Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
I'm away until September, harvesting blueberries in Maine, but I've queued up a series of Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diaries to entertain you until I return.
The theme for these diaries is Summer Songfest. Each week you'll get a puzzle spotlighting a noteworthy song and a YouTube clip of the song featured in the previous week's puzzle.
Since there was no song featured in last week's diary, I thought this might be a nice one to lead off with this week while you try to figure out what the song identified in tonight's puzzle is. Have a good time...
First up, the answers to last week's puzzle.
The clues (after I fixed the error in row 3) were:
1. kind of deviation / 2. kind of noodle / 3. kind of chocolate cake
4. famous Fitzgerald / 5. kind of cat / 6. in fact
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
The answers were:
mean R ramen G German
Ella Y alley R really
sled A Dales I ladies
Rosa N arson M manors
And the verticals spell out RYAN GRIM.
Why spotlight Ryan Grim in the JulieCrostic? Because the answer to the Crypto-Gremlin (which, alas, no one seems to have solved) was:
"Yes, that's us passing judgment, but I'd argue it's still objective, as he is objectively a clownshow," Grim said of Trump.
Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post, in reference to their decision to move coverage of Donald Trump from the Politics section to the Entertainment section
(Yes, "
Selfist Nutjob" in the gremlinized text decoded to
Donald Trump. I think the gremlins deserve a little applause for that one.)
Here's a link to the story about the Huffington Post's decision to relegate Trump to Entertainment.
All right, on to tonight's puzzle.
Tonight's JulieCrostic has 6 rows, with 3 answers per row. Four of the answers are proper names
IMPORTANT NOTE! Every clue in tonight's puzzle is a familiar phrase, name, or hyphenated word from which one word is missing. The missing word is the answer to the clue.
If, for example, the clue reads free, some possible answers would be will [free will], trade [free trade], scot [scot free], and duty [duty-free].
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. Thomas
2. stay
3. baggage
4. good right
5. Khayyam
6. house
7. dish
8. Spaghetti Sauce
9. cane
10. bull
11. half
12. West
13. when
14. put
15. temper
16. get
17. belt
18. coach
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!