28. First Verse

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1. Puzzle #27 recap

Puzzle #27 answer: VIBRANT

Correct entries: 25

Perhaps one of the hardest challenges I've created and rightful of its place as a Week 4 (at least!!).

Math story: Often, you have to solve proofs in geometry class. Sometimes, I'll look at one and think, "Oh, that's maybe just 3 or 4 steps," and then it ends up being 10.

That's kind of what happened with this one! I knew it was a Level 4, but I didn't realize how intricate was until I actually went to explain how we get to our meta answer of VIBRANT. Here's the journey:

1. Recognize that the seven longest, symmetrically placed themers (all of which are followed by a number in parentheses) have a word within that are linked to another phrase or title.

2. Each of these phrases contains a color in the rainbow, in ROYGBIV, from top to bottom:

PAINT THE TOWN RED

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

MOOD INDIGO

SHRINKING VIOLET

The number in parentheses gave the length of each of these phrases; those numbers are not relevant from then on forward.

3. Now comes the hard (harder) part and where the title comes into play. The fact that we're looking for a 7-letter word likely indicates that each of these phrases will somehow give us a letter, and here's how that's done.

First, recognize the position of the color in each of these new phrases. So, since RED is the fourth word in PAINT THE TOWN RED, we'll state RED = 4.

RED = 4

ORANGE = 1

YELLOW = 3

GREEN = 3

BLUE = 4

INDIGO = 2

VIOLET = 2

4. Now, in conjunction with the title, we will take this position letter over the word in the original phrase that also shows up in the phrase with the color (hence, somewhere over the rainbow):

The 4th letter above TOWN is V

The 1st letter above NEW is I

The 3rd letter above FOLLOW is B

The 3rd letter above ANNE is R

The 4th letter above ONCE is A

The 2nd letter above MOOD is N

The 2nd letter above SHRINKING is T

This spells VIBRANT, which rainbows certainly are, and this gives us our meta answer. Whew!

2. While this puzzle is a little larger than I would like to fit in the necessary material, I still think this will be - at most - a Level 2 (hoping for 1.5). You may or may not need a Google search along the way!

Good luck!

Mikey G

The answer to the meta is a 4-word song title.