Welcome to Sunday Puzzle, a weekly series for people who enjoy light mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, and odd bits of trivia.
Last night in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up I said that tonight would feature three puzzles in one. I was wrong. Tonight features four puzzles in one.
What happened is this.
- (1) There's a real-life puzzle which caught my interest. I think I know the answer to it. So...
- (2) I built a puzzle for tonight's diary around my solution to the puzzle. But...
- (3) the Sunday Puzzle gremlins sneegled (a cross between sneering and giggling which all of you who have gremlins of your own are no doubt familiar with). They said the solution to my puzzle was too obscure for people to easily recognize what the underlying puzzle was. So they made a puzzle of their own to 'improve' mine -- which they then appended to mine without consulting me first...
- (4) So I retaliated by pointing out their puzzle was too obscure in a different way. Ha, I thought, now they'll have to take theirs off and restore mine to its original state. But instead they came up with yet another puzzle, to explain their first puzzle -- and they appended this new puzzle to my puzzle as well.
So you folks have 3 puzzles to solve tonight, which will lead you to a 4th puzzle (which you may have already encountered and pondered) and to what I think is the answer (which you can check out to see if you agree).
On the good news side, I don't think you'll have any difficulty distinguishing my puzzle from the gremlins' puzzles, once you've solved them all.
But there's also some not-so-good news: while the order of the three puzzles is gremlin-logical, it is not the order in which the puzzles were created. So don't assume the first clues you see in tonight's puzzle are mine. Gremlins like to mix things up, so who knows which puzzle will be first when this diary goes up...
Oh, well. The gremlins are not as experienced as I am at constructing puzzles, so I'm sure you'll find it easy to tell their clues from mine and to solve their puzzles. And once you've solved theirs, the clues to mine will be the only ones left so that should make solving mine easy too. Have fun!
PS: if you solve tonight's puzzle too quickly and want something else to do, the solution to the Crypto-Gremlin in
last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up hasn't been posted yet. Here it is:
"Anyup oyui and Edict stop and Stcwe, wimsy ande’cd biggt cpmmymli otcy rcduysdmap."
(If you're not familiar with Crypto-Gremlins you can find an explanation of how they work
here, and you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions
here.)
I'll post a step-by-step demonstration of how to solve it in next Saturday's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up. So give it a try when you've got some free time, and come back Saturday to see how it's done (if you aren't able to solve it on your own) or to compare your method of solving it to mine (if you are able to solve it yourself.)
All right, enough introduction. Tonight's 4-in-1 puzzle is waiting for you right below the orange squiggle.
Before we get to tonight's puzzle, here are some NOTES FOR NEWCOMERS:
JulieCrostics are a special kind of acrostic puzzle, named in honor of Julie Waters who started the Sunday Puzzle series here a little over 7 years ago. If you're not familiar with how JulieCrostics work you can find a detailed explanation in last night's Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.
If you're new you should be warned that we have some mischievous gremlins who like to tamper with the Sunday night puzzle clues. In particular you should keep in mind:
* you can't trust the clue capitalization;
* you can't trust the clue punctuation;
* sometimes you can't even trust the word spacing.
Because of this, some of the clues may be hard to crack, and you may not understand the answer at first after it has been cracked. But the answers actually do make sense, once you look at them the right way. If you have any trouble understanding how an answer fits the clue, please leave a comment asking for an explanation.
The gremlins also like bundling the clues into tidy little groups of 3, regardless of how many answers there actually are per row. If the number of clues doesn't divide evenly by 3, they add a space-filler clue or two at the end to fill out the final bundle. If you see a clue at the end such as nothing to see, that could well be such a clue.
A small request: please don't put any any spoilers in the comment subject lines. Use the subject line of comments to identify what your comment will be about but keep any guesses as to clue answers or the verticals confined to the comment itself. That way folks who are still trying to crack a clue for themselves won't inadvertently see the answer before they're ready to see it. Thanks!
Okay, I think that covers all the basics. Here are the clues for tonight's puzzle. Have fun, and I hope to see you in comments!
1. before today
2. bellow
3. waterfall (or, more commonly, the first part of a city)
4. noble title
5. community member
6. John Howard Griffin title
7. kind of maid
8. toe trouble
9. sweetie
10. snack
11. Henry Calvin
12. hill hex
13. state
14. visit
15. Gandhi's truth
16. going in the wrong direction
17. famous roach
18. disease-free
19. sedimentary rock
20. rings
21. solid as a rock
22. little Indian's pin
23. kind of cold
24. acquainted with the night
25. sheet
26. ear
27. Agar's man
28. DDI
29. liar! [hint: no Clay]
30. Baker
31. wealth
32. type "M"
33. cheaper doll