Welcome once again to Sunday Puzzle, a weekly series for people who enjoy mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, odd bits of trivia, and the occasional furry animal.
The past few puzzles (both here and in the Saturday night warm-up series) have featured solutions which either early (spotlighting Thanksgiving weeks before Thanksgiving arrives) or late (spotlighting Halloween after it had passed). Well, tonight’s puzzle is both early AND late. The important part of what’s in the spotlight is still in the future, and yet what’s in the spotlight has been around since early October. What is it? Solve tonight’s puzzle and find out!
Tonight’s puzzle is a JulieCrostic (a special kind of acrostic named after Sunday Puzzle founder Julie Waters).
If you’re new to Sunday Puzzle you can find complete instructions on how JulieCrostics work at the bottom of last night’s Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up. Be warned, however: the clues in the Saturday night warm-up puzzles are generally pretty straightforward, but we have 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 at first how a particular answer fits the clue it's an answer to. 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 and I or one of the other puzzlers will try to provide 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. For instance, if the puzzle had 5 rows with 4 answers each, there would be only 20 clues, so the gremlins would add another clue (such as empty, or blank, or place-holder, or this isn’t what it looks like) to make the number come out right and to let you know it’s not really a puzzle clue.
A small request: please put a SUBJECT LINE at the top of your comment to indicate what your comment is about. For instance, if your comment contains your guesses at the answers to clues 4, 5 and 6, your subject line might read 4-5-6 answers. Or, if you think you’ve figured out what the verticals say, your subject line might read verticals! Putting subject lines on comments makes it easier for folks who are looking for help with a particular part of the puzzle to find helpful comments and helps folks who are still trying to crack a clue for themselves to avoid seeing an answer before they're ready to see it. Thanks!
All right, here are the clues for tonight’s puzzle. Have fun, and I hope to see you in the comments!
1. Stand point 2. Achieve underhandedly 3. Squabble
4. Darker than black girls? Bravo! 5. Stay 6. Residents of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and China
7. Imposed a penalty 8. Add to list 9. Kind of fee
10. Kind of release 11. Puzzles 12. Puts up again
13. Puzzle 14. Abby and Martin, at last! 15. rational phone
16. 10, perhaps 17. Something with a specified number of levels 18. Sounded old
19. What D. and D. did 20. What Jack Nicholson and William Shatner often did (but not together!) 21. Made to appear like something it’s not
PS: Last week’s puzzle still hasn’t been solved! I had intended to reveal the answer tonight — and then an idea occurred to me. One of the hardest parts about doing these puzzles is coming up with an idea for what to spotlight each week. So next week I’ll use one of the puzzles — either the warm-up or the regular, I haven’t decided yet — to reveal the meaning of last week’s verticals. (So if you want to beat me to the revelation, you’ve got at least 6 days left to figure out and post the answer.)