"Love Letters" February 14, 2025

[chocoholic]

I was on the ship so long that I almost drank all of Isaac's Pinot Noir. Then facepalm....Solved with the help of last call.

[Bob cruise director]

Our final count is 9 on the ship and 170 on the shore. Good luck winning the mug.

And stay safe

[LittleGood]

I submitted

[Aragorn]

Counting myself on the boat. Got the first step, and a few helpful nudges from @ELSavage got me to see how to use that info, but still seem to be missing the big picture. Looking forward to the reveal!

[PQ63]

Ashore. Loved it!

[doc1388]

Ashore! Just in the nick of time! This one has me craving a JAGERMEISTER (wink)!

[steveb]

Made it to shore with half an hour to spare! It helped to reprint the grid and start over without all my markings from my previous false starts.

[hcbirker]

[woozy]

Had to be towed. I was really stuck on the oodles of letters especially the Double-Ds. And trying to find entries within the grid of the form Letter 1-letter 2-letter 2- letter 1. But there weren't enought. I did at one point think of the three double Ds on the three sides of the 2x1 black space and the three double RRS on the other but I couldn't see how it would go.

I got some nudges that there was *ONE* word that somehow was an OXXO and it was not actually an entry, and I responded by banging my head on the wall for 20 minutes saying "that just doesn't make sense. That just doesn't make sense" untill it did.

Creative dead-end rabbit hole: There were alot of repeated strings oxx in entries. Two YDD and DDY and ALL and others. I thought maybe if re removed some of thes. graypARRot -ARR = gray pot. wALL-e -ALL = We. skIDDy - IDD = sky or skiDDY -ddy = ski. Got nowhere fast.

[Abide]

Shades of @MikeyG

[woozy]

Shades of @MikeyG

A long time ago there was the TETRIS one. I *loved* that.

It shouldn't have eluded me as frustratingly as it did as it's not unprecedented. But it did.

[Faust]

Thursday night:

Me: I finished this crossword and now I’m trying to find a secret word. I found a pattern, but can’t really make any sense of it. See how the Ds and Rs make circles, and the Es and As make crosses?

Wife: Oh.

Me: Oh… O… O!! DEAR!!

Wife: What.

Me: The answer is Dear! From the Os and Xs! From the longest middle answer! See how [unintelligible excitable gibberish]! You’re a genius, thank you!

Wife: I have no idea what just happened, but I’m glad you’re happy.

[Wife continues caring for the kids and keeping our house running, while I spend the next 15 minutes staring amazed and dumbfounded at the puzzle.]

[Mirage]

There were several rabbit holes I followed before I landed on the correct beach. On one of my searches, I noticed the unusual sequence of the hugs and kisses clue - OXXO. I thought it more usual to write XOXO and figured this order was important. I looked for answers in the grid that followed that sequence and found SEES, ADDAms, and ERREd. If I could find four Ts in a row, I could spell DEAREST with the SE, AD, and ER but no such luck. I was able to anagram the word SEARED with the letters I found. Maybe that’s a word used in a love letter: “My love for you is seared on my heart”. Now isn’t that more picturesque than DEAR?

[DBMiller]

Puzzle title of "Love Letters" and we're looking for a word that might be used in a love letter. Certainly apropos for Valentine's Day (Or as my wife always pronounces it, "ValenTIMES Day". Several words come to mind, but let's see what we find...

Okay, clearly a hint at 36A. As my grandmother used to say, "O's and X's are hugs and kisses". Damn, I gotta finish the grid and look for O's and X's. The grid is tough, and I am not happy with the NE corner. Don't ever think I heard of LYDDA. And SKIDDY? SUDSED??? what the hell? Tuck 'em away for later thought...

Okay. Grid finished. Several O's. But no X's???? Maybe that's not the right path. Engaging free association mode... Back to the title. "Love Letters". Well, O's and X's are certainly letters. Could it be just that? And so I spot all the grid answers that sound like letters. 31a, ESS (S). 45a, EASY (EZ). 62a, ELEM (LM). 58d, SEA (C). 45d, ELL (L).

SEZLMCL. Not very promising. What about USSR and RBI? Those are letters too.

I hate to call upon Anna Gramma, but let's see what see says. SEZLMCLUSSRRBI -> Mrs. Sculler's Biz. I do a portmanteau of Scully and Mulder and the X-files comes to mind. Is that the X I'm looking for? What the hell do I do with that????

I'm stumped and can't get the phonetics out of my brain and put it away for the day. The next day I look at it again and wonder about all the silly fill in the NE corner. It must be important. That's when I spot the blank squares in that corner of the grid between 20a/21a and 24a/25a that sort of form an o. I write down:

DDA
S D
E D
DDA

Hmmm. ADD is repeated three times, with SE being the outliers. In the other corner I see:

ERR
R O
R A
ARR

Okay, the odd letters out here are O and E. That's no help. If they were R and O, I'd have ROSE, which could work. But I still haven't found the kisses, just the hugs. None of the other blank squares don't look like X's. Do some of them look like lips???? Maybe, if you squint hard enough. But I don't see what to do with them.

Finally, I return to the odd fill. Where SKIDDY also has DD in it. Now I'm hot on the trail. I modify my earlier notes:

iDDa
Ds D
De D
yDDa

eRRe
R oR
R aR
aRRo

Still looking at the extra letters and still no idea what to do with them... Except... Hmmm... The D's form an O, and the R's form an O. I have my hugs! Now to find the kisses. And I know what the meta answer will be. So after a little searching I find them and confirm the meta answer. Phew!

[mlvilv]

I spent a lot of time on this one making it way more difficult than it needed to be apparently. I never would have gotten this one, but now the concept goes into the mental file for a metanism to consider in the future!

[Bobj]

(wrong art posted)

[Bobj]

The meta reminds me of my early computer programming days back in the 1970s (yes -- before there was Saturday Night) when it was "great fun" to create banners just out of printing characters on that continuous feed paper.

This effort would get me solid D+

(It was easier when everything was fixed space rather than proportionally spaced)

......xx.......xx
....x...x....x....x
..x......x.x.......x
.x........x..........x
x.....................x
.x....................x
..x.................x
...x..............x
.....x..........x
......x.......x
.......x....x
.........x

[Abide]

I feel like I have stumbled into a Fortran lab.

[foiledthrice]

Initially only saw the Os of D and R, which between them were "hugging" A, E, O, and S. Rearranged this spells ADORES, but I wasn't super confident since there wasn't a good way of determining the order of the letters. Eventually saw the A and E Xs and submitted DEAR.

[LeslieO]

DEAR was my Hail Mary. I saw the Hugs, and spent way too long looking for the Kisses (never did see them til looking at the reveal this morning). I even considered that the Xes were just crossing out the extra letters in the Hugs (I, Y, O). But that wasn't very satisfying. So I just went with a guess. Lucky for me it was the right one.