From today's page in the Page-A-Day puzzle calendar, here's an easy little puzzle to start things off tonight:
Below are 4 lines, each consisting of two words:
TABBY _ HOOEY
ORATE _ CONIC
REIGN _ NATAL
SALON _ HYPED
Change the first letter of both words in each line to a different letter (the same letter for both words) to form two new words. Write the new letter in the blank space between them. What word is spelled out by the new letters?
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 warm-up puzzle theme last month was Books Worth Supporting -- books worth reading, worth buying as gifts, and worth recommending to your local library. For a month or so before that, the theme was Candidates Worth Supporting. And last week's Sunday Puzzle featured a Prisoner of Conscience Worth Supporting (Raif Badawi, who was sentenced in Saudi Arabia to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison).
Tonight's puzzle continues the worth supporting theme -- but you'll need to solve the puzzle to see what category the answer falls into.
Also tonight: as many of you probably know, folks around the world are celebrating an important birthday this month. Yes, 55 years and 4 months ago the character Bizarro first appeared in Superboy # 68! To commemorate this momentous anniversary, I have entered the clues for tonight's puzzle in reverse order (i.e. the last clue is listed first and the first clue is listed last).
Reverse fun awaits you below. Come on down and join the Saturday night puzzle party!
Here's 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.
(Also if you're new, a request: please don't post any answers or other spoilers in comment subject lines. Instead, please put any guesses at possible answers into the comment itself. Thanks!)
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row. The clues are listed in reverse order. You can solve the clues in that order (and get the verticals spelled backwards) or you can start at the bottom and work your way up. Have fun!
15. well-known savage
14. well-known dick
13. name often heard after sandra
12. duck dynasty's robertson
11. claimed
10. down
9. well-known duke
8. keen
7. help
6. g.i. jane's name
5. row
4. nothing
3. half of hank william's kind of blues
2. slightly more than one mile per hour
1. fill in the blank!
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!