Welcome to the first DK4 edition of Sunday Puzzle!
Sunday Puzzle is a regular feature at Daily Kos. It features an assortment of puzzles with political themes and educational tidbits worked in.
These Sunday Puzzle diaries are a weekly party for people who enjoy solving puzzles together. People share their ideas about what the answers to the puzzles might be in the comment section (being careful not to put any spoilers in the subject lines of comments, in case there are people reading the comments who'd prefer not to know the answers yet).
If you're new to Sunday Puzzle, we have something new this week: Sunday Puzzle for beginners , which features an introductory acrostic which should give you a sense of what these puzzles are like and how to solve them.
Today's puzzles include: a JulieCrostic; an Ana-Gremlin; and a Crypto-Gremlin.
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Puzzle # 1: JulieCrostic.
Those of you not familiar with what JulieCrostics are and how they work can find an explanation and an introductory puzzle in today's Sunday Puzzle for beginners. Those of you who are familiar can plunge right in.
Today's acrostic has 30 clues -- which could be 10 rows of 3 answers each, 7 rows of 4 answers each (with two spaceholder clues), 6 rows of 5 answers each, 5 rows of 6 answers each, 4 rows of 7 answers each (with two spaceholder clues), or 3 rows of 10 answers each. It's up to you to figure out which it is. But I have considerately bunched the clues together for you in neat little groups of three.
1. Cooking pots
2. Unhealthy looking
3. 22222222222222222...
4. Places you must pay to go
5. Badly overcooks
6. Hunt
7. Common California cock
8. Egg cookers
9. Stuck
10. More lenient
11. Bette's family
12. What the Supreme Court did in Bush v. Gore
13. Concerning a former world capital
14. Controversial home protector
15. Messenger
16. Foreign currency, or foreign constellation
17. This can make you sick
18. Poorly-paid worker
19. Attractive English bathroom
20. Set up house far from home
21. Synthetic material
22. Cheese sauce
23. Chandler
24. Any which way
25. John Walker
26. Retained
27. Took in
28. A wrinkle, perhaps
29. Thoroughly cooked
30. Coated with lacquer
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Puzzle # 2: Ana-Gremlin
Each word in the following list gave one of it's letters away (to one of the other words) and received a new letter (from one of the other words) before being anagrammed. If you correctly unscramble them you will get a set of six related words. How they are related is for you to figure out. As an aid in solving, the items on the list are in alphabetical order.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1. BAKE
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 2. MOTH
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 3. YAM
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 4. WOMAN
5. CRAW _ _ _ _ _ _ _
6. ROGUE _ _ _ _ _ _ _ !
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Puzzle # 3: Crypto-Gremlin
“Onsquar qupt preston creator, knish gltpr clt irrsu fugz glr otpgn, eumr fugz glr ernpgh.”
-- Blueubr Styoryn Pgniltbr, fnmn Etyst Alrpgryduresh
For those of you who aren't familiar with Crypto-Gremlins, here's an explanation of what they are and how they work:
Crypto-Gremlins are cryptograms for the 21st century. Ordinary cryptograms can be solved by online programs; Crypto-Gremlins can't.
The key difference is that, before encoding a passage, I go over its text and make sure that every word begins with a consonant (or consonant sound) and ends with a vowel (or vowel sound).
Take, for instance, the sentence The cats are attending university to learn ballet.
1. The and to begin with consonants and ends with a vowels, so they're fine and would be left alone: THE, TO.
2. Cats and learn begin with a consonants, so that's okay, but they also end in consonants, which is not okay; therefore I will add a vowel of my choice (either A, E, I, O, U or Y) to the end of each: CATSE, LEARNO.
3. Are ends with a vowel, so I don't need to adjust that; but it also begins with a vowel, so that does need adjusting: QARE.
4. Attending begins with a vowel and ends with a consonant, so it needs adjustment at both ends. I'll change it to something like KATTENDINGE.
5. Ballet looks like it would need adjustment but it doesn't; the word ends with a vowel sound, so it gets left alone. BALLET.
6. Similarly, university looks like it would need adjusting but it doesn't; the u at the beginning has a consonant sound so it's left alone. UNIVERSITY.
Now the sentence reads The catse qare kattendinge university to learno ballet, and that's what I'll encrypt.
If a word is capitalized in the source material, I capitalize the first letter of its encrypted form.
If a word is hyphenated, I treat each of its parts as a separate word.
I try to keep the word encryption consistent; if I change CAT to CATO once in a quotation, I try to change CAT to CATO every time it appears in that quotation.
I will generally use all 6 of the standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U, and Y) at least once at the end of a word, to make the puzzles easier to solve. So you will generally be able to recognize right from the start which letters in the puzzle are vowels and which are consonants.
The bolded words at the top of each Crypto-Gremlin are the quotation to be deciphered; the unbolded words at the bottom give the source of the quotation.
That's basically it. It may sound complicated, but Crypto-Gremlins are actually fairly easy to solve once you get the hang of them.
PS: I recommend going to the American Cryptogram Association site and using the handy tool you'll find there to aid in trying out letter substitutions.