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The answer to last week’s Sunday Puzzle was Val Demings — who, as many of you are probably already aware, is running in Florida for the US senate seat currently occupied by Marco Rubio.
(And Marco Rubio, as many of you are also probably aware, is one of the worst senators currently in office, so Val Demings is very much a Candidate Worth Supporting and Rubio is very much a candidate who needs defeating.)
Tonight’s Sunday Puzzle features one more Candidate Worth Supporting, and then Sunday Puzzle will be going back on hiatus.
Normally I’ve been posting the answer to one week’s puzzle the following week (as I’m about to do for last week’s puzzle). But since I won’t be posting a puzzle next week, this time I’ll post the answer in a comment early Wednesday morning. So if you have any trouble solving tonight’s puzzle and would like to see what the answers to the clues are and who the spotlighted candidate is, come back to look at the comment section on Wednesday.
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All right, let’s look at the clues and answers to last week’s puzzle. (The puzzle was a little harder to solve than it should have been because I messed up badly on clue # 12, and didn’t spot the error to fix it until long after the puzzle had gone up. My apologies.)
Here are the clues (with the bad clue # 12 replaced by one which actually works):
1. rocks containing metals such as gold and iron
2. wanders
3. people who help you get things from one place to another
4. smaller quantity
5. [picture of seals]
6. star character of (at least) a dozen movies and 6 tv series
7. look for
8. like a cat's fur
9. genuflects
10. only
11. Bob and Elizabeth (a married couple, both of whom were senators)
12. Veronica in comics and Henry Cabot in the senate
13. clever remark
14. dudgeon
15. provides gear
And here is the answer grid:
ores V roves M movers
less A seals I Lassie
seek L sleek N kneels
sole D doles G Lodges
quip E pique S equips
In these puzzles, each clue answer in a row contains all the letters of the previous answer plus one new letter. This makes the rows easy to solve — once one correctly guesses any answer in the row, the other answers in the row are usually fairly easy to figure out by adding or subtracting a letter from the answer you’ve figured out, and anagramming to find words which match the other clues in the row.
For example, in the first row ROVES contains all the letters of ORES plus a V. (The V then gets written into a column between ores and roves.) And MOVERS contains all the letters of ROVES plus an M. (The M then gets written into a column between roves and movers.)
When all the clues have been correctly solved and all the add-on letters written in, the letters in the add-on columns will spell out the answer to the puzzle. In this puzzle the columns read VALDE and MINGS — which, when decapitalized and properly spaced, spell out Val Demings.
If you think you understand how these puzzles work, then you’re all set for tonight’s puzzle. It’s a nice short easy one. The spotlighted candidate is not nearly as well-known as some of the other candidates I’ve spotlighted, so as a little bit of help I’ll mention that she’s a candidate for congress. The incumbent Democrat, who has held the seat for 36 years, decided to retire after this current term, and there’s a danger of the Republicans taking this seat so this is an important race we need to win.
(And the spotlighted candidate is a very good person who is excellent on the issues and who has done good things for the people of her state in volunteer work and in the office she’s held for the past 4 years. She’s the kind of person we very much need in congress if we hope to get good things accomplished in the years ahead.)
1. narrow beam of light
2. change
3. estrogen producer
4. Caesar, Vicious, or Cookie Monster
5. stated
6. name of a cartoon duck
7. member of The Squad -- a candidate very much worth supporting
8. carbonated drink
9. regional
10. feline
11. informal conversation
12. use unfair means to win
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NOTE: my computer is not behaving as it should, so I’m going to turn it off for an hour or so and won’t be reading or posting comments for a while. But I will be back later after the computer is a bit better rested, so if you have any questions you’d like to ask or comments you’d like to make — about last week’s puzzle, about this week’s puzzle, about Val Demings, or whatever’s on your mind after reading all this, I’ll enjoy reading what you have to say.