As thrilled as we are that so many Santa Feans (and Galisteans and Albuquerqueans) submitted their completed V-day film-themed crossword puzzles, it's always a difficult process to whittle down the winners to just three. We just don't have enough prize packages to accommodate everyone.
We understand that licking envelopes and adhering stamps ain't nothing, so for those who didn't win in the end, here's how we narrowed the pool down down:
The first thing we did was disqualify anyone who got an answer wrong, even if only slightly. Of eight possible winners, that killed two -- one who identified Wall-E's love interest incorrectly as "Eva" and one who confused Amélie with another character named "Aurora." Then we disqualified two more that spelled "virgin" incorrectly (v-i-r-g-e-n).
That left four winners:
Frank Lux, Galisteo
Linda Byington, Santa Fe
Heidi Jones, Santa Fe
Sarah Blaine, Santa Fe
So, here's the somewhat arbitrary method we used to eliminate the fourth.
Lux was deemed a definite winner because his was the first to arrive in our mail box. Jones was also picked for including the accent in Amélie. Byington was selected because she corrected a mistake that appeared in the final clue: We called the Jim Carrey film
Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind
. Byington crossed out "on" and replaced it with "of."
If it's any consolatiion, Blaine can look forward to an official congratulatory call from SFR.