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.
Hmmm. Should we start off tonight with a nice easy math puzzle?
I just checked my watch and noticed that one-quarter of the time that has passed since midnight is equal to one-sixth of the time remaining until it’s midnight again. What time is it?
Or a nice easy word puzzle...
Find rhymes for each word below to form a common phrase of paired words connected by the word “and” or with an ampersand. For example, PLAY and KITE becomes DAY and NIGHT.
1. TOSSED and DROWNED
2. TORQUE and GENES
3. SKI and SLEAZY
4. PANDERED & TOURS
5. YACHT and FATHERED
6. FIX and QUARTER
Both the above puzzles come from the 2014 Page-A-Day puzzle calendar. For a new puzzle created especially for Daily Kos, jump below the orange squiggle.
Here's tonight's puzzle. It's a JulieCrostic (so named in honor of Julie Waters, who founded the Sunday Puzzle series 7 years ago).
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 7 rows, with 3 answers per row. The verticals will tell you a little about what to expect tomorrow in the regular Sunday Puzzle. (And there's a hint in the clues, as well...)
Tonight's puzzle shouldn't be too hard to solve. Have fun, and I'll see you in comments!
1. officer of the law
2. cut up
3. period of time
4. care-giver
5. presidential power
6. chose
7. Limbaugh
8. young woman
9. Paul's companion
10. ... the year that ___
11. ____ 3 ships
12. abides
13. unused
14. proceed
15. supplied with alcohol
16. sticky stuff
17. famous plantation
18. well-known blood carrier
19. another name for Alperovitz
20. another name for Davis
21. well-known Birds
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!