Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
I wasn't able to take part in the warm-up diary last week; as the verticals last week partially explained, I needed to host a party in memory of a friend who died last year.
I am here tonight, but this is the last week I'll be able to participate in the weekly puzzle diaries for a while. In a few days I'll be catching a bus up to Maine for blueberry season, and while I'm up there I'll have very little internet access (except on rainy days off when I can bicycle to a library and use computer there).
But don't despair: I'll be away but the puzzles won't. Before I leave I'll queue up enough Warm-Up diaries to last until I return. So there'll be a new warm-up puzzle for you folks to enjoy each week (hopefully without too much gremlin tampering).
And the regular Sunday Puzzles will continue as well. Pucklady will be hosting our potluck puzzle parties the first Sunday of the month; Villanova will be providing her delightful JulieCrostics on the third Sunday of the month; and I'll queue up JulieClassics (re-posts of some of Julie Waters' earliest Sunday Puzzles) for the weeks in between.
Tonight's puzzle awaits below the fold. Have fun, and I'll see you in comments!
Here are the clues for tonight's puzzle.
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, have at it! If you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. small informal restaurant
2. encircled
3. ruled
4. malice
5. Irish pie
6. burgers
7. sends a greeting
8. hesitates
9. folks Seeger sang with
10. ledge
11. plump
12. newly
13. occupation
14. small bomb
15. exits
For the benefit of anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, here are 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!