Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly series for people who enjoy light mental exercise spiced with politics, humor, and odd bits of trivia.
The theme of the warm-up puzzles in recent weeks has been good quotes. Last week's quote was from Neil Gaiman...
Yes! The person who wrote Fortunately The Milk ("...quite possibly the most exciting adventure ever to be written about milk since Tolstoy's epic novel War and Milk.") The person who wrote Coraline, Mirrormask and Stardust. The person who sings the Fireball XL-5 theme song in the video posted at the top of this very diary!
You can find the full quote lower down in tonight's diary. Meanwhile, here's tonight's quote:
Bushy Psi’tn idol bytz twyawdhrd wl mdhoes,
Wus cdseoz bytz gasodfwsol wl obdhoes.
Hlb kltwy gletn myrass:
Ulb wlzrus fyhn us is?
Us fyh’wl ksxshl tfyas Iliin Pdhoyed.
Of course, you'll need to decode the quote if you want to know what it says.
It's pretty easy to decode. Be warned though: it's not a regular cryptogram. It's a Crypto-Gremlin (a kind of cryptogram which can't be solved by computer code-cracking programs which run through all the possible letter substitutions, but can be solved through the use of your wits).
If you're not familiar with how Crypto-Gremlins work you can find an explanation here. (And you can find a handy tool to help you with letter substitutions here.)
Tonight's diary also includes a new JulieCrostic which reveals the source of tonight's quote (and a full explanation of how JulieCrostics work, for the benefit of any newcomers). The clues and the puzzle party are waiting for you right below the orange cloud.
Here's the text of last week's Neil Gaiman quote (which was successfully decoded by new Sunday Puzzle poster Quabbin):
“It was explained to me that people do not masturbate in the DC Universe. Actually, that explains a lot. That’s probably why the characters all dress in tight costumes and go around thumping the shit out of each other.”
Gaiman was referring to an experience he had in the early days of his DC comics-writing career. Here's the story, as recounted in an entry on the site
Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed):
COMIC URBAN LEGEND: There is no masturbation in the DC Universe.
STATUS: ... True
One of the more interesting facets of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is how odd the early issues are compared to the rest of the series, because the early issues of Sandman were firmly placed within the DC Universe. Once Gaiman established himself, he really pulled away from the world of superheroes (while still occasionally noting some connections), but in those early days, he was at the mercy of DC, who thought it made more sense for a brand new character like Morpheus to connect to other DC characters...
By the second story arc, Doll’s House, Gaiman had gained more freedom, but the comic was, even then, still intended to be a part of the DC Universe ... so you would think that DC might take some issue with the topics being discussed in the Doll’s House storyline, including a serial killer’s convention.
Well, Michael Berry had the same thought, so he asked Gaiman about it in a piece Berry did in 1991 for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Gaiman let him know that, in the issue about the serial killer’s convention:
“the only word that got censored was ‘masturbate,'” Gaiman says. “It was explained to me that people do not masturbate in the DC Universe. Actually, that explains a lot. That’s probably why the characters all dress in tight costumes and go around thumping the shit out of each other.”
Great quote, no?
First off, please note ... that the editor most likely only meant that you can’t SAY “masturbate” in comics. I don’t doubt that the editor phrased it to Gaiman this way, though. So yeah, it is more the word than the action, but it’s funny either way, right?
You can learn more about Gaiman's Sandman series
here. And as a bonus, here's a video with Gaiman reading several short stories written by other people in the Gaiman style.
All right, thank you for your patience. And now, at last, here's tonight's JulieCrostic. When you've solved the puzzle the verticals will identify the source of tonight's quotation.
Tonight's JulieCrostic has 4 rows, with 4 answers per row. Two of the answers are literary references, and two of the answers are 2-word phrases.
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, you can jump right in; if you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
(Also if you're new, a request: please don't post any answers or other spoilers in comment subject lines. Instead, please put any guesses at possible answers into the comment itself. Thanks!)
Okay, I think that covers the basics. Here are the clues. Have fun, and I'll see you in comments!
1. tableland
2. women
3. woman
4. tasted
5. where to find dragons and dragon-riders
6. what birds often do
7. look through window from outside
8. trailblazer
9. March girl
10. wash
11. ___ ___ bomb
12. under
13. hasty
14. fragment
15. held jointly
16. most difficult
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!