Last week's diary featured two songs. The solution to the gremlins' puzzle was "Today", by The New Christy Minstrels:
... and the solution to my puzzle was "Some Day One Will Do", by Holly Near:
Welcome once again 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 13th, 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. You can find out what tonight's song is by solving tonight's puzzle ...
NOTE: This diary was supposed to post on September 12th, while I was away for blueberry season, but the gremlins removed it from the queue in order to post one of their puzzles. (They claim I gave them permission to do this 5 months from now.)
When I got home and discovered their tampering, I re-queued the diaries which they had replaced and most of those diaries have now appeared.
I also told the gremlins they needed to apologize for tampering with the diary queue during my absence. They agreed to do so, and their apology will be in tonight's diary.
Additional note: They haven't quite finished writing their apology but they promised to paste it in at the end of tonight's diary before the diary posts. And they provided me with this excerpt, which is part of what they will post. The full text should be at the end of tonight's diary.
We are sorry that we substituted our puzzles for the ones which were queued while you were away. It was stupid and thoughtless
We are sincerely sorry
Once again: we are sorry we altered the diary queue, and we promise that in the future we will not do this again.
(
Oh, yes! The head gremlin assured me.
These exact words are part of our apology. We'll say all this, and more. This kind of thoughtless error needs to be acknowledged in full to make sure it doesn't happen again..)
Well, that seems clear enough. I'm looking forward to reading their full apology. Meanwhile, let's get on to tonight's puzzle...
Let's start with the answers to last week's puzzles.
First, here are the clues to the regular puzzle:
1. iron / 2. throat / 3. gods
4. seventh / 5. some day / 6. hangman's
7. John / 8. Teapot scandal / 9. the lawn
10. school / 11. mother / 12. well machine
13. bargain / 14. ties that / 15. legally
16. skeleton / 17. Danny / 18. roof
19. far away / 20. Kaufman / 21. Yankee Doodle
22. Franklin / 23. dry / 24. Daniel
For these
Summer Songfest puzzles I've been constructing puzzles in which every clue provides a phrase with a word missing, and the answers are the missing words. So the answers for this puzzle are:
ore S sore N Norse
son O soon E noose
Doe M Dome W mowed
old E lode I oiled
bin D bind L blind
key A Kaye L leaky
and Y Andy D Dandy
Ben O bone O Boone
The columns of add-on letters read
SOMEDAYO NEWILLDO -- which, properly capitalized and spaced out, spell out the song title "
Some Day One Will Do".
Next, the gremlins' bonus puzzle. The clues were:
1. what comes after Limbaugh's b
2. Peter, Paul or Mary
3. Your health, sir! (with "love")
4. comma trix
5. horny creatures
6. what you might say to a welcome guest
The answers were:
s T St O tos D dots A toads Y "Do stay!"
The add-on letters spell out the song title "
Today".
And now, here's tonight's puzzle -- the final
Summer Songfest song for 2016!
IMPORTANT NOTE! Every clue in this 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. Pizza
2. your eyes
3. Twist and
4. walks in beauty
5. shine
6. guest
7. music
8. off
9. steamer
10. cent
11. review
12. Pan
13. death
14. St. John's
15. free
16. chess
17. Meyers
18. rock
19. flash
20. of office
21. Lake
19. carpet
20. straits
21. for sound
22. Myrna
23. I Want To Be With You.
24. bin
25. shot
26. Reaper
27. Brothers
28. Diesel
29. You're So
30. assumption
31. Calling
32. Lancaster
33. offering
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!
An apology from the gremlins:
We are not sorry that we substituted our puzzles for the ones which were queued while you were away. It was stupid and thoughtless of you not to realize you gave us permission to do that, even though the diary introduction you wrote clearly says you did.
We are sincerely sorry that stupid-human does not understand the meaning of common words such as 'early'.
On April 27, 2016, in light of the results of the previous day's primaries, we politely asked for stupid-human's permission to post our diaries with puzzles about vice presidential possibilities "early". That was the exact word we used in making our request and that was the exact word stupid-human agreed to in granting our request.
According to common usage and to various dictionaries, "early" means things such as prior to and sooner than usual. But stupid-human apparently is not familiar with the meaning of the word early and thinks it means later, or afterwards, or several weeks in the future.
According to the introduction stupid-human wrote for this diary, when stupid-human granted us permission on April 27 to post our diaries early stupid human thought that meant we would post our diaries April 30, May 1, May 6, May 13 and May 14. How on earth is that early???
For the benefit of stupid-human and any other language-challenged humans:
If someone asks on April 27, 2016, for permission to post and is given permission to post on April 27, 2016, that would mean they were given permission to post immediately, or now, or today. That's not what we asked.
If someone asks on April 27, 2016, for permission to post and is given permission to post 3, 4, 10, 17 and 18 days later, that would mean they were given permission to post later. That's not what we asked.
We asked for and were granted permission to post early. We posted our diaries on August 29th, 2015, on August 30, 2015, on September 5, 2015, on September 12, 2015, and Septemer 13, 2015. All of those are earlier than April 27, 2016. Clearly, then, we did exactly what we were given permission to do. It is not our fault if stupid-human gives us permission to do something and thinks that means we should do something completely different.
Once again: we are not sorry we altered the diary queue, and we promise that in the future we will not hesitate to do this again.