Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly series for people who enjoy light mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, and odd bits of trivia.
The theme for this month's puzzles has been good quotes. Here's tonight's quote:
"In opera mud OTP, qua rnighd mud bdgpmd icon shoc tdyctip qnmuh ehkud xdocic mpobc xnmtncfa enyh ach mthfa gdfndxd ach'td scoc mud enbd ecyh tnsuma? Rpoh wptshidomn tnec ucofa bninoneudbd qudon bdfnxdtdbd qnmuh bnetdewdkma."
Of course, you'll need to decode it first if you want to read it.
For anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, please note that this is not a regular cryptogram; it's a Crypto-Gremlin. Crypto-Gremlins are a special kind of cryptogram -- ones which can't be solved by online programs which run through and test out every possible letter substitution, but which can be solved by reasoning and creative thinking.
If you're not familiar with Crypto-Gremlins you can find a detailed explanation of how they work here.
(And you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions here.)
It looks like I won't be here to take part in tonight's puzzle party, but I don't think you folks will have any trouble solving tonight's puzzles without me.
And I will be here for tomorrow night's first-Sunday-of-the-month potluck puzzle party which pucklady will be hosting. In exchange for my including them in a clue tonight, the Sunday Puzzle gremlins have constructed a special Valentine's Day One-Off puzzle to contribute to the potluck. It's very romantic, they assure me. (Having seen the title, I suspect gremlins have a somewhat unconventional idea of what's romantic.)
Meanwhile, for tonight, you'll find a new JulieCrostic (which reveals the source of tonight's quotation) right below the orange squiggle...
Here's tonight's JulieCrostic puzzle (so named in honor of Julie Waters, who founded the Sunday Puzzle series a little over 7 years ago). Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 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!)
Okay, I think that covers the basics. Here are the clues for tonight's puzzle. As I said in the diary intro, I'll be away tonight, but I don't think you'll have any trouble solving this without any comments from me. Have fun, and I hope to see you at tomorrow night's potluck!
1. alternative to die
2. pole
3. social misfit
4. next to
5. Robin, originally
6. follow
7. source of a recent sports-related controversy
8. Republican control of the house and senate
9. kind of eagle
10. Cameron's role
11. gremlin
12. weak
13. Democrat-turned-Republican Gillespie
14. football player
15. Republican action on climate change
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!