Gosh folks, maybe this week’s puzzle was just too tough. Of everyone who entered (and there were a lot of entries), only Steven Strell answered correctly. So he gets a $50 gift certificate from ThinkGeek.
Solution:
As many people ascertained, the bar code can be deciphered to the following numbers:
9 0 4 9 7 0 3 0 4 5 5 0
But we certainly wouldn’t stop there — those numbers mean nothing.
A lot of you tried to then search for a product that matched this code. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. For those of you who searched the UPC database, the top return for “UPC lookup” on Google, perhaps you saw a product listing early in the week that had those numbers. The product said “Geekdad Puzzle of the Week No Cheating.” I have no idea who put this there, but it wasn’t us and it wasn’t the answer.
I was worried about the number of people who were submitting this as the answer, so I got in contact with the Webmaster at the UPC Database (thanks, Rob!) and the description was replaced with the message “This is a red herring – Dave.” People still submitted this as the answer. (You do know what a red herring is, don’t you?)
Anyway, as I’ve mentioned, Steven Strell figured it out. Translate the numbers to letters in a straight cipher and you get:
i0dig0c0dee
But that doesn’t make much sense either. So if you apply a little leet to the phrase, you can get:
i dig c0de5
0r
I dig codes
Congratulations to Steven and everyone who sent in a response. Be sure to tune back in on Monday when Dave G. will have a new puzzle possibly more difficult than this week’s head-scratcher.
