When you play poker, much depends on the luck of the draw. In the long run, the better player will prevail because the randomness averages out, but any individual hand is determined to a significant degree by chance. You're wondering where the crossword analogy is, aren't you? Crosswords depend on a unique combination of cleverness and factual knowledge and your relationship to those facts is the crossword luck of the draw.
It's one of my goals to know everything but since I haven't yet got to rock singers, TV stars or R&B singers, I have some gaps. Since none of the theme answers meant anything to me, today's puzzle was not nearly as fun as it might have been. I realize your mileage may vary. Maybe you've never seen Lohengrin so yesterday's Elsa clue was just as befuddling, but at least it wasn't a 15-letter theme answer. One of the great aspects of crosswords is that they encompass an incredibly broad range of knowledge. I learn something nearly every time.
Answers to Michael Langwald's Wednesday puzzle are posted. I got to feel smug for getting that "Angered and enraged" were ANAGRAMS without any letters, so that was fun. It helped that I remembered that Barry Silk clued ANAGRAM last December as "cheaters, to teachers" which is also a great clue.
So, am I a cultural idiot for not knowing these gentlemen: Messrs. Frey, Boyle and Cooke? In this modern digitally-connected democracy, there's no such thing as a definitive list of facts that an educated man can be expected to know. (Back in the old days when that was a question that could reasonably be asked, feminine anomalies like Marie Curie or George Sand were exceptions that self-respecting misogynists could conveniently ignore.) Nowadays, information flows freely without regard to any authority