It's Valentine's Day today, so what could be more appropriate than starting with:
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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.
There's a good chance that I'll be away tonight and will miss have to miss tonight's puzzle party. If so, the verticals to tonight's JulieCrostic spell out where I am. (And the verticals to tomorrow night's puzzle will spell out why.)
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 10 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. Have fun!
1. extract
2. husk
3. large pieces
4. posterior
5. Asian people or language
6. kind of place
7. heap
8. gave drinks to
9. break up
10. Morgue de la Paix
11. awakening pundit
12. wear pants?
13. break up
14. kind of candle
15. counteract HR
16. rich soil
17. well-known Willy
18. regular
19. bitter quarrel
20. joined together
21. complained about trifles
22. household gods
23. agreements
24. visible feature
25. western train destination
26. genuine congressional maverick
27. highest-ranking woman in the senate
28. close loudly
29. prominent religion
30. lose
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!