Do you like puzzles? Do you like a little light political humor? Do you like pictures of adorable kitties (accompanied by hilarious captions)?
Well, two out of three ain't bad. Sorry about the lack of kitty pictures this week, but we do have entertaining puzzles (supplemented with the occasional educational tidbit and political barb).
Welcome to Sunday Puzzle -- a chance 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.
I'm writing this introduction in a time warp; you'll be reading this Sunday morning but I need to get it typed and queued Tuesday as I'll be away from home this week and don't know how much computer access I'll have.
So I don't know where we stand with the JulieChallenge yet. It's possible we completed it May 30th when we reached Phase III # 45, which says "No question yet. Please check back soon." Or it's possible that's actually a puzzle, one we need to solve. Radical simplicity is looking into this, so we should know soon.
There's a puzzle which went unsolved 3 weeks ago, part of a puzzle which went unsolved 2 weeks ago, and several puzzle bits which went unsolved last week. You'll find these, along with a new 27-clue JulieCrostic, right below the nurple...
Leftover from 2 weeks ago
We still haven't solved JulieChallenge puzzle Phase III # 15.
What's next in this sequence?
1, 2, 3, -4, 5, 8, 3, 14, ??
We know the answer is 47; what we don't know is why.
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Leftover from 2 weeks ago
Two weeks ago the solving crew figured out what the verticals were but failed to figure out what the verticals meant. To refresh your memories, the verticals read:
U E D
S Y I
A S C
N T K
A E E
R R N
V N S
I included a note with the puzzle:
IMPORTANT NOTE: there's a dash missing from the verticals today; the answer won't read correctly until you figure out the correct placement.
So far no one has figured out the correct placement. You've got another chance this morning -- but you'll need to hurry and solve it before you reach the bottom of this diary, because I've included the solution there.
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Leftover from last week
leftover 1. We solved the verticals of pucklady's acrostic, but the final row of the puzzle remains unsolved. There are only two answers in that row, which will make solving it more difficult. The clues are:
16 imaginers
17 chapter and verse
There should be 9 letters to the first answer and 10 letters to the second -- the added letter being an S.
leftover 2. Pucklady also posted 5 Lost In Translation film titles. We still haven't found the movie which re-mis-translates to The Pass. (Hint from Pucklady: this is a multiple-Oscar-winning film, and it's not The Graduate)
possible leftover 3. Plf posted 2 Lost In Translation sayings, "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten" and "Invisible idiot". We solved the first -- and I think we solved the second, but I'm not sure.
The answer I posted for this is "Out of sight, out of mind" -- but Peter didn't say that was right, and posted a hint to the solution farther down the comment page, so there may be a different solution.
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Today's puzzle
There's a fair chance I won't be able to take part in Saturday evening's warm-up puzzle party or this morning's party either. So just in case, I'd better tell y'all now while I'm typing this diary and have internet access: there's a slight problem with today's acrostic.
I came up with what I thought were interesting verticals, wrote out the clues quickly, and was about to start writing out clues when I noticed that the answers in row 4 are all 1 letter longer than the corresponding answers in the other rows.
Unfortunately I don't have time to come up with a new set of answers for that row which have the proper lengths. So you'll just have to keep that in mind: the answers in one row are a different length than the answers in the other rows.
Some additional help: one of the letters in all the words in row 4 is A. if one removed the letter A (so that the answers in row 4would be the same length as the answers in the other rows) it would be possible to make good answers out of all the entries in the row except the final one.
Okay, here's today's JulieCrostic. Usual rules apply. (If you're new and aren't familiar with JulieCrostics, you can find the rules, introductory puzzles, and examples of solved puzzles in our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up).
1. android, for example
2. sda, bfs, bhr or bgr, informally
3. beam used for structural support
4. fairy tale rose
5. pucklady wrote the clue for this one
6. precedes big
7. troop support group
8. kind of ball
9. cook's de france
10. judge david
11. all-star jackson
12. swamp
13. there's a song about watching all the girls do this
14. evil spirit
15. in the past
16. that's the answer!
17. quaker whose quest for vengeance destroyed him
18. johann sebastian, for instance
19. quantity of cookies
20. hazardous undertaking for one who lives with a feline
21. country known for its war
22. title for a saint
23. something which has fins
24. part of a saying about pre-digital clocks
25. paradise
26. bliss sank
27. take back trademark
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SPOILER: what the verticals from 2 weeks ago say.
U E D
S Y I
A S C
N T K
A E E
R R N
V N S
So what we have is
USANARV EYSTERN DICKENS. That doesn't seem to say anything meaninful.
But as I said in the introductory note to the puzzle, the letters a d a s h are missing from the verticals and need to be placed correctly in order for the verticals to make sense.
That should be pretty easy for Sunday Puzzle regulars. Those are the first letters of the 5 words in the verticals. Placed correctly, those letters spell out sUSAN hARVEY aSTER aND dICKENS -- the names of pucklady and her three cats.