XWord Muggles Forum

So. Not Semaphore Code? Holy Toscanini! Desktop littered with colorful flags. Alas, no mug for the Commodore!
Did learn the color of various religious order's habits, our eyes have cones, don't order a Black & Tan in Ireland, and pink may not be a color? And perhaps look for a MIKE answer in upcoming Gaffney grid?
Terrific puzzle. __-__ -__ --- -----

So it had nothing to do with Rotoscan?

Contrary to my initial confused reaction when the answer popped out, I now see that this was a very well-executed meta. I got the right answer on Friday, but it took me a day or two to realize that, in addition to being used to send Morse code, WIRES are usually color-coded (hence the tight and doubly-elegant tie-in to the title). Duh.

Nice to know I’m putting that electrical engineering degree to good use.

Nope. Not in a month of Sunday’s, or Fridays, or Saturdays, was I going to get this one. Congrats to all of you who de-coded it!

Well, I'm humming "Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door" as I put this one in the (also hummable?) "so close, but yet so far" category.

Like others, looked for colors and shades along the 'add white' track, even looked for colored chemical symbols (Au, Cu, Co, ...) and 'missing' colors. Also, looked for computer coding references. Never a Boy Scout, but old enough to remember color coded resistors and wire wrapping circuit boards.

Searched my tally spreadsheet for the word "code," thinking back to a previous puzzle that used Morse's dit and dah (if memory serves), but somehow got no hits. Even had Morse Code written on my scratch pad! While I did 'tint' the CODE letters, it was done only in the theme answers and I failed to comprehend the in-between sequence. Not sure if you can get any closer to a solve without solving!!

Time to whitewash and reset for Thursday!

Cheers!

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 12:09 am Soooo.... what's worse than not figuring out the mechanism? How about figuring out the mechanism but reading dot-dash-dot as L instead of R? Yep, I sent in WILES as my answer. To me, it's apropos: ˈwī(-ə): a trick or stratagem intended to ensnare or deceive.

I missed a dot (D) in the 3rd letter and sent in WINES, which seemed odd, but then I thought about red and white. Should have double-checked!

Meg wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:38 am

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 12:09 am Soooo.... what's worse than not figuring out the mechanism? How about figuring out the mechanism but reading dot-dash-dot as L instead of R? Yep, I sent in WILES as my answer. To me, it's apropos: ˈwī(-ə): a trick or stratagem intended to ensnare or deceive.

I missed a dot (D) in the 3rd letter and sent in WINES, which seemed odd, but then I thought about red and white. Should have double-checked!

Is that supposed to make me feel better? Well...okay, it does.

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:39 am

Meg wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:38 am

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 12:09 am Soooo.... what's worse than not figuring out the mechanism? How about figuring out the mechanism but reading dot-dash-dot as L instead of R? Yep, I sent in WILES as my answer. To me, it's apropos: ˈwī(-ə): a trick or stratagem intended to ensnare or deceive.

I missed a dot (D) in the 3rd letter and sent in WINES, which seemed odd, but then I thought about red and white. Should have double-checked!

Is that supposed to make me feel better? Well...okay, it does.

Actually, I wasn’t trying to make you feel better. I just thought it was funny! This better not be the week they pull my entry.

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 12:09 am Soooo.... what's worse than not figuring out the mechanism? How about figuring out the mechanism but reading dot-dash-dot as L instead of R? Yep, I sent in WILES as my answer. To me, it's apropos: ˈwī(-ə): a trick or stratagem intended to ensnare or deceive.

You should still put that one in the W column.

TMart wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:01 am Nice to know I’m putting that electrical engineering degree to good use.

I’m also an electrical engineer and spent a while trying to eke out five of the resistor or capacitor color codes. BLACK and BROWN were self-evident (0 and 1) and red (2) possibly from the color of slave ants. But then I ran out of ideas. In case electronic codes are used in future - which I doubt coz that would be even more obscure - here they are for non-EEs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code
Nice meta though... Inspector Morse rides again!

