Late? you might ask. Isn't this the time when Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up usually posts?
Yes, it is. Like last weekend, the diary title is a hint to the puzzle solution rather than a comment on the posting time.
Last week's warm-up puzzle ("A little early") spotlighted Thanksgiving, still to come, and last week's regular puzzle ("A Little Late") spotlighted Halloween, already past. Tonight's puzzle again spotlights Halloween, with something a lot of people find very scary. What is it? Solve the puzzle and find out...
Tonight’s puzzle is a JulieCrostic (a kind of acrostic named after Sunday Puzzle founder Julie Waters). If you’re familiar with how JulieCrostics work you can jump right in; if you don’t know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions at the bottom of this diary.
Tonight’s puzzle has 3 rows, with 4 answers per row. Here are the clues:
1. kind of dog 2. thick slice 3. removes water 4. excuses
5. currently the time in western Tennessee 6. expense 7. applies paint 8. east and left
9. Trump voter 10. upper limits 11. hold tightly 12. holds tightly
For the benefit of anyone new to these puzzle diaries, 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 were1. 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!