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 (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
I'm away until September, 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.
For instance, the answer to last week's puzzle was "Barry's Boys", a great Chad Mitchell Trio song about Barry Goldwater and his supporters in the 1964 presidential election.
There were several cultural and political references in last week's puzzle. Notes on those, and the clues for tonight's puzzle, await you directly below...
Some quick notes on some of last week's clue answers:
2. Laurence who would have made a good Supreme Court justice
That would be Laurence TRIBE, who was touted as a good Supreme Court possibility during the Clinton years but, alas, was not nominated. (Here's a link to a recent piece Tribe wrote concerning the Hobby Lobby decision.)
4. infamous House committee
Before it became known as HUAC, what would become the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was the DIES Committee:
On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties. It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (D-TX), and therefore known as the Dies Committee.
In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so, prompting known anti-black committee member John E. Rankin (D-MS) to remark, "After all, the KKK is an old American institution." Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration...
The Committee also put together an argument for wartime internment of Japanese Americans, known as the "Yellow Report." The investigation was presented to the 77th Congress and alleged that certain cultural traits—Japanese loyalty to the Emperor, the number of Japanese fishermen in the US, and the Buddhist faith—were evidence for Japanese espionage...
(If you're curious, here's a link to
more information about committee chair Martin Dies.)
6. like Fox News: obviously, that would be BIASED.
14. massacre site
The Mỹ Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968. It was committed by U.S. Army soldiers from the Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but served only three and a half years under house arrest...
All right, that covers the cultural and political references in last week's puzzle clues. Here are the clues for tonight's puzzle.
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, have at it! If you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 3 rows, with 4 answers per row.
1. often-fatal lung disease
2. bathing place
3. contest
4. nearly
5. river in Spain
6. individual
7. flashy sign
8. hole __ ___
9. Mad publisher
10. kind of cube
11. noted for being quiet
12. doctor
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!