Welcome once again to Sunday Puzzle, a weekly series for people who enjoy light mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, and odd bits of trivia.
Tonight: a brand new JulieCrostic, with a number of interesting / educational / political clues. Do you know who Ruby Sondock is? How about Strada? And what resembles a rush?
Also tonight: there's still an unsolved puzzle from last week's potluck puzzle party. Here's a second chance to solve it. (And I'll even include a little help...)
If you'd like to solve tonight's puzzles on your own, you can copy them down and work them at your leisure. (But please leave a comment, tip, or rec, so we'll know you were here.)
Or if you'd like to be part of our weekly solving party, where we tackle the puzzles as a team, come on down to comments and join the fun. Everyone's welcome -- and the more different sets of eyes we have looking at the puzzle clues, the better the chance of someone figuring out some of the more devious answers.
Come on down!
If you're new to Sunday Puzzle, you can find a detailed explanation of how JulieCrostics work in any Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diary (as well as an introductory puzzle to work and an example of a solved puzzle).
We have some mischievous puzzle gremlins who enjoy tampering with the clues, so it's good to keep in mind:
* you can't trust the clue capitalization;
* you can't trust the clue punctuation;
* sometimes you can't even trust the word spacing.
You might also want to keep in mind that the gremlins like bundling the clues in tidy little groups of 3 regardless of how many answers there actually are in the rows. (There are at least 3 answers to a row; but some weeks there are 4, 5, even 6 or more answers per row. Figuring out how many answers there are per row, and what the word lengths are for each column, is part of the Sunday night challenge.)
A small request: please don't put any any spoilers in the comment subject lines. Use the subject line of comments to identify what your comment will be about but keep any guesses as to clue answers or the verticals confined to the comment itself. That way folks who are still trying to crack a clue for themselves won't inadvertently see the answer before they're ready to see it. Thanks!
Okay, I think that covers the basics. Here are the clues for tonight's puzzle:
1. rests
2. agitates
3. up, down or back
4. laced jacket
5. famous big cat
6. prominent propaganda promoter
7. common solution
8. takes in
9. waterproof
10. ho, for example
11. transfers
12. blanched
13. without
14. Ruby Sondock
15. abcdefghjlmnopqrstuvwxyz?
16. resembling rush
17. Strada who helped create emergency (see clue 26)
18. in debt
19. in possession
20. in on
21. acquire
22. another name for hicks
23. simplifying
24. torments
25. all the presidents and a few good kings
26. one major reason for creating emergency (see clue 17)
27. acting like a female, when done by a male
28. wet
29. lights
30. computers
31. airport
32. hints
33. no hints needed for this one
For last week's potluck puzzle party the Sunday Puzzle gremlins contributed the following puzzle:
Billboard announced multiples of a Batman villain;
Furthermore, identity had been a controversial cartoonist.
Illustration is non-jewish person
With tranquilizer which it's within your power to tranquilize.
Christmas and New Years sheltered from sunlight
One particular bridge hand, very blue, also tiny.
Peculiar: an occasion when Kent Allard
Is able to plunge from one end of shopping center to opposite end
Plus put on false appearance of what has changed
Of liquid discharged by person reading this
Um, this male simply works as redcap, although
This male comprises all prostitutes.
One imposter beneath single road illuminator
Has highly developed abs, plus is putting on different clothes while flying.
"Set fire to intersection!"
Thus this male continues to be umpire
Apprehending everyone human --
People urinating without realizing it.
Write legal determination in this space
Contained by his urine.
This is a One-Off puzzle. The gremlins took the first 20 lines of a song, changed
ONE letter in each line, and then wrote paraphrases of the altered lines (being careful not to use any word which appears in either the original or altered line in the line's paraphrase).
The one-letter change could be an addition (such as changing CAT to CART). It could be a subtraction (such as changing CAT to AT). Or it could be a substitution (such as changing CAT to HAT). But the gremlins only changed one letter per line.
(However, you should be warned that they felt free to alter the capitalization and the punctuation to their hearts' content -- and it's quite possible they may also have fiddled with word spacing, adding spaces into words or removing spaces between words. Hey, they're gremlins!)
If you're hesitant to attempt solving the puzzle, because you're afraid you won't recognize the song they used (or because you think there are just too many possible songs out there): not a problem! The song the gremlins used to make this puzzle is one of the songs which was spotlighted in Summer Songfest, either this year or last year. That limits the choice to about 20 songs (all of which appear in diaries with the Summer Songfest tag).
[And while the tag system now seems to bring up only the 15 most recent entries, the song you're looking for appears in one of those 15.]