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).
I'm away until September, harvesting blueberries in Maine, but I've queued up a series of Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diaries to entertain you until I return.
The theme for these diaries is Summer Songfest. Each week you'll get a puzzle spotlighting a noteworthy song and a YouTube clip of the song featured in the previous week's puzzle.
For instance, the answer to last week's puzzle was "Be Our Guest" (from Beauty and the Beast).
Clues last week included references to Barbara Gordon and to the Coast Guard motto (Semper Paratus). Hmmm. Nothing musical or political last week. But tonight's diary should make up for that...
If you're ready for some light Saturday night mental exercise, come on down!
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.
1. alternative
2. line of JulieCrostic answers
3. night crawler
4. continent
5. Solo
6. word often followed by fire or ten
7. 109 was a famous one
8. Misty Malarky Yin Yang was a famous one
9. Maya Angelou was a famous one
10. group dedicated to peace, friendship, social progress, better living standards and human rights
11. Pat Farrell
12. southern senate candidate
13. Ed's title
14. Russian peace
15. frost
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!