Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly series for people who enjoy light mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, odd bits of trivia, and the occasional furry animal.
The gremlins titled tonight's diary Grim news. I assume that's a reference to the news out today about the sentencing of Michael Grimm:
Former US congressman Michael Grimm has been sentenced to eight months in prison for tax evasion.
Last year Grimm pleaded guilty to charges that he underreported more than $1m in wages from a Manhattan health food restaurant.
The New York Republican, who once threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony, was re-elected in November but later resigned...
In 2007, he began running the day-to-day operations of Healthalicious.
Federal prosecutors said he failed to report the wages and provide receipts so he could avoid payroll, income and sales taxes.
He paid immigrant workers in cash, some of which were in the US illegally.
But when I pointed out to the gremlins that they had misspelled Grimm's name in the diary title and offered to help them edit it, they just smirked. And hours later, as we approach post time, I see the spelling in the diary title remains
grim. So maybe that's not what they're referring to after all.
Oh, well. I guess you can find out for yourself by solving tonight's puzzles...
Two puzzles on tap tonight: a new JulieCrostic and a new Crypto-Gremlin.
Tonight's JulieCrostic has 4 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. Have fun!
1. kind of deviation
2. kind of noodle
3. kind of chocolate cake
4. famous Fitzgerald
5. kind of cat
6. in fact
7. boys
8. dish of vegetables
7. this can be fun to ride on snow
8. Evans and Earnhardt
9. women
10. another name for Luxemberg
11. illegal fire
12. large houses
NOTE: If you have any trouble solving tonight's JulieCrostic, or if you have solved it but can't figure out what the verticals mean, tonight's Crypto-Gremlin should help make it clear.
Here's tonight's Crypto-Gremlin. The bolded text is a quote; the italicized part explains who said it and what they were talking about.
Mbad, nxfn'at jtae ofaadlkb vtskjblne, wtnf Hd'st afuktb cdn'am andiim jewvbgndhb, pfae xb wdae jewvbgndhbim af gieylaxey.
Umfle Kudjf xerd nxb Xtrrdlknelb Oeant, hdlt ubrbublgb ne nxbdum sbgdadelf ne jehb gehbufkb xerd Selfist Nutjob rueje nxb Oeidndgam abgndelb ne nxb Wblnbunfdljblnf abgndelf
If you're not familiar with how Crypto-Gremlins work:
* you can find a complete explanation
here;
* you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions
here; and
* you can find step-by-step demonstrations for solving previous Crypto-Gremlin puzzles in
any of these diaries.
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.