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 (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
Last week's warm-up puzzle spotlighted Ken Dious, who is running for Congress against Paul Broun in Georgia's 10th district. Here's what a post on a political web site covering this race had to say:
Broun's GA-10 district is heavily Republican with a R+14 rating by the Cook Report. Therefore, Ken Dious certainly has his work cut out for him.
However, Athens is a very liberal city in GA-10 so there's reason to fire the base there, as well as anywhere else Dious can get voters alive and involved.
And why not build the base? After all, Georgia is becoming a purple state. Maybe certain Congressional Districts like GA-10 are solidly Republican but you have to start somewhere, right?
Here's a link to the Meet Ken page on his web site:
Meet Ken.
Here is a page with his stands on various issues, including economic development, health care, public education, the tax code, the federal deficit, student loans, veterans affairs, equal pay for equal work, and immigration reform.
And if you'd like to donate to his campaign, here's a link to Ken Dious ActBlue page.
All right, on to tonight's puzzles...
Once again I let the gremlins provide the puzzle since I'm still running late on everything. They were chortling with delight when they handed me the clues to paste into tonight's diary. Indeed, they were so pleased with themselves they even showed me the answers and verticals.
I could see from the verticals that what they're spotlighting tonight looks like something of special interest to gremlins, but what the verticals seemed to advise didn't seem like something gremlins would approve of. As usual they took delight in my puzzlement. But for once they also took pity and laughingly explained I was reading the verticals wrong: I thought there were 3 words, but they insist there are only two.
Which leaves me even more puzzled as to what those two words are and what they mean. But they say there's a recent Daily Kos diary which explains it; so after you solve tonight's puzzle, perhaps someone can locate and post a link to that diary (or to other online accounts of the story they're referring to).
Here are the clues for tonight's 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 5 rows, with 3 answers per row.
After you've figured out the verticals, locate and post a link to the recent Daily Kos diary or other online account of the story featuring the person, place or thing spotlighted in tonight's puzzle.
1. kind of blue
2. kind of strength
3. kind of knife
4. gambles
5. tv component, formerly
6. something yams and dahlias have
7. well-known Thomas
8. Oregonian Wayne (a genuine maverick)
9. lovers
10. McCarthy
11.
12. well-known Ben
13. victim
14. like a Bartlett?
15. kind of white
If you have trouble with tonight's puzzle, here's a hint the gremlins provided for clue # 8: "
He's one of only two [deleted]
s to vote against the [deleted]".
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!