1634: Just Look At That Gorgeous Garfield
| Just Look At That Gorgeous Garfield |
 Made by: Manyhills |
Explanation[edit | edit source]
This strip is an homage to the CiSRA Puzzle Competition, an annual event wherein several groups compete to see who can solve the most puzzles (with the potential for Australian students to win prizes). The puzzles themselves tend to be extremely obtuse, and have no instructions at all. (See, for example, this one from 2013 - and compare its structure to this comic.)
After attempting to give hints in a forum thread, Manyhills eventually gave up and revealed the solution to the puzzle:
The Garfields come in coloured pairs. For all but four of these pairs, the two Garfields are facing each other; for four of these pairs, one of them is facing away from the other.
Write each of the characters of BUTWHATSHOULDICHOOSEBUTWHENSHOULDISEARCH left-to-right, top-to-bottom on the strip, and extract the four characters corresponding to the panels containing the facing-away Garfields. This gives you the characters T-C-B-S.
Now we know what we should choose, we just need a date (a when to search). Translating the letters into numbers in the usual way (A=1, B=2, etc) gives us 20-03-02-19, which suggests the eight-digit date 2003-02-19; and, since this is a SRoMG comic, looking up the comic for that day might be a wise course of action; all that remains is to answer Jon's baldly stated question with one word, eight letters: BISMARCK.
The author writes:[edit | edit source]
The answer is one word, eight letters. The first correct response received at many_hills-excitingcompetition@yahoo.co.uk wins a FABULOUS PRIZE*. Alternatively, email the same address with the subject "I'm colourblind and you annoy me" and win a FABULOUS PERSONALISED APOLOGY (for a limited time only).
* Probably nothing but hey, make me an offer.
Original strip: 2011-04-23.
The colours were chosen from a Two4U colour catalogue.
Transcript[edit | edit source]
1A. Just Look At That Gorgeous Garfield
Puzzle by: manyhills
Difficulty: Easy
SRoMG Puzzle Competition 2013
http://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield
{An array of bored-looking Garfields}
...BUT WHAT SHOULD I CHOOSE
BUT WHEN SHOULD I SEARCH?
