Welcome once again to
Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up -- a weekly Saturday night opportunity to have a little fun and to warm up your wits for the regular
Sunday Puzzle.
The Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up theme for the past few weeks and the next few weeks is Candidates Worth Supporting, spotlighting noteworthy candidates in the upcoming elections. Last week, for instance, the puzzle verticals spelled out Staci Appel (who is running a neck-and-neck race against David Young in Iowa's 3rd Congressional district).
And if I were doing the puzzle tonight, you could expect to see another worthwhile candidate spotlighted in the tonight's verticals.
But I'm away this weekend. The gremlins will be providing the puzzle instead, and they insisted on doing a diary about the revelation that a Republican who played a prominent role in efforts to bring down Bill Clinton in the 1990s while claiming to be an "independent prosecutor" was actually being controlled by a foreigner who entered the US illegally and was trying to destroy US nuclear weapons capabilities.
I wasn't keen on letting the gremlins hijack tonight's diary to put forward what sounded a lot like a conspiracy theory, but they told me they've seen this in headlines and news stories in respectable papers. I'm way behind on a lot of things at the moment and haven't had time to follow the news much lately, but I'm sure they wouldn't lie about something like that. So I agreed to let them use tonight's diary to bring more attention to this startling story.
Although the string-puller was a well-known figure (and the target of a government task force), his real name apparently has never been revealed. But tonight the gremlins have promised to identify the prominent Republican, the illegal alien who controlled him, and the US senator who's the source of this story. If you'd like to know who all these folks are, just head on down below the unidentified orange object...
All right, from the diary title and the picture at the top of the diary you've probably figured out who the prominent Republican referred to is. The rest is revealed below.
This appears to be a JulieCrostic. 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.
Hmmm! This one looks a bit tough. Usually people figure out the verticals by solving the clues, but tonight you may need to come up with the verticals first in order to figure out what the clue answers are!
Have fun! And -- assuming I don't get banned for posting the gremlin's conspiracy theory -- I'll be back next week with another Candidates Worth Supporting puzzle.
1. Mr. Burns
2. person who for many years was unfairly given sole credit for creating a famous comic book character
3. Danish museum or Godwin variant
4. legendary monster
5. pad
6. kind of shop Archie used to hang out in
7. European island
8. Mexican dish
9. person who formerly was unfairly given sole credit for creating many famous comic book characters
10. touch
11. 100 years ago this was a word for bloodsuckers
12. yellow-flowered herb
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!