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.
When this diary posts I'll be riding a Megabus back to Tennessee so won't be able to take active part in tonight's puzzle party. But I don't think you'll have too much trouble solving this puzzle without me. Have fun, and I'll be back in person next week!
1. accomplish
2. like Chris Christie's presidential aspirations?
3. Tobacco or toll
4. kind of pass in New York and New Jersey
5. kind of Buddhism
6. kind of charge
7. what GOP is party of
8. show agreement
9. voter enthusiasm this year as compared with 2010
10. this lets you know not to bother reading a comment
11. newspaper in the news
12. Tim
13. reality-based community
14. public transit
15. opposite of boom
16. White House dog
17. the world's cutest dog
18. what Tom Tancredo called John McCain last year
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!