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.
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be new-puzzler-friendly. So 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.
I'm still swamped so once again the Sunday Puzzle gremlins stepped in to provide tonight's puzzle. They're still basically behaving themselves, although from the snickering they did when they handed me tonight's clues to paste into the diary I suspect one or two of tonight's clues may be a little devious. But they've also provided generous hints to the solution, so I don't think you'll have any trouble solving the puzzle. Let's head on down below the orange squiggle and find out...
Here, courtesy of the Sunday Puzzle gremlins, 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 bottom part of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 3 rows, with 4 answers per row.
1. musical Chandler who wrote and performed civil rights and anti-war songs
2. first name of one member of a famous musical trio
3. large fruit
4. Boston Red Sox relief pitcher, well-known even outside sports circles
5. city or tax
6. what apples are picked into
7. developer of an important vaccine
8. very smart people
9. Dl and Di
10. send
11. assert
12. evil intent
Helpful (?) hints from the gremlins:
Five of tonight's answers are capitalized.
There are no phrases among tonight's answers.
Punctuation is honest, but we may have erred once or twice on capitalization.
For clue # 2, the other two first names are Paul and Mary.
For the benefit of anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, here are instructions for solving JulieCrostics.
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). 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. 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!