From the Page-A-Day puzzle calendar, here's a fun little word puzzle.
Use the same set of four consonants (in a different order each time) to fill in the blanks in these 6 entries to form 6 uncapitalized English words.
1. --OSSO-IN-
2. HE-O--O-IN
3. I--RO--IO
4. -AI--A-
5. -U--A-O
6. -U--A-L
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.
On Sunday nights, the regular Sunday Puzzle series features puzzles intended to be challenging enough to call for a team effort to solve; but these Saturday night warm-up puzzles are simpler and suitable for individual solving (although we usually make a party out of solving them too, so if you're in a party mood come join the solving team in comments).
The theme for the Saturday night puzzles this spring has been good quotes, but tonight is a little different. I've been very pressed for time this year so the Sunday Puzzle gremlins have been helping out by providing the puzzles, and tonight they insisted on giving time to a bad quote.
Good quotes are boring, they insisted. So tonight's puzzles will spotlight one of the gremlins' favorite recent Republican quotes:
"Ga'la nuts wispu biyonce niwa kpikufuytu couporyfe gronr ona kpacrtayos onuoi alapedite cnishti nuoa ona kihrza."
Of course, you'll need to decode the quote if you want to know what it says.
Be warned though: it's not a regular cryptogram. It's a Crypto-Gremlin (a kind of cryptogram which can't be solved by computer code-cracking programs which run through all the possible letter substitutions, but can be solved through the use of your wits).
If you're not familiar with how Crypto-Gremlins work you can find an explanation here. (And you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions here.)
Last week's code message went unsolved, so tonight's diary includes a step-by-step demonstration of how to decode it.
Tonight's diary also includes a new JulieCrostic which reveals the source of tonight's quote (and a full explanation of how JulieCrostics work, for the benefit of any newcomers). The clues and the puzzle party are waiting for you right below the orange cloud.
Last week's quote was by Luis Lang.
The gremlins misled me to believe that Luis Lang is the current incarnation of reporter Lois Lane (following her marriage to romantic rival Lana Lang and a subsequent sex change from Lois to Luis) but apparently that is not the case. It turns out that Luis Lang is a South Carolinian with medical problems and without insurance who has recently quit the Republican Party and come out strongly in favor of a single payer health care system.
Brainwrap (who's been diarying the story) recently interviewed Lang, as did Egberto Willies. But it'll take you 80 minutes to listen to both interviews. It only takes 5 minutes to solve and read the Luis Lang quote from last week's diary. Here's the quote, and a step-by-step demonstration of how to decode it.
Great drips gremli rcan rsposhe us ass uibs zpscbpt. Pews grst act, remhaelrgc jean gdsmgt/gdsmgt.
- 1. Start by writing down the end-letters (T, S, I, N, E and C). These stand for the vowels a, e, i, o, u and y, although we don't yet know which stands for which.
- 2. Next, look for 3-letter words (since these are almost always all-natural, add-on free). There are two: ass and act.
The only two vowels which appear commonly as doubles are e and o, so S is likely one of those two. Since S is the most common letter in this code (appearing 12 times), it's likely an e; let's try that out first (and fall back on o if e doesn't get us anywhere).
Now look at act. It has two vowels in a row. We can rule out -ea, since e is already taken. Likewise we can rule out -oe and -ie. So What we have is probably either -ay or -oy. Plug in T=y.
- 3. Aha! Since grst translates to --ey, it's probably they. Plug in G=t, R=h.
- 4. Aha again! Gdsmgt/gdsmgt translates to t-e-ty/t-e-ty. That's got to be twenty/twenty. Plug in D=w M=n.
- 5. The word remhaelrgc now looks like h-n----ht-. The letter preceding ht must be a g, so plug in L=g. And since it's a single vowel preceding ght, that vowel must be an i; plug in E=i.
Aha -- the word is hindsight! Plug in H=d, A=s.
- 6. We can now see that act is either soy or say. My money is on say, so I'm plugging in C=a.
- 7. Similarly, drips must be either whore or whole. My money's on whole: so P=l.
- 8. And from there it's easy. Rsposhe is helped; us is me; uibs is more; zpscbpt is clearly; and pews is like. The whole thing reads:
This whole thing has helped me see more clearly. Like they say, hindsight is twenty/twenty.
All right, that shows how to solve one of last week's puzzles. Let's return to this week's puzzles.
Here's a brand-new JulieCrostic. It has 4 rows, with 4 answers per row. When you've solved all the clues, the verticals will spell out the source of tonight's bad quote.
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. Have fun, and I'll see you in comments!
1. house cooler
2. alternative to bicycle for getting places
3. rocky outcrop
4. a thing which is sometimes just itself
5. Martin Luther King who delivered DNC invocations
6. south in Spain
7. author of Exodus
8. one way to fly (from 1979 to 1997)
9. concerning
10. 20th century Communist or 21st century conservative
11. impolite
12. below
13. commercial
14. O'Connor before she changed her name
15. Tyne
16. kind of diary
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!