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 have stepped in to provide tonight's puzzle.
Here are the clues for tonight's JulieCrostic. The gremlins promised not to pull any sneaky tricks tonight, and it looks to me like all the clues in tonight's puzzle are pretty straightforward definitions and synonyms.
But the gremlins did ask me to pass along this note: The important thing to get right in tonight's puzzle is the second add-on letter in the 6th row. They said you'd understand once you solve the puzzle.
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 8 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. lubricate again
2. baseball player
3. more like Bachmann
4. go along with
5. removed water by the bucketful
6. having two feet
7. foreign coins
8. sink parts
9. fish
10. look hard
11. more far-reaching
12. goes somewhere
13. guesses
14. lions and tigers and bears
15. horse homes
16. an issue worth fighting for
17. cup holder
18. vigorous effort on behalf of a 13
19. carries
20. stops
21. people who rarely go to jail
22. small rooms
23. large instruments
24. how some office-holders should be watched
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!