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.
On tap tonight: a new JulieCrostic.
(If you're not familiar with how JulieCrostics work, don't worry; full instructions are provided.)
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be a new-puzzler-friendly. If you've never tried Sunday Puzzle before and have been scared to dive in the deep end, come on and dip your toes in here.
PS: If you haven't already seen it, please visit Skymutt's A BridgeGate Puzzle, which posted earlier today. It's a crossword based on the Chris Chistie / George Washington Bridge incident and it's filled with lots of fun clues and answers.
First up, here are the clues for tonight's JulieCrostic. If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, have at it! If you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the second half of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 4 rows, with 4 answers per row.
1. __-Man
2. ___ Nation
3. woman who knows a lot about sex
4. burglary
5. about
6. Volt
7. Person-centered Rogers
8. a Huxtable
9. US-supported dictator who came to power via assassination and whose sole hero was Hitler
10. crucial
11. friend of Eric and Stan
12. country cousin
13. Einsteinium
14. carnal knowledge
15. what you can do when you don't know a number
16. central point at which things are connected
HELPFUL HINTS: answers include three fictional characters, three non-fictional characters, a magazine and a 2-word phrase.
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Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE
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Section II: Instructions
In JulieCrostics you are given a set of clues, such as these:
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns, like so:
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).
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. say what's not so
2. resting
3. concede
then the answers might be LIE, IDLE (= LIE + D), and YIELD (= IDLE + Y)
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:
1. LIE D 2. IDLE Y 3. YIELD
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.
In the example given, the verticals read
DAIL YKOS. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Daily Kos!