Welcome to Sunday Puzzle -- a weekly opportunity to exercise your wits, have fun, and occasionally learn the odd fact or two in the process.
Sunday Puzzle posts weekly, generally at 9:30 am Eastern time / 6:30 am Pacific time, and features puzzles suitable for group puzzle-solving.
On tap this morning: a 30-clue acrostic, a mini-crossword, and answers to the previous weeks' Spoonerism puzzles.
First up is this morning's JulieCrostic.
If you aren't familiar with JulieCrostics, you'll find an explanation of how they work, an example of a completed puzzle, and a sample puzzle to practice on over in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
There are a few differences between the warm-up puzzles and the Sunday morning ones, though:
(1) In the Saturday night warm-up puzzles the clues tend to be fairly straightforward. Most of the clues there are definitions or synonyms. In these Sunday morning puzzles, the clues are often a little more devious.
(2) In the warm-up puzzles all the clues in a row are grouped together, so you know from the start how many answers are in the rows; but in the Sunday morning puzzles, I group the clues in bunches of 3 regardless of how many answers there actually are per row. (If the number of actual clues doesn't divide evenly by 3, I add in place-holder clues such as blank or I have no clue to fill out the last group.) Figuring out how many answers there are per row is part of the challenge.
(3) Some weeks (such as today) all the words in the clues are in lower case and you have to provide your own capitalization.
If you'd like to solve the puzzle on your own, you can set comments to Hide or Shrink. Or, if you'd like to be part of the team effort, set your comments to Expand; this will let you see what others are saying so you can pool your efforts with theirs and make a party out of solving the puzzle.
1. those who say this repeatedly often say bah! as well
2. march, perhaps
3. often comes between you and me
4. lack
5. feeble
6. attended
7. along with 12, this is one of 12
8. fertility interest
9. recommends a diary
10. naked people
11. stardust blankets
12. see 7
13. onion mood
14. descriptive of stars
15. beginnings
16. fixed
17. followers of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, of Browning, Dickinson, Frost, and of Baez, Dylan, Guthrie
18. religious offshoots
19. high points
20. underwear
21. one of dc's challengers
22. challenge
23. true seals aren't
24. scorched
25. most precious
26. follows ei
27. describes clues 26, 27, 29 and 30 (and answers 12, 13, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30)
28. precedes a million
29. enunciate
30. often high or hyper
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Next up, here's a mini-crossword. It's a cryptic -- the kind of crossword featured in The Nation, Harpers, and British newspapers. If you're not familiar with this type of puzzle you can find a good explanation of how to solve cryptic clues here.
1. He could be a pope, especially with robes on. (4)
5. You'd have to search through a very old roster in order to find someone like John V. Lindsay nowadays. (4)
6. Strange kind of job. (3)
7. One-on-one action could provide indicator of nighttime entertainment. (4)
1. Press release about making pictures of naked people in a way that's hard to recognize. (4)
2. You might get a strange idea of what Dondero used to be, for one. (4)
3. Erase peculiar unsound nouns. (4)
4. Big Bird is one, some have said! (4)
Bonus fun! I've colored in two of the answers, you get to color in a third. Which one?
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Two weeks ago I ran some Spoonerism puzzles. The first set was solved quickly:
1: broken countenance (2) [ANSWER: burst face / first base]
2: goddamned autumn! (2) [ANSWER: cursed fall / first call]
3: famous Patty struck out (2) [ANSWER: Hearst fanned / first hand
4: lousiest little flute (2) [ANSWER: worst fife / first wife]
But the second set still isn't completely solved. Here are the answers to the ones that have been solved:
1: leg of the person whom Ochs' draft dodger believed in (2)
[ANSWER: Dodd gam / God damn!]
2: caustics, wool colorings, and numerical data (5)
[ANSWER: lyes, lamb dyes, and statistics / lies, damn lies, and statistics]
3: draw a small circle on a pig (2)
[ANSWER: dot ham / hot damn!
5: baby buggy has pictures of Doris and Dorothy on it, but they're faded and hard to see (4)
[ANSWER: pram with faint Days / damn with faint praise
That leaves two left still unanswered:
4: folding money with pictures of presidential candidates are valuable to me, but singles with Howard's picture aren't worth even miniature metric amount (9, but one of those is a contraction)
and
6: it takes a pair of pigs to draw this small circle on (3)
I'll give you the answer to the last one now. A small circle so big it takes two pigs to draw it on is a
two ham dot (
too damn hot!)
That leaves only one Spoonerism remaining, and it's a good bet that the word damn figures into the underlying phrase somehow. Can you figure out what the phrase is? It's a reasonably well-known phrase -- and it ties in with the nature of this morning's acrostic verticals (as revealed last night in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up)
1:13 PM PT: For the benefit of anyone reading this diary late, a quick note on the acrostic clues. The clues I originally posted led to a minor mistake in the verticals, so I have gone back and changed a few of the clues to make the verticals read correctly.
Only one of the comments in the thread is affected. But if you are working the puzzle on your own, and read the comments for help, that's why the answers in comment # 57 don't match the answers you come up with.