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 "Union Maid" (as performed by New Harmony Sisterhood).
Last week's puzzle was short and easy. If you're curious to see what tonight's puzzle is like, head on down below the orange squiggle...
Last week was a fairly short puzzle, but one clue is worth expanding on a little: "9. Mad publisher". This seemed like a good clue to use in light of the recent passing of Al Feldstein, who edited Mad for many many years and was responsible for much of the social consciousness underlying the magazine's humor. The answer is EC (which originally stood for Educational Comics, but had changed by the time Mad came along to Entertaining Comics).
Mad Magazine, the subversive satire-laced magazine best known as the home of Alfred E. Neuman has, in its sixty years of existence, become an American institution. The magazine's original publisher, Educational Comics (EC), was founded by Max Gaines in 1945 and specialized in titles such as Picture Stories from the Bible. But EC eventually gained notoriety and critical acclaim for their line of well-drawn, socially conscious and often gruesome suspense, horror, and sci-fi titles. These comics played a central role in the comics scare of the 1950s, before being killed by the adoption of the Comics Code Authority...
Here's a link to
an excellent item on Al Feldstein, Mad Magazine and EC. After you've finished tonight's puzzle I highly recommend reading it. (No connection to tonight's puzzle answer; it's just a very fine piece.)
All right, on to tonight's puzzle!
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 10 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. weeps
2. fruit drinks
3. perceive
4. tear
5. multitudes
6. gave less than should have
7. army officer, informally
8. "woman of valor"
9. often found in closets
10. tears
11. flows
12. bestows
13. hinder
14. napped
15. cake or pie
16. following
17. hesitate
18. sad
19. work
20. freezing
21. go on and on about
22. Lawrence who wrote about # 8
23. mythically brave
24. sang like a bird
22. Lawrence who wrote about # 8
23. card distributor
24. away from the wind
25. removes moisture
26. feline flocks
27. said nice things about
28. intended
29. prisoner
30. whenever
NOTE: the original clues for 22 to 24 were incorrect; I've crossed those off and replaced them with clues which actually work.
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!