Welcome to Sunday Puzzle!
The title of last week’s Sunday Puzzle was Den cat said: “Throw ring to pups!”, which let you know that the puzzles last week featured Candidates Worth Supporting.
Hmm, I wonder what this week’s puzzles feature? There’s one way to find out. (Well, actually there are several ways to find out, but the one I had in mind was continuing down the page, finding the new puzzles, and solving them...)
First, though, let’s look at last week’s puzzles. That will show new folks who aren’t familiar with JulieCrostics what these puzzles look like and how they work.
In JulieCrostics you are given a set of clues, such as these from last week’s first puzzle:
1. Richards
2. Doctrine
3. Become more distant
4. Amaze
5. Searches for
6. Spends a lot of time at
7. back talk
8. Jack, dumb, and candy
9. Evaluate
10. Fire
11. Bike, spice, and magazine
12. Gable and Kent
13. Rabbit, cauliflower, and tin
14. Lift up
15. Less difficult
16. Row, show, or tug
17. Monastery head
18. Assistant to a baseball team
The answers to the clues need to be entered into a grid of rows and columns. In this example, there are 6 rows with 3 columns.
Every word in a row has all the letters of the previous word plus one new letter. For example, in the set of clues above the answers in the first row are: Reed (Richards), creed (doctrine), and recede (become more distant). CREED contains all the letters of REED, plus a C. RECEDE contains all the letters of CREED, plus another E. These add-on letters are placed in the grid in columns between the words, like so:
Reed C creed E recede
stun H hunts A haunts
sass E asses S assess
sack R racks L Clarks
ears I raise E easier
boat B abbot Y batboy
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. For this puzzle, the add-on letters spelled out CHERIB EASLEY. Put those together, and put the space in the proper place, and it spells out Cheri Beasley.
As the diary title indicated, she is very much a candidate worth supporting; she’s the Democratic candidate in North Carolina who is challenging Ted Budd for the seat in the US senate which Budd currently occupies.
Here are the clues to last week’s second puzzle:
1. Location of Hollywood South, informally
2. Calrissian
3. Famous duck or famous ass
4. Separate
5. More suitable
6. Say it again
7. Go in front
8. Perfect
9. Put behind bars
10. Standing in a system
11. Consumed liquid
12. Cloud over
13. Lose fur
14. Tear into small pieces
15. Held in common
16. Conceited
17. Unsophisticated
18. Canyon
And here’s a grid with the correct answers all filled in:
NOLA D Lando D Donald
part E apter E repeat
lead I ideal J jailed
rank D drank E darken
shed R shred A shared
vain E naive R ravine
The add-on letters spell out Deidre DeJear — the Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa. (If you’re not familiar with her, here’s a link to a good news story about her candidacy.)
Here are the clues to last week’s third puzzle:
1. Bow and neck
2. Locations
3. afternoon nap
4. Evaluate
5. Pay for someone else's meal
6. What you make pancakes with
7. Hoover, Grand Coulee, and Buffalo Bill
8. West and Kinzinger
9. stories involving conflicts
10. Cheeky
11. Moved slowly on hands and knees
12. Floor covering
13. Play the lead role
14. Rips apart
15. Live, jet or gulf
16. God of war
17. School, light, and new
18. Wimsey creator
Here is the answer grid for last week’s third puzzle:
ties S sites A siesta
rate T treat B batter
dams A Adams R dramas
pert C crept A carpet
star E tears M stream
ares Y years S sayers
The add-on letters spell out Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia.
So if you’re clear on how these puzzles work, here are the clues for this week’s pair of puzzles. (Or, if you’re not clear, let me know in a comment below and I’ll try to explain it better.)
Here are the clues to puzzle # 1. The answer words in these rows are 3, 4, and 5 letters long
1. Take to court
2. Prompts
3. Common form of ice
4. Took a class
5. Breakfast food
6. Cars
7. Possessed
8. Difficult
9. Fragment
10. Glimmer
11. Breezy
12. Furry
Here are the clues to puzzle # 2. The answer words in these rows are 4, 5, and 6 letters long.
1. Did extremely well
2. Ran quickly
3. Gallery
4. Forecaster
5. Remove
6. Puzzle
7. Alan
8. Vegetable dish
9. Texas city
10. Ruby and rose
11. Assembles and directs a group
12. Owned and used by more than one
13. Nuisance
14. Ill will
15. Feels sorry for
16. Ratio of sides
17. Eats
18. Joe and Jill
Have fun with the puzzles! And now you can have fun with tonight’s poll.
Last week’s poll asked: “Which game would probably help the most in solving today's puzzles?” And a list of 11 options was offered — bridge, chess, baseball, checkers, Yahtzee!, Red Rover, tag, mahjong, pin the tail on the donkey, go fish, and This is Daily Kos -- we don't play games here.
That last one, about not playing games, was the most popular choice, getting 8 votes. Several of the games — chess, Yahtzee, and mahjong — got 4 votes each.
The game which would seem most obviously helpful in solving the puzzles is tag, as there is a tag on the diary, CandidatesWorthSupporting, which clearly identifies the category the answers fall into. But for some reason that option only received one vote in the poll.
I guess that could be because most of the poll voters had already figured out the answer category, since it was spelled out (albeit in anagram form) in the diary title:
Den cat said => Candidates
throw => Worth
ring to pups => Supporting
And now, here’s tonight’s poll question. Tale a look at the next line:
C D F G I J K L M N P Q R S U W X Y Z