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.
I continue to be running way behind on things this year, so the gremlins have been filling in for me quite a bit. And I think they've gotten to enjoy making puzzles almost as much as they enjoy tampering with them. When I told them I'd be able to do tonight's diary myself, they insisted on collaborating...
Last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up puzzle wasn't completed until the early hours of the morning. Come on down below the orange squiggle and see if any of tonight's puzzles are challenging enough to keep you up late ...
PUZZLE # 1
First up, here's a new Crypto-Gremlin:
Lord Bsac'to Ronald Bugoxe Phxe Tlexxd Mgbya Pacgme ljooloro, "Foxhso Chfepebeso, luoso uerg mowosa foomh be bhmxgsporg beto phxe Cofhze ugma luo A.To."
Doeu. Yemra foxhso Lord Bsach jetg sammgmie ueshamrh tedgmie tlangrg lugmita zgyo luelh, jo rgrm'lh uewo Cofhze ugma lugto bhamlsd, xogluosh. Yg too be rgsobla beato-yemra-roxxoblh luoso.
Pesya Cowemgosh
NOTE: Crypto-gremlins are a special kind of cryptogram -- ones which can't be solved by online programs which run through and test out every possible letter substitution, but which can be solved by reasoning and creative thinking.
If you're not familiar with Crypto-Gremlins you can find a detailed explanation of how they work here. (And you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions here.)
The bolded text is a quotation; the italicized text identifies the author.
DKU NOTES
Before we get to tonight's JulieCrostic, here are DKU notes on the JulieCrostic from two weeks ago which spotlighted Staci Appel (who, if elected, will be the first woman elected to Congress in Iowa).
clue # 5. famous big cat
That refers to one of the most famous big cats in the world, ELSA, the lioness raised by Joy and George Adamson. You can see her in the picture at the top of tonight's diary; and you can see more pictures of her, and read a little about her, here.
clue # 6. prominent propaganda promoter
That's a reference to Roger AILES, founder of Fox News.
Roger Ailes was born in Warren, Ohio, in 1940. He has hemophilia, which didn’t stop his father from beating him with an electrical cord. A story Ailes has told—'his Rosebud story,' according to Stephen Rosenfield, who worked with Ailes in the nineteen-seventies—is about a lesson he learned in his bedroom as a boy. His father, holding out his arms, told him to jump off the top bunk and then deliberately failed to catch him, saying, 'Don’t ever trust anybody'.
clue # 14. Ruby Sondock
Ruby Sondock was appointed to the Texas Supreme Court in 1982 -- the first woman ever to serve on that court. Her middle name is KLESS.
clue # 16. resembling Rush
Since the Rush referred to in the clue is Limbaugh, the answer is obviously ASSLIKE.
clue # 17. Strada who helped create Emergency (see clue 26) and clue # 26. one major reason for creating Emergency (see clue 17)
This is a reference to GINO Strada, who helped found the humanitarian group Emergency. From Wikipedia:
In 1988 Dr. Strada redirected his experience as a hospital surgeon to trauma surgery and the care of war victims. From 1989-1994, he worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross in the conflict zones of Pakistan, Ethiopia, Peru, Afghanistan, Somalia and Bosnia.
That field experience motivated Dr. Strada and a group of colleagues to establish Emergency as a "small, agile, highly specialized" humanitarian medical organization in 1994, with its headquarters in Milan, Italy. Since the end of 2010 Emergency has provided medical services to more than 4,420,000 patients.
In addition to his career as a war surgeon, Dr. Strada is a widely published author. In May 1996, Dr. Strada was the author of the Scientific American cover story, "The Horror of Landmines".
and lastly,
clue # 22. another name for Hicks
This is a reference to ANGIE Hicks, co-founder with William Oesterle of the well-known website Angie's List.
All right, on to tonight's JulieCrostic. The gremlins were disappointed when they discovered I'd composed a puzzle for tonight and that they're services wouldn't be needed, so they offered to help improve it.
"Fine," I said, "as long as you don't tamper with my clues. If I let you help, you have to promise not to fiddle with the capitalization, punctuation, or word spacing."
Oh, we won't do that, they quickly agreed, with cheerful laughs which sounded almost like snickers.
And true to their word they didn't touch the capitalization or the word spacing of any of the clues. They did, however, remove 123 underscores. (They were just taking up unnecessary space, the gremlins said when I called their attention to the disappearance. And when I reminded them of their agreement, they looked bewildered by my complaint: But those aren't punctuation marks. They're just characters. Hmmm.)
Apart from the removal of all the underscores, the gremlins also added a few clues to the puzzle (to make the symmetry more pleasing, they explained). You shouldn't have any trouble spotting which clues are mine and which are theirs.
I noticed there is indeed a symmetry to what the gremlins did. If you divide my rows into sets of 3, one row in each set has underscores removed from both sides (but more removed from the left), one row in each set has underscores removed from both sides (but more removed from the right) and one row in each set has all the underscores removed from one side. And they removed exactly as many of my underscores from the right as they did from the left.
1. first
2. Union
3. Matters
4. chess
5. coast
6. punk
7. much
8. Tobacco
9. ham
10. back
11. Ridge
12. Q
13. Square
14. ill
15. Kentucky
16. Spiegel
17. awakening
18. oil
19. onion
20. dry
21. transit
22. ginger
23. Swan
24. share
25. time
26. Dorothy
27. fallen
28. pockets
29. nest
30. set
PUZZLES # 3 and # 4
The gremlins also provided their own subtitle for the diary. I decided to go with mine, which you can see at the top of the diary, but theirs (with their usual disregard for capitalization, punctuation, and word spacing) is Slaw List. The gremlins asked me to ask you which one you prefer. (And they hinted at dire consequences if people say they prefer mine, but I'm sure they were only joking so don't let that influence you in the slightest.)
And while you're deciding which you prefer, you might also take a moment to figure out what the subtitles mean...
SUNDAY PUZZLE POLL
Lastly: not a puzzle, but a poll question. The gremlins maintain it was perfectly okay for them to remove all the underscores from the clues since these aren't punctuation marks. Do you agree?