All hints are in the comments!

Monday, December 9, 2019

Dec. 9, 2019

|| || slimy, nudge, depict, sprain, dampen (his) spirit.
Image from the Internet.

The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed!
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.

8 comments:

OwenKL said...

The garden is a lovely place
    for all the bugs to play,
For them to romp around in
    on a summer's day.
For the praying mantis
    to nudge the lady bug aside
And grab the tasty aphid
    that had nowhere to hide.

The artistic snail's palette
    of iridescent slime,
Depicting trails of ichor
    Van Gogh would think sublime.
Does it sprain the mind
    to credit elegance
To this curly-housed mollusk's
    path of evidence?

Morning, when condenses
    the dew on leaf and petal
Refreshment it provides
    to each tiny beetle.
Never does it dampen
    the spirit of the day
In the lovely garden
    where bugs romp and play.

Ol' Man Keith said...

Thank you, Owen, for your richly detailed view of the cheery activity of Nature, a bug's eye view of our gardens.

In the tale of Reindeer Rudolph, we rarely get the full account of the hazing he had to endure before that foggy night. On earlier training drives, those mean reindeer used to nip & bite his hindquarters--mercilessly. Now that he's become Santa's go-to fog leader, they no longer champ on his rear. It's just not done!
~ OMK

Misty said...

I zipped right through all four jumble words, and got the second word of the solution instantly, but had trouble with the first word. So I had to go back to see what the problem was, and it turned out that the first word wasn't SMILY but something a bit more slippery and gooey. But I loved the cartoon with that very kind and joyful ghost coping with the rainy weather.

Owen, your poem was a delight even if it did remind us that even inside that lovely natural vegetation, there's a lot of predatory activity going on. And Ol'Man Keith, that's the silliest solution rhyme you've ever offered us--cracked me up and made me laugh out loud.

Wilbur Charles said...

I thought I had the solution before doing J's but I had to solve and get the remaining letters. I was all wet like that ghost.

Great poem. How many aphids does a lady bug eat in an hour?

WC

Sandyanon said...

Yes, the garden is a lovely place for bugs; bugs are not lovely to me. I've never gotten oven the "ycckk!" response. Nevertheless, your poem paints an attractive picture very appealingly. It does raise one question for me: why did the mantis just nudge the lady bug aside instead of eating her/it?I

The jumble clues were not hard, though I did have to think twice about the first one. But the solution eluded me; my excuse is that I was doing the jumble on the Tribune site and it left out that middle three letter word. So, getting a clue from your poem helped, Owen.

Sandyanon said...

Wilbur, I think a lady bug eats twice as many aphids in an hour as it eats in half an hour.

Ol' Man Keith said...

Sandy, Brava! You're a regular mathematist, a true arithmelogist!

And thanks, Misty ~ I enjoyed that one myself.
~ OMK

OwenKL said...

*** ALERT ***

If you work the Jumble for tomorrow at the Shockwave site, again the final solution will not register, for the exact same reason as today! From Sandy's comment about the Tribune site, it evidently had a different but comparable problem.

Today's solution was
DAMPEN (his) SPIRIT, but the online app would only recognize
DAMPEN ..... HISSPI. Hard to do since it also wouldn't allow an H to be entered.

Tuesday's puzzle answer is
OOOO (the) XXXX, but the only answer it will recognize is
OOOO ..... THEX.

The first time, I thought it was funny. Twice in a row is just sloppy.