It’s Follow-Up Friday: Crosswordnado edition!

Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’m posting solutions to our Sharknado and Crosswordese puzzles from the last two weeks!

Two Follow-Up Fridays ago, I posted a deduction puzzle in honor of Sharknado 3 rampaging its way across TV screens all over the world, and I challenged you to complete the schedule of mayhem wrought by our five heroes with five different weapons across five different cities on five different days! (Whew!)

How did you do?

And that brings us to our second solution. Last week, we discussed crosswordese — those words that only seem to appear in crosswords, to the dismay and bafflement of casual solvers — and I created a 9×9 grid loaded with crosswordese.

Did you conquer the challenge?

ACROSS

1. Toward shelter, to salty types — ALEE
3. Arrow poison OR how a child might describe their belly button in writing — INEE
5. Flightless bird OR Zeus’s mother — RHEA
6. Hireling or slave — ESNE
8. “Kentucky Jones” actor OR response akin to “Duh” — DER
9. Compass dir. OR inhabitant’s suffix — ESE
12. Wide-shoe width OR sound of an excited squeal — EEE
15. No longer working, for short OR soak flax or hemp — RET
16. Like a feeble old woman OR anagram of a UFO pilot — ANILE
17. Actress Balin OR Pig ____ poke — INA

DOWN

1. Mean alternate spelling for an eagle’s nest — AYRIE
2. Old-timey exclamation — EGAD
3. Unnecessarily obscure French river or part of the Rhone-Alpes region — ISERE
4. Supplement OR misspelling of a popular cat from a FOX Saturday morning cartoon — EKE
7. Maui goose — NENE
10. An abbreviated adjective covering school K through 12 OR how you might greet a Chicago railway — ELHI
11. My least favorite example of crosswordese OR good and mad — IRED
12. Ornamental needlecase — ETUI
13. Movie feline OR “Frozen” character — ELSA
14. Shooting marble OR abbreviation for this missing phrase: “truth, justice, and ____” — TAW

I hope you enjoyed both of these challenging puzzles! If you haven’t had your fill of crafty puzzlers, worry not! We’ll be tackling another tough brain teaser in two weeks!

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Sharknado puzzle edition!

Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, we’re returning to the subject of holidays.

I like to talk about puzzly holidays, but this week has marked more of a cinematic holiday.

Yes, for the third summer in a row, a Sharknado movie has rampaged across our screens, bringing ridiculous action and inexplicable acts of shark-fighting heroism to millions of viewers.

And I thought to myself, what better way is there to mark the occasion than to create a Sharknado-themed deduction puzzle?

So that’s exactly what I did! Enjoy!

Sharknados are terrorizing cities across America! Every day, one of our heroes (April, Claudia, Fin, Gilbert, or Nova) has bravely ventured into a sharknado-afflicted city, armed with a weapon (baseball bat, chainsaw, grenade, laser, or rifle.)

No two heroes were in the same city on the same day, and no hero used any weapon more than once. No weapon was used more than once in the same day, nor was any weapon used more than once in the same city. Can you complete the schedule chart below?

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on TwitterPinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!