Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly series for people who enjoy light mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, and odd bits of trivia.
The puzzle theme this weekend is good quotes. Tonight's warm-up puzzle reveals the source, tomorrow night's regular puzzle will reveal the quote.
Last week's puzzle answers contained references to Death of A Salesman, 3:10 to Yuma, and to Maury Maverick -- the original (and genuine!) Congressional maverick.
(And in the comments I even included one of the verses from the theme song used by his son Maury Maverick Jr. in his 1961 campaign for the Democratic senate nomination. I doubt you'll find that anywhere else on the web.)
What will you find in tonight's puzzle? Well, there's one way to find out...
Before we get to tonight's puzzle, I'd like to mention that one of the rows in last week's puzzle remains unsolved (or, at least, no one has posted the answer in a comment).
But don't worry about it; I'll post the answer to it in next week's warm-up diary. (Why not this week? Come back tomorrow for Sunday Puzzle and you may understand better.)
Okay, on to tonight's puzzle!
Tonight's puzzle is a JulieCrostic (so named in honor of Julie Waters, who founded the Sunday Puzzle series a little over 7 years ago). It has 6 rows, with 3 answers per row.
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!)
Okay, I think that covers the basics. Here are the clues for tonight's puzzle. Have fun!
1. astonish
2. melodies
3. defeat an incumbent
4. well-known university
5. kind of cat
6. actually
7. look over
8. bamboo sticks
9. washes
10. friends
11. what Republicans still haven't produced on health care and immigration
12. what editorial cartoons are made of
13. remove male reproductive organ
14. clearing in a forest
15. droop
16. fish
17. shut
18. comfort in a difficult time
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!