I'm away for blueberry season, with minimal internet access, until about the third week of September.
But Sunday Puzzle will still be here every week for your puzzling pleasure. Pucklady will be hosting the potluck puzzle party on the first Sunday of each month; Villanova Rhodes will be providing her delightfully devious JulieCrostics on the third Sunday of each month; and I'm queuing up re-posts of some of the earliest JulieCrostics for the weeks in between.
Julie Waters started the Sunday Puzzle series in October 2007, and a special kind of acrostic puzzle (named JulieCrostics in her honor) quickly became the Sunday Puzzle feature item. If you're ready to journey back in time and match wits with Julie, come on down below the orange squiggle...
Tonight's puzzle was previewed in the January 27, 2008 diary but there was also a guest puzzle that week so people postponed solving this one until the February 10, 2008 diary.
If you're new to Sunday Puzzle, you can find a detailed explanation of how JulieCrostics work in any Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diary (as well as an introductory puzzle to work and an example of a solved puzzle).
Back in the early days, Julie used to tell us what the word-length pattern for the puzzle was and stix continued that tradition. But since you folks have gotten pretty expert at team-solving these things, the gremlins insisted that I shouldn't include that information this time.
But I think it's okay with them for me to tell you that there's a slight spelling error in the first vertical; one of the add-on letters the answers provide should be a Y instead of --
Oops, no, I guess it's not okay with the gremlins. I'll shut up now. Here are the clues:
1. King's realm
2. Low on the totem pole
3. How you might describe Data
4. Extract
5. Like Jay Leno, in more ways than one
6. Path of descent
7. What grievances are, at Festivus
8. Collected
9. It's packed
13. Diminish
14. Owner
15. System of behavior
10. An important key
11. Was not, conditionally
12. Tanager or Grebe, e.g.
16. Whack
17. Fate
18. Falling in love can be #17, but it can be this.
19. Part of a euro
20. Hexapoda
21. Reservoir
22. Ratted out
23. what people might do to someone doing work like # 2
24. #22, again
Next week, Villanova Rhodes! (And in 2 weeks, another JulieClassic and the answers to tonight's puzzle.)
Meanwhile here are the answer to JulieClassic # 7:
slate M metals N laments
crest O escort O scooter
toker N trek on W network
cared K racked E creaked
dints E ends it A stained
liver Y verily S silvery
lingo B goblin E ignoble
tansy I sanity L saintly
boner Z bronze S bronzes
The verticals spell out
monkeybiz and
noweasels, two Kossacks actively involved in the IGTNT series. (Noweasels still posts regularly, but alas monkeybiz has been absent since 2010.)
The 2008 solving crew figured out the verticals but couldn't crack row 5, so stix revealed the answers to that row in this comment:
dints: Dints are sort of like dents but dints are the blow and dents are the effect. Noun or transitive verb. Dints make dents or the hammer dints nails.
ends it: Not necessarily hospital patients, one could pull the plug on a project or television show, although I did once work in a hospital.
stained: Okay, ‘turned oak to ash’ was nefariously misleading but ash, the tree and wood, is a stain color at the hardware store.
We need to get stix back to Sunday Puzzle!