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.
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be a new-puzzler-friendly. So if you've never tried Sunday Puzzle before, and are scared to dive in the deep end, come on and dip your toes in here.
Last week's puzzle spotlighted a graphic novel which has already received a (former) presidential endorsement:
"Congressman John Lewis has been a resounding moral voice in the quest for equality for more than 50 years, and I'm so pleased that he is sharing his memories of the Civil Rights Movement with America's young leaders. In March, he brings a whole new generation with him across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, from a past of clenched fists into a future of outstretched hands." — Bill Clinton
More information about the book -- a link to a preview of the first 14 pages -- and, of course, a brand new puzzle for you to play with -- are all awaiting you below the orange squiggle...
First, tonight's puzzle. This is a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic -- full instructions can be found directly below tonight's puzzle.
If you'd like to take part in the group solving, come on down to comments and join in. We're friendly and we love having new people!
If you'd prefer solving the puzzle on your own (or if you're discovering this diary hours, days or weeks after it went up), no problem. Just set your comment preference to SHRINK (so you only see the subject lines of comments); then, if you get stuck, look for a subject line identifying a comment dealing with a clue you need help with, expand and read that comment, and you're good to go.
Tonight's puzzle has 6 rows, with 3 answers per row. Here are your clues:
1. musical instrument
2. coming to a point
3. sentence unit
4. workspace
5. characters in Doonesbury and G.I. Joe
6. what many folks think the Romney campaign did
7. Morrison
8. dot
9. choice
10. informal road
11. acquire knowledge
12. Ryan's budget numbers, for instance
13. might be compact
14. went downhill
15. took a gamble
16. Anne or Susan
17. kind of syndicate
18. system opposed by many conservatives
For those of you new to Sunday Puzzle, here's an explanation of
How JulieCrostics Work
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns. For the warm-up puzzles on Saturday I generally tell you how many rows and columns there are in the grid; for the regular puzzles on Sunday that's usually left to the solvers to figure out.
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) Alaska governor, (2) mountainous, and (3) clarify, the answers would be PALIN, ALPINE ( = PALIN + E), and EXPLAIN ( = ALPINE + X).
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:
PALIN E ALPINE X EXPLAIN
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.
To show you what a completed puzzle looks like, here is the solution to last week's puzzle.
rose M Morse O morose
beds A beads O abodes
gain R grain K raking
sure C cures O course
gist H sight N nights
last B blast E stable
The verticals read
MARCHB OOKONE -- which, when properly spaced, spells out
March, Book One, a graphic novel by John Lewis about his life and his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. The book won't be out until August, but you can read a preview of the first 14 pages
here.
This looks like a well-done and worthwhile project. I have the first volume on order and am looking forward to reading it this fall (and to recommending it to my local library).
Here is some more information about the book from the publisher:
Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president.
Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist for Swallow Me Whole).
March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.
Book One spans John Lewis’ youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.