My hat is off to anyone who got through the Google Da Vinci Code puzzle quest thing. I sure didn’t!

I wasn’t even going to bother. As I mentioned before but explained very poorly, the prize consisted of a trip and a bunch of merchandise valued at more than $128,000. If you win a cash prize, they can take the taxes right out of it, but when you win a bunch of stuff, the IRS still wants their share in cash. A lot of cash. No, thanks.

But I really wanted to know if I was up to the challenge. I sat down and spent about a half hour on the first puzzle — a sudoku-like thing, with symbols to be filled in instead of numbers. The puzzle after that was this kind that I absolutely hate where you have to piles of dirt and you select them both and they combine in the middle and you have to reduce all of the piles of dirt down to just one. I just click randomly and eventually get through it. Not this time, oh no. I had been sitting there for an hour when I thought, this is stupid, and so I closed the browser in defeat.

I do wish I could have seen the other three puzzles. It’s unfortunate that my weak spot was the second one and they had to be completed in order. But c’est la vie.

Congratulations to the winner, and to everyone who got through all five puzzles!