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 puzzle theme this week (and through early November) is Candidates Worth Supporting. Each week the verticals in the acrostic will spell out the name of a progressive candidate in this year's elections.
Last week's puzzle spotlighted Ruben Gallego, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Arizona who is almost certain to win the 7th district seat since he's running against ... um... er... (oops!)
... nobody. He's running unopposed.
Sorry about that; I'd noted him down as a candidate worth supporting way earlier in the summer, when he was competing against a strong opponent, Mary Rose Wilcox, in the Arizona primary. Last week I was composing the puzzle at the last moment from older notes and didn't take time to check on current status of the race.
Did I screw up again this week? Solve tonight's puzzle and find out! It's waiting for you right below...
Before posting the new puzzle I often include DKU notes on political or cultural clue answers from the previous week's puzzle. But it doesn't look like any of last week's clues call out for annotating, so let's get right down to tonight's puzzle.
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, you can jump right in; if you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
(Reminder: please don't post any answers or other spoilers in comment subject lines; put possible answers inside the comment, rather than in the subject line, so folks who are still working on the puzzle won't see that information before they're ready to read it. Thanks!)
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row. Here are the clues.
1. US neighbor
2. kind of dive
3. calculator
4. dirt
5. works
6. gun
7. swerve
8. plunder
9. generally suitable to serve to a vegan
10. job
11. pile
12. box
13. take time off
14. becomes exhausted
15. soda units
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!