I don’t feel so bad when the meta I miss requires Googling for the piece — I figure puzzles should be self-contained — and I’m not fluent in Morse. I still kick myself and think that I should have gotten it. But it doesn’t bother me quite as much.

Ah! It’s a Rorschach Test! Thought I when first viewing the colored in squares. That was after being dumbfounded that Mike could have constructed this beauty using these 4 common letters only in these 5 answers.
I spent more than a day trying to give a name to this object or critter- no rabbit in that hole, though it sorta kinda looked like a bunny
Finally it clicked and I got the message.
My only experience with Morse Code was 40 years ago as a 2nd grade teacher. The kids loved it when I gave them a worksheet in MC to decipher-
Good for hand, eye, brain coordination. Shades of Matt Jr.
It may also have helped that I am currently diving back into Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot often receives a telegram to help the plot along in her books.

Wow, I don't even mind not getting this one. . . .

This was a "sleep on it" one for me. DiOCEsE was the entry point for me - I saw the complete word CODE anagrammed within it and spent too much time looking at the leftover letters. I finally reworked the grid in Excel (thanks Joe Ross!) and started coloring in all the C O D E S as instructed by 55D. I immediately noticed those letters were only in the 5 theme answer, but it took a while to notice the dot and dash patterns.

The only Morse code I know is S-O-S so the last letter was the only one I did not need to Google. And I saw enough old bomb-defusing movies to know that WIRES are often color-coded.

Remarkable construction and a fun meta to solve.

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 12:09 am Soooo.... what's worse than not figuring out the mechanism? How about figuring out the mechanism but reading dot-dash-dot as L instead of R? Yep, I sent in WILES as my answer. To me, it's apropos: ˈwī(-ə): a trick or stratagem intended to ensnare or deceive.

Oh my gosh. Were you eating a grilled ham and cheese at the time?

Didn’t come close on this one. The rabbit holes were many. The different ways to spell PAINT with the letters in the SE corner sent me in that direction for awhile. There had to be significance in the odd formulation TNTS at 1D (never thought of TNT as a verb), contrasted with the key TINT at 55D. I wondered why the constructor took the unusually-spelled surname PUTTNAM and repeated it in two parts in separate answers.
I spent a long time looking for colors and codes in the theme answers. I considered the various meanings of “code,” but came up blank on how any of them could be tinted, or how a code could be used to tint something else.
Taken In the sense of a body of statutory law, and used after the first word of 25A or that of 42A, “code” yields very sinister historical meanings that Mr. Shenk could not have intended.
I even thought about Mr. Morse briefly (I seem to recall a NYT puzzle with a simple Morse code theme), but I saw no dots or dashes here. That’s as close as I got.

On to next week.

What happens frequently with me happened here. I became obsessed with the wrong mechanism. Artists “tint” by mixing with white. I couldn’t figure out how adding WHITE would solve anything. Then I saw PAINT in SAINT PAT and then several other red herrings and rabbit holes and never moved back to tinting letters. I thought about Morse code early on, but soon forgot it. Also thought about wires being color coded, but that was the end, not the means.

What a relief! Solved the grid Thursday evening and started tinkering with meta methods, but fishing kept me away for the rest of the weekend. I am pleased to report that Thursday evening's stabs weren't even close--not even step 1--and that this is a scheme I probably wouldn't have gotten anyway.

And the fishing was great.

Blerg! First thing I did was xerox my completed grid and shade in those letters, but I felt like the small number of shaded squares meant they were insignificant, so I threw it away and spent hours reparsing that clue to see if I was missing something else :/

For some reason I thought of Morse Code right away, and took 1A as either a hint that I was on the right track, or a huge rabbit hole (in Morse Code "T" is dash or bar). I noticed the letter frequency of the vowels - E and O only in the theme answers, but it still took me a while to realize you needed to take the title literally.