damefox wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 3:36 pm
I have an argument for SHELL. Obviously the S_ELL is the same. But if in INDOCHINE you see DO instead of DOC, this still works because DO is part of the 7 notes on the solfege scale. Then HAL is an anagram of LA + H, and ta da SHELL. Shell is considered one of the Big Oil companies, which it could be said is a "certain set."
Now, there are a couple issues with this. Perhaps the biggest one, why in the world would anyone make a meta about Big Oil? The second one is that entries TIC and OUD are also anagrams of a solfege note + one extra letter. Since DO is the note in the entry, we can rule out OUD. But TIC is a problem. However, all the other anagrammed entries appear in the same order in the grid as their respective themers, so TIC could be ruled out for that reason.
I generally feel like if a solver has 100% landed on the correct mechanism, there should be no ambiguity in getting to the answer, and to me this was a lot of ambiguity. The inelegance of having RED in FLUSTERED (I spent so long looking for anagrams of colors - it's lucky GREED is only one letter from GREEN or I never would've noticed it) also made for a frustrating solve. And then there's the title... what in the world. This puzzle really didn't feel like it was up to their normal standard.
Hmmm - had not considered that RED could have easily been part of the set: Orange Indigo Violet Yellow, Red, Blue, Green. There are certainly 7 colors of the rainbow, and I can sing it if necessary!
My particular tale of woe was getting to the "OK, I need another of each set" and then getting them from the wrong places:
I started going for a MISSING letter so MAS - R, PETRI - D, SENZY - E
Of course the problem with that was its variability and the fact that I could find no lake or college, then I saw that one word contained all the letters of SNEEZY with one extra and the rest came pretty quickly.
Oh, and you know how the puzzle often plays into daily life...well today I was going by one of the local prisons and I saw GRUMPY climbing down the wall! "Gosh", I said to myself, "that's a little condescending!"