
14. with a 58, descriptive of some drinks
15. tone or spider
16. obstruct
17. robot predecessor
18. martial artist bruce
19. type
20. tricky guy
21. team list
22. rush
23. low
24. punctures
25. woman
26. major wilson brown
27. twin city, briefly
28. ultraviolet street
29. great and powerful
30. lofgren
31. seep
32. blue gas
33. continent
34. what it takes to make bush turn red
35. family
36. peal
37. often found among all who enter
38. imaginary line
39. artistic baker
40. word for l'il abner (and source of his name)
41. street, in some places
42. kind of thing
43. picture puzzle
44. famous brown
45. before
46. kind of review
47. kind of colony
48. what the 21st accomplished
49. theaters
50. jane and richard
51. cookies
52. it's an ok name
53. presence
54. dylan davies
55. huxtable
56. kind of bread
57. cyst
58. usually wrong thomas and openly-gay anderson
59. loose
60. pretexts
61. entice
62. slide home
63. coins
64. not as obvious
65. national security advisor
66. charge
67. cut again
68. copy
69. on tv, people who have had crimes committed against them
70. squad president
71. declares
72. beginners
73. fasten
74. completely committed
75. kind of talk show
76. vocation
77. did well
78. sticker
79. was missing
80. concealed
81. stay away from
Last week I posted the following Crypto-Gremlin:
He halts over richu pc kewl nude hiuvouvws, sel reltky icny he my pc kewl.
No one posted the answer, so tonight I'll provide a demonstration of how this can be solved. You'll find it in the comment labeled
Sunday Puzzle Workshop: Solving Crypto-Gremlins, immediately following tonight's tip jar.
NOTE: Crypto-Gremlins are 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 creative reasoning. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle you can find a detailed explanation of how they work here.