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).
The theme for the past couple months of Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up (while I was away for blueberry season) has been Summer Songfest. Each week spotlighted a different song (with the song appearing at the top of the next week's diary). And the gremlins did an additional songfest diary last week for the regular Sunday Puzzle, spotlighting a (slightly gremlinized version of) Simon and Garfunkel's classic "I Am A Rock".
But summer (and Summer Songfest) are over for another year. Tonight, and for the next month, the theme for Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up is candidates worth supporting in this year's election. Come on down and see who's in the spotlight tonight...
... but first, before getting to tonight's puzzle, a couple of quick DKU notes on last week's puzzle.
There were 3 political/cultural clues last week:
6. Olympia
7. Gavin
and
11. thoroughly defeated
Gavin was a reference to
Gavin Newsom, a
registered member of Daily Kos since 2007 who has posted 39 diaries (although his last activity here was back in 2010.) In addition to being a member of Daily Kos, Newsom was formerly the mayor of San Francisco and is currently the lieutenant governor of California. Over the years Newsom has engaged in a number of newsworthy actions, such as
this one from 10 years ago:
In 2004 Newsom gained national attention when he directed the San Francisco city–county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in violation of the current state law. In August 2004, the Supreme Court of California annulled the marriages that Newsom had authorized, as they conflicted with state law at that time. Still, Newsom’s unexpected move brought national attention to the issues of gay marriage, solidifying political support for Newsom in San Francisco and in the gay community.
Olympia was a reference to former Maine senator
Olympia Snowe, who retired in 2012 after 3 terms. Although Snowe has never posted a diary or comment here herself, she has been the subject of a number of diaries and comments. For example, Brian McFadden posted a good diary about her at the time of her resignation which summed up her senate career well and which you might enjoy looking at again:
The Endangered Moderate Republican.
The third clue, thoroughly defeated, was a sneaky one. While the obvious answer is John McCain, the answer used in the puzzle was actually routed.
All right, that's enough about last week's puzzle; on to tonight's!
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 6 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. very high
2. nutty confection
3. flying machine
4. prominent feature of cardinals, blue jays, and cormorants
5. George Armstrong and Elizabeth Bacon
6. what JulieCrostic clues can be found in
7. these are good for frying, baking, or boiling
8. baseball players
9. members of WWF
10. challenges
11. amphibious rodents
12. deprives and saddens
13. yells
14. novas
15. sounds heard on firing ranges
16. sad songs
17. moles and miners
18. vomit
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!