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 theme of the warm-up puzzles in recent weeks has been good quotes. Last week's quote was from Mark Evanier. (What, again? Yep, again!)
It was solved by JoeXM and Joffan. The solution (and a step-by-step demonstration of how to come up with it) can be found a little farther down in tonight's diary.
Meanwhile, here's another good quote. Indeed, this one's a classic! Cat-lovers should especially enjoy it:
"Shaven nha orvvg fr, cvritr, suglua sin Sg shaduoh oh sivbr pyhfi uryr?"
"Ouiog ercrketn si dhhea erivg shkg suryr nha sikoh oh droh oh," tiger our Lion.
Of course, you'll need to decode it first if you want to read it. It's a Crypto-Gremlin (a kind of cryptogram which can't be solved by computer code-cracking programs but can be solved with human wits). If you're not familiar with how Crypto-Gremlins work you can find an explanation in tonight's tip jar.
Tonight's diary also includes:
- a step-by-step demonstration of how to solve a Crypto-Gremlin, and
- a new JulieCrostic (revealing the source of tonight's quote)
IMPORTANT NOTE: don't forget that tomorrow pucklady will be hosting our monthly Potluck Puzzle Party!
If you've got a puzzle you'd like to share, KosMail it to pucklady so she can include it in the diary (or post it in a comment in tomorrow's diary, and pucklady will paste it into the diary).
I: what are Crypto-Gremlins and how do they work
As mentioned above, anyone unfamiliar with Crypto-Gremlins can find a detailed explanation of what they are and how they work in tonight's tip jar.
(And you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions here.)
II: Sunday Puzzle Workshop: how to solve a Crypto-Gremlin
Crypto-Gremlins may look complicated at first, but they're actually pretty easy to solve once you get the hang of them. Here's a step-by-step walk-through of how to solve last week's puzzle.
The coded text for last week quote was:
Blather Milkthyler yemptieyn xtht clitpt etiu pubbnhym cuhn flyylist Etpu Whmq'yl ygttwdr. Yumipym blot an anhsnliu eu ft.
- 1. Make a list of the word-ending letters. There are 6 word-ending letters in the message text: R, N, T, U, M and L. These are the substitutions for the standard vowels a, e, i, o, u and y. We don't know yet which of these letters stands for which vowel, but we do now know which letters in the message text are vowels and which are consonants.
- 2: Look for 3-letter words. If we can find either the word the or the word you in the text we'll be off to a good start.
Alas, there are no 3-letter words in this quote. But we do have something almost as good...
- 3. There's an apostrophe in the word Whmq'yl. Since there are capital letters at the start of Etpu Whmq'yl, that indicates Etpu Whmq is probably a name and the Y stands for an S. Plug in Y=s.
- 4. Since we didn't find any 3-letter words, let's look at 2-letter words. There are three of these: an, eu, and ft. These could be either genuine 2-letter words, or 1-letter words (a or I) with an add-on consonant at the start.
Hmmm. Nothing obvious jumps out to tell us what these words are. But since none of these words is capitalized, at least we can rule out any of them being the word I.
- 5. Okay, let's look more closely at the vowels.
(a) Most of the vowels appear singly; the only vowel pairs in the text are a double-t in ygttwdr, a um in Yumipym, and an nl in anhsnliu. The double-t indicates that T probably stands for either E or O
(b) The letters N, T, U, M, and L all appear inside words but the letter R appears only at the end of words. That makes it likely that R=y.
(c) The letter M appears at the beginning of Milkthyler, meaning it has a consonant sound there. The most common vowel to have a consonant sound at the beginning of words is Y (as in you, year, youth, etc.), but Milkthyler doesn't look like any of the common y-beginning words. (And if R is y then M can't also be y.) The next most-common vowel to have a consonant sound at the beginning of words is U. Let's try M=u.
(d) All right, let's consider which letter stands for I. We know it can't be R or M (if our guesses so far are correct). And it's also unlikely to be N, U, or T (as there aren't too many 2-letter words ending in i). That leaves only the L. So let's try L=I...
- 6. Aha! Milkthyler is university! Plug in I=n, K=v, T=e, and H=r.
- 7. Aha again, twice over! Blather is Liberty (plug in B=l, A=b) and yemptieyn is (are?) students (plug in P=d).
- 8. Now we're getting somewhere! We can see that pubbnhym (d-ll-rsu) must be dollars. Plug in U=o, N=a, and now all the vowels are accounted for.
- 9. What we have for the quotation now is: Liberty University studentsa -ere -inede teno dollarsu -ora -issin-e Tedo -ru-'si s-ee--y. Soundsu li-e ba bar-aino to -e. . From there, it's not hard to get the rest of the quote: "Liberty University students were fined ten dollars for missing Tedo Cruz's speech. Sounds like a bargain to me."
II-b: DKU note on last week's quote
from PolitiFact:
Liberty University students faced $10 fine if they skipped Ted Cruz presidential speech
Every politician likes a packed house, and when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, announced that he was officially running for president this week, he got one. About 11,000 students at Liberty University in Virginia were on hand when Cruz came to their campus. But as Jess McIntosh, the spokeswoman for the abortion rights group Emily’s List noted, they weren’t there necessarily by choice.
"Students were mandated to be in attendance or they would be fined," McIntosh told Chris Hayes on MSNBC on March 24, 2015. "Not as much as they would be fined for possessing R-rated movies or practicing witchcraft, but still, they had to pay money if they didn’t want to see him."
III: tonight's 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.
(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. Tonight's puzzle has 6 rows, with 3 answers per row. Here are the clues. Have fun, and I'll see you in comments!
1. traveled
2. more mature
3. fill again
4. dell
5. depart
6. uncover
7. chair
8. garbage
9. irrigates
10. isn't able
11. lighthearted adventure
12. deed
13. act
14. search party
15. places to ski
16. finished
17. type of crop
18. common 17 crop
IV: 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!