The answers to last week’s pair of JulieCrostic puzzles were Dana Nessel, Ilhan Omar, and Tina Kotek, all of whom are candidates well worth supporting.
Dana Nessel is the Michigan Attorney General, and an excellent one who works hard on behalf of the people. I don’t live in Michigan but I receive her weekly e-mail describing some of the matters she is working on that week. It’s always an inspiring read, and I encourage folks to go to sign up for it.
She is up for re-election this year, and her opponent is Matthew DePerno, a Trump supporter who was involved in illegally gaining access to Michigan voting equipment to look for evidence to support Trump’s election fraud claims. Dana Nessel is very much the kind of person we need in attorney general offices; Matthew DePerno is a scary example of the kind of person who should never hold such an office. We can talk more about Dana Nessel and her campaign in the comment section if people are interested.
Ilhan Omar represents Minnesota’s 5th congressional district (which was also Keith Ellison’s district when he served in congress), and has been a consistently strong voice for good government and for policies to help ordinary people. (She, AOC, and Cori Bush were among the first to unionize their capitol hill offices.) We can talk more about Ilhan Omar in the comments section.
Tina Kotek has represented Oregon’s 44th district in the Oregon state legislature for the past 16 years, and when Democrats won a majority in 2012 she became speaker of the house. Now she’s the Democratic candidate to be Oregon’s governor, and a very good candidate at that. We can talk more about Tina Kotek in comments.
There are many more candidates running for office this year who are worth supporting, and tonight’s puzzle spotlights three more. But before we get to that, let’s pause for a classic campaign ad...
I’ve featured Dana Nessel in 12 of my past diaries, especially back when she first ran for attorney general. In this one from December 2017 I included a video of a great campaign ad she was running then, and I like it so much that I’m going to include it again today. (But click the link for the diary if you’d like to read a little more about Dana Nessel and see a few classic pictures of Noble Fur.)
All right, now it’s time to look at the completed answer grids for last week’s puzzles. Here are the clues for last week’s first puzzle:
1. poem
2. brought food to the table
3. are entitled to
4. one who eats
5. precipitated
6. small fish
7. not the same
8. chair of royalty
9. flying insects
10. what 9 might do to you if they don’t like what you're doing
11. baseball team or football team
12. making fun of
13. special family meal served on certain religious occasions
14. person who puts something in the mail
15. thin
And here is the answer grid. There were 5 rows, with 3 answers per row:
verse D served E deserve
diner A rained S sardine
other N throne S hornets
sting A giants E teasing
seder N sender L lenders
Each word in a row has all the letters of the previous word plus one new letter. For instance, SERVED has all the letters of VERSE, plus an added-on D, and DESERVE has all the letters of SERVED plus an added-on E. The add-on letters get placed in columns between the answer words, and when the grid is completed they spell out DANAN ESSEL. Put a space in the right place and that reads Dana Nessel.
All right, if last week’s first puzzle is clear, here are the clues and grid for last week’s second puzzle.
1. Be quiet!
2. possessive pronoun
3. what you might call something you're pointing at
4. British thank you
5. keyboard key
8. something to wag
7. famous princess
8. put in a secret place
9. rear
10. often follows do
11. listener
12. region
13. exists
14. do something bad
15. go down
16. occupational title
17. Stewart or Blagojevich
18. entrance
19. good grades
20. follows X once a year
21. Scottish hats
22. magazine which began publishing in December 1971
23. Dean's brother on television
24. identical
25. father
26. average
27. amusement, water, or trailer
sh I his T this
at L Alt I tail
Di H hid N hind
re A ear A area
is N sin K sink
Dr O Rod O door
As M Mas T tams
Ms A Sam E same
pa R par K park
The first add-on letters column spells out ILHANOMAR, and the second add-on letters column spells out TINAKOTEK. Properly capitalized and space, those read Ilhan Omar and Tina Kotek.
Yes, the desert sand cat is seeing correctly. Here are the clues for today’s puzzle.
Just one puzzle this week, rather than two, but once again there are three Candidates Worth Supporting featured because I included all three in a single puzzle. Which means there are four answers per row this week (rather than the more usual three answers per row). And as a helpful hint in solving the puzzle, the words in each row are 3, 4, 5, and 6 letters long.
1. kind of rummy
2. search engine
3. aptly named streaming service
4. famous large clock
5. friend
6. kind of deal or bargain
7. propel a bicycle
8. jumped
9. anger
10. brown, fried, or Spanish
11. apple juice
12. kind of card
13. social insect
14. isn't able
15. The ___ __ The Hat
16. lawsuit
17. 60-min. periods
18. hasty
19. let a friend have what you've got
20. on land
21. before
22. alcoholic drink
23. aquatic bird (see picture below)
24. creator of Howard (the duck)
25. followers of Q
26. graphic or liberal
27. look at intensely
28. gets on a soapbox
29. agency that goes after dealers
30. pass out cards
31. soup-serving tool
32. refer to indirectly
33. took a class
34. sparkling white wine
35. follows
36. Appalachian and Iditarod
37. star
38. sisters
39. Devin
40. underwater
41. body of water
42. chair
43. flower (see picture below)
44. puzzle
And that’s the puzzle for today. I hope you have fun solving it! If you have any difficulty just leave a comment and I or someone else can provide some help.
And now that you have the answers from last week and the new puzzle for this week, it must be just about time to move on to today’s poll question. But first let’s take a moment to look at last week’s poll question and answers…
.
Last week I posted an image and asked, “What does this image say to you?” Here’s the image:
No
the
.
If I had voted in the poll I think my choice would have been the final option listed:
Everyone should google for information about "period" so that people trying to find out who's googling for that information will have a surplus of data to sift through.
There are some bad-hearted people out there who intend to track and see who’s searching online for information about late periods and other things which could indicate a person who needs and is considering getting an abortion, and who these people want to locate and punish. So the more people who search for information about periods (and for information about medicinal abortions and about places which still perform abortions), the harder it will be for people trying to make life difficult for abortion-seekers to do that.
Most men have never had a period, so it makes sense for men to look for information about not having a period. Many women no longer have periods because they’re on the pill or because they’ve gone through menopause, which means they don’t need to have any worries about why they’re not having periods when they fill out period-tracking applications on whether they’ve had a period recently. Just think of it as a gift to those anti-abortion folks; they want to know who’s not having period or who’s seeking information about abortion, so we can make it easy for them to compile massively huge lists to pore through.
But Poll Cat tells me that’s not the intended answer to the poll!
According to Poll Cat, the image shows the letters No directly northeast of the letters the, which appear directly above a period ( . ) That means the answer Poll Cat had in mind when they submitted last week’s poll was option # 9 on the list:
No ne of the above.
Hmmm. I think maybe I should provide the poll question this week instead of letting Poll Cat do it. So here’s this week’s poll question:
Which Candidates Worth Supporting will be featured in next week's puzzle?