Onetime English poet laureate Henry James / WED 8-9-17 / Flock loser of rhyme / What Rick called Ilsa / Forbidden fragrance in old ads

Constructor: Adam G. Perl

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (proper noun issues...)

THEME: "Where a [sounds like a poker hand] can beat a [sounds like a poker hand]" — the answers have nothing to do with poker:

Theme answers:

• CHESS MATCH (17A: Where a queen can beat a king)
• DOUBLES TENNIS (39A: Where an ace can beat a pair)
• SOCK DRAWER (61A: Where two pair beats three of a kind) 

Word of the Day: Onetime English poet laureate Henry James PYE (47A) —

Henry James Pye (/paɪ/; 10 February 1744 – 11 August 1813) was an English poet. Pye was Poet Laureate from 1790 until his death. He was the first poet laureate to receive a fixed salary of £27 instead of the historic tierce of Canary wine (though it was still a fairly nominal payment; then as now the Poet Laureate had to look to extra sales generated by the prestige of the office to make significant money from the Laureateship).

• • •

There is a cuteness and cleverness in back of this theme, but the whole shebang is pretty wobbly, for a number of reasons. The reorientation from poker to a CHESS MATCH is pretty clear, pretty straightfoward. It's a game, the "beat" make a kind of sense, even if you'd never ever say a queen "beat" a king if you were referring to actual chess. But fine. Association between clue and answer gets softer in the next themer, DOUBLES TENNIS, as "a pair" makes no sense here. You only ever serve to one human in DOUBLES TENNIS, and unless it's match point, an ace "beats" precisely no one. Also, association between "pair" and doubles team is not strong. But OK, you're playing a little word game, we'll give you Super Duper leeway. Finally there's SOCK DRAWER, which is both the funniest (if this kind of humor is your thing) and the weakest of the bunch. If I open my SOCK DRAWER and see three of a kind, I still have socks for the day. True, I will have to find that fourth sock by tomorrow, but today I'm good. It's a tie. 


The fill is where this one gets rough, and occasionally unbearable. There are too many proper nouns of dubious fame here. Yes, constant solvers will have seen LEHAR and BEHAN and BINET, but probably Only In Crosswords because they get Overused because of their odd letter patterns (esp. those first two—having LEHAR and BEHAN in the same grid should cause it to implode or otherwise collapse; they're essentially the same name to me, the "holy crap I have -EHA- in my grid how do I make it work!?" (REHAB would of course be the ideal fix, but ...). Crossing BEHAN and BINET is just cruel. LEHAR and BEHAN are both known for precisely one work apiece. You gotta be better at handling proper nouns. Crossword addiction can convince you that today's names are far, far, far more commonly known than they are. Also, I grew up in CA and have never heard of the EEL River, so that is a beast of a clue (57A: California's ___ River). Also, a word about *&$&ing PYE: Literally no one knows who Henry James PYE is. I have an English Ph.D. and have been around English Ph.D.s most of my life, I've barely if ever heard of him. He was "poet laureate" over 200 years ago. He wrote nothing anyone has heard of. I love this line from wikipedia: "As a prose writer, Pye was far from contemptible." It is both stupid and sadistic to clue PYE this way.

Other slowness came from ONE instead of YOU in the central Down answer, and CRAFT instead of CARVE at 34A: Sculpt. Very choppy grid meant lots of short stuff meant less-than-lovely answers, most of the time, though GO TO THE DOGS and LAME-BRAINED are winners, for sure.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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