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 in Maine harvesting blueberries (and spreading straw on the blueberry field in preparation for next spring's burn), 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 "It Could Have Been Me" by Holly Near, a beautiful and moving song written in reaction to the 1970 shooting of Kent State students.
This is the last weekend of summer, so tonight is the last weekend of summer songfest for this year. But to stretch the fun out as long as possible, tonight's summer songest puzzle is the longest on record.
There were a couple of cultural and political references in last week's puzzle clues. Notes on those, and the clues for tonight's puzzle, await you directly below...
The political reference in last week's puzzle was:
8. dictator US government supported until it turned on him
There've been a lot of those -- the US for many years had a bad habit of supporting brutal dictators as long as they were anti-communist -- but the specific one referred to in the clue is
Manuel Noriega.
Born in Panama City, Noriega was a career soldier, receiving much of his education at the Military School of Chorrillos in Lima, Peru. He also received intelligence and counterintelligence training at the School of the Americas at the U.S. Army's Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone in 1967, as well as a course in psychological operations (psyops) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina...
Involvement with CIA
Although the relationship did not become contractual until 1967, Noriega worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the late 1950s until the 1980s...
The 1988 Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations concluded: "The saga of Panama's General Manuel Antonio Noriega represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures for the United States. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, Noriega was able to manipulate U.S. policy toward his country, while skillfully accumulating near-absolute power in Panama. It is clear that each U.S. government agency which had a relationship with Noriega turned a blind eye to his corruption and drug dealing, even as he was emerging as a key player on behalf of the Medellín Cartel (a member of which was notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar)." Noriega was allowed to establish "the hemisphere's first 'narcokleptocracy'"...
In the 1988 U.S. presidential election, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis highlighted this history in a campaign commercial attacking his opponent, Vice President (and former CIA Director) George H. W. Bush, for his close relationship with "Panamanian drug lord Noriega" ...
Noriega strengthened his position as de facto ruler in August 1983 by promoting himself to full general. Noriega, being paid by the CIA, extended new rights to the United States, and, despite the canal treaties, allowed the U.S. to set up listening posts in Panama. He aided the American-backed guerrillas in Nicaragua by acting as a conduit for U.S. money and, according to some accounts, weapons. However, Noriega insists that his policy during this period was essentially neutral, allowing partisans on both sides of the various conflicts free movement in Panama, as long as they did not attempt to use Panama as a base of military operations. He rebuffed requests by Salvadoran rightist Roberto D'Aubuisson to restrict the movements of leaders of the leftist Salvadoran insurgent Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in Panama, and likewise rebuffed demands by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the United States Marine Corps that he provide military assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras. Noriega insists that his refusal to meet North's demands was the actual basis for the U.S. campaign to oust him.
The cultural reference was:
19. musical Brown was said to be this, comparatively
This was a reference to the Jim Croce song "Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown". In the lyrics Leroy is described as
the baddest man in town, but the comparison actually being referenced in the clue is that he was
badder than old King Kong.
Hmm. Since this is summer songfest, why not include this song in the diary as well...
And now, 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 8 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. canyon
2. gather
3. critical and acute
4. teeming
5. person sending in a tax return
6. something of little value
7. professional right-wing talking points spouter Tony
8. ___ __ the time
9. early influences on important elections
10. drunkards
11. certain UK residents (although possibly not much longer)
12. girl, boy, and talent
13. of tears, perhaps
14. depart
15. disclose
16. slender seabird
17. pays to use
18. backward
19. fasten with tape
20. Norman King
21. acquires information
22. another kind of UK resident (almost certainly for a lot longer)
23. cat which doesn't scratch?
24. variety of orange or almond
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!