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.
On Sunday nights, in the regular Sunday Puzzle series, we feature puzzles intended to be challenging enough to call for a team effort to solve; but these Saturday night warm-up puzzles are simpler and more straightforward.
At least usually they are. I'm running even later than usual (and I usually run pretty late) so the gremlins volunteered to do tonight's puzzles. But they promised not to pull any sneaky tricks, and they looked very sincere when they said that, so you shouldn't have any trouble solving tonight's puzzles.
The current theme of the warm-up puzzles is good quotes, so the gremlins said they'd feature a good quote from a story that's been in the news this week.
Last week's quote was by Jen Sorenson. You can find the full quote lower down in tonight's diary. Meanwhile, here's tonight's quote:
Great drips gremli rcan rsposhe us ass uibs zpscbpt. Pews grst act, remhaelrgc jean gdsmgt/gdsmgt.
Of course, you'll need to decode the quote if you want to know what it says.
Be warned though: it's not a regular cryptogram. It's a Crypto-Gremlin (a kind of cryptogram which can't be solved by computer code-cracking programs which run through all the possible letter substitutions, but can be solved through the use of your wits).
If you're not familiar with how Crypto-Gremlins work you can find an explanation here. (And you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions here.)
Tonight's diary also includes a new JulieCrostic which reveals the source of tonight's quote (and a full explanation of how JulieCrostics work, for the benefit of any newcomers). The clues and the puzzle party are waiting for you right below the orange cloud.
IMPORTANT NOTE: discovered and fixed a small problem with the Crypto-Gremlin; apologies to anyone who tried to solve it earlier and got stuck, but it should be easier now.
Last week's quote, from Jen Sorenson, is excerpted from the Slowpoke cartoon she posted on February 8, 2012. The captions to the cartoon read:
- Hello there. We at the Susan G. Komen Foundation would like to apologize for our recent wardobe malfunction.
- We were innocently doing our fundraising dance when our right breast just popped out. <KA-BOING!>
- Please understand that this slip had nothing to do with politics, even though our board is totally stacked with right-leaning boobs...
It's a great cartoon; click the link and give it a look.
All right, here's tonight's JulieCrostic.
This puzzle has 4 rows, with 3 answers per row. The verticals identify the source of tonight's quotation. And I've got to admit, the gremlins picked out a doozy!
The gremlins haven't showed me the quote, but they did show me the name of the person who said it and I was floored. A female celebrity who's been having romantic problems apparently got married -- not to the person she's been romantically linked to for a long-time, but to her long-time romantic rival! And then, going by the name she's now using, she changed sex (so I guess I need to start referring to him as he; apologies, I'm a bit slow sometimes and I'm still stunned to learn about this. I knew I was behind on following the news about these folks, but I didn't realize I was this far behind.)
Find out the source of tonight's quote by solving 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. Here are the clues. Have fun, and I'll see you in comments!
1. saute, then simmer
2. buckets (or other containers) used to empty a boat of water
3. progressives
4. pariahs
5. brush off
6. delight
7. birth control pioneer
8. gets back
9. Smith, knot, and Hood's relative
10. ate selectively
11. negligees
12. absorbed
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!