Welcome once again to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up -- a weekly Saturday night opportunity to have a little fun and to warm up your wits for the regular Sunday Puzzle.
The Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up theme for the past few weeks (and for one more week after tonight) is Candidates Worth Supporting, spotlighting noteworthy candidates in the upcoming elections.
Last week, though, was a little bit different. I was away and the Sunday Puzzle gremlins offered to fill in for me. But the subject they wanted to spotlight was a news story they had seen recently: the revelation, by a prominent US senator, that Ken Starr, the ostensibly "independent counsel" appointed to investigate Vince Foster's suicide and the Clinton's Whitewater investments, was actually a puppet controlled by a foreigner who had entered the US illegally and was trying to destroy US nuclear weapons capabilities.
Shocking? Yes. But according to the gremlins this has appeared in numerous headlines and news stories this election season, even though the mainstream media has done its best to conceal it.
Full details -- plus DKU notes on the political and cultural references in last week's puzzle, and a brand-new puzzle -- all await you below the fold...
As revealed in last week's puzzle vertical:
A r K
L a e
F n n
Yes! chortled the gremlins. As numerous newpaper headlines and stories have proclaimed, Ken Starr was being controlled by an Alien Life Form who came to earth in the mid 1980s and attempted to stop the US nuclear program. ALF ran Ken!
I tried to point out to the gremlins that, while that phrase can indeed be seen in numerous newspaper stories and headlines, that isn't exactly how it appears. The gremlins looked puzzled, so I showed them the differences between ALF ran Ken and Al Franken.
The gremlins simply snickered. To them, capitalization and word spacing are trivial matters, to be paid no heed (or, better, to be creatively altered as one pleases). I guess I should have known that, based on what they do to the Sunday Puzzle clues...
Speaking of clues, there were a lot of clues in last week's puzzle featuring cultural and political allusions. So before we get to tonight's puzzle, here are the DKU (Daily Kos University) notes on last week's puzzle:
1. Mr. Burns
KEN Burns is the maker of many well-regarded documentary series, including
The Civil War,
Baseball,
The Dust Bowl,
The Central Park Five, and, most recently,
The Roosevelts.
2. person who for many years was unfairly given sole credit for creating a famous comic book character
From
Mark Evanier, who knows more about comics than almost anyone else alive:
Around 1946, when DC was afraid of him suing them over ownership of Batman, [Bob KANE] secured a very lucrative contract with the company. One of its provisions stated that Bob Kane — and only Bob Kane — would be credited as the creator of Batman and that hero's major supporting players. Kane often acknowledged that certain supporting players were created by others but he insisted on his credit and thereafter refused to give it up or modify it.
(No time for me to write more about this, or to quote more about this, at the moment, but perhaps
quarkstomper can do a diary about it...)
3. Danish museum or Godwin variant
This is a reference to the
ARKEN museum and to
ARKEN's Law: "A discussion is over when present society is compared to George Orwell's Oceania..."
4. legendary monster
Release the
KRAKEN!
The Kraken: "Probably no legendary sea monster was as horrifying as the Kraken. According to stories this huge, many armed, creature could reach as high as the top of a sailing ship's main mast. A kraken would attack a ship by wrapping their arms around the hull and capsizing it. The crew would drown or be eaten by the monster. What's amazing about the kraken stories is that, of all the sea monster tales we have, we have the best evidence that this creature was based on something real."
6. kind of shop Archie used to hang out in
In the 1940s and 1950s Archie and his pals used to hang out in
Pop Tate's MALT Shop (later renamed the Chocklit Shoppe).
9. person who formerly was unfairly given sole credit for creating many famous comic book characters
Although in more recent years Stan
LEE has been good about saying that Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and many others who worked at Marvel comics were co-creators of various comics characters, in the early days of Marvel and well into the 1970s he often said things which implied he was the sole creator of those characters...
... Which fit in nicely with the corporate view. Lee was a company employee. Anything he created was on company time and owned by the company. The artists and other writers were freelancers; anything they created, they would have been entitled to a share of the enormous profits which the characters have generated.
This is another note which I don't have time to do justice to at the moment, but it's a story worth knowing and an injustice worth correcting.
11. 100 years ago this was a word for bloodsuckers
This isn't really a cultural or political allusion. Still, I think it's sort of interesting to know that a hundred years ago one of the plurals of flea was
FLEEN.
All right, enough of last week's puzzle. On to tonight's!
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 4 answers per row.
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!)
1. killer prefix
2. haunting sound
3. kind of bait Noonan says Republicans should stop taking
4. kind of prize suitable for many Republicans
5. degree
6. forbid
7. Republican member of congress, Libertarian candidate for president, and ACLU employee!
8. bramble
9. kind of card
10. common criminal offense
11. car company
12. visual complement
13. male
14. revolutionary
15. sexist pig
16. John Birch Society founder
17. interesting senate race
18. Sullivan and Schultz
19. Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder
20. made simpler
For the benefit of anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, here are 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!