For those of you who enjoy puzzles, but who aren't able to take part in the Daily Kos weekend puzzle parties, here is a re-posting of the puzzles from this past weekend.
These pre-Thanksgiving leftovers include two JulieCrostics and two Crypto-Gremlins.
NOTE: If you're not familiar with these types of puzzles, don't despair. Full instructions, and examples of completed puzzles, are included in Section II: the instructions, at the bottom of this diary.
Have a happy Thanksgiving!
Section I: The puzzles!
Puzzle # 1: Here is a re-posting of the warm-up JulieCrostic from Saturday's RIP: Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up 2013-11-23.
(Helpful Hints:
(a) The clues in the warm-up puzzles are generally straightforward definitions or synonyms.
(b)If you get stuck for an answer you can click the link for the diary and look through the comment subject lines there to find a comment with the answer you're looking for.)
1. generally found in jails
2. poets
3. confronts
4. places
5. looks sullen
6. faucets
7. windy weather plaything
8. child's vehicle
9. action taken by postal workers in 1970
10. polite fellow
11. hint
12. start a fire
13. fury
14. Fury or Rock
15. writer of "What Every Girl Should Know"
16. first woman to serve as attorney general
17. introvert
18. more drawn out
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Puzzle # 2: Here is a re-posting of the JulieCrostic from Sunday's books you haven't read: Sunday Puzzle 2013-11-24
Helpful Hints:
(a) Clues in the regular puzzles tend to be a bit more devious than clues in the warm-up puzzles. In particular you should beware of alterations which may have been made to capitalization and punctuation in the clues.
(b) If you get stuck you can click the diary link and look through the comment subject lines to find a comment with the answer you're looking for.
(c) After you finish solving the puzzle you might enjoy clicking the diary link and reading the comments. Often there are clues based on political, historical or cultural allusions, and these are explained after the puzzle is solved in comments with DKU note in the subject line.
1. meat substitute
2. what many men who work in offices would like to do
3. Ginsberg and Watts
4. played ball
5. nudged
6. shouted
7. sailed
8. something that sounds wrong musically, such as when playing a sax
9. got
10. ravine [HINT: best-known one is grand]
11. coffee could be, or perhaps a hill
12. Stalin
13. smooth function
14. small dog
15. last word of stupidest song ever written
16. football and hockey team
17. hard workers, perhaps most commonly associated nowadays with service and cremation
18. involves in trouble
19. three-cornered sail
20. striped
21. what Republican leaders do to women, Blacks, Hispanics and gays
22. sidetrack
23. before this, I never thought
24. Cuban or Haitian
25. offer again
26. screens
27. darts
28. northern
29. worker
30. like a tree
31. whole
32. image receivers
33. advance payment
34. of one mind
35. pineapple
36. glanced
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Puzzle # 3: Here is a re-posting of one of the Crypto-Gremlin from Sunday's books you haven't read.
Helpful Hint: the solution to this puzzle relates to the JulieCrostic in that diary (posted above).
Zod adcurie for kdudcbduh yruzl alzm blue ph sriduryd grid prim ph chlim khm for krdui'zh pirf orf zr cdhkl.
Wdinhylid Tchipslid
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Puzzle # 4: Here is a re-posting of another Crypto-Gremlin from Sunday's books you haven't read.
Helpful Hint: While this puzzle appeared in this past Sunday's diary, the answer actually relates to the JulieCrostic in the previous week's Blacks Tell GOP "NO!"
"Cope plo cukodtzotpa fubpu kujb fubdu menfsedgis. Pap'is daganbrubio. Cukodtzotpa dogb pexo lodo. Mbdoebndepano lodo. Pap'is tutiotio lekatce herru plaib cukodtzotpa."
Dumb Judge
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Section II: The Instructions!
instructions for solving JulieCrostics
To show you what a finished JulieCrostic looks like, here are the clues and answer grid for completed puzzle.
1. behave badly
2. temper tantrum
3. clues
4. behaves rationally
5. kind of fox
6. traveled by horse
7. like a lot
8. band employee
9. grow older
10. Gandalf
11. animated mom
12. kind of chocolate cake
sin T snit H hints K thinks
red O rode A adore I roadie
age M mage R Marge N German
The verticals read
TOM HAR KIN. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Tom Harkin.
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.
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how Crypto-Gremlins work
Crypto-Gremlins are a special type of cryptogram which can't be solved by online programs which run through all the possible letter substitutions but which can be solved by careful reasoning.
The reason simply running through all the possible letter substitutions doesn't work is that before encoding a passage I alter the text so that every word begins with a consonant (or consonant sound) and that every word ends with a vowel (or vowel sound). If the words don't naturally begin or end that way, I add letters of my choosing to make sure they do.
You'll find a detailed explanation of the rules of Crypto-Gremlins here.
how to solve a Crypto-Gremlin
Here's an example of a Crypto-Gremlin:
He halts over richu pc kewl nude hiuvouvws, sel reltky icny he my pc kewl.
Here is
a step-by-step run through of the logic involved in deciphering the text. What it decodes to is:
To truly know whati ja dogu viso thinkingy, you woulde have to be ja dogu
-- which, when all the add-on letters are removed, reads:
To truly know what a dog is thinking, you would have to be a dog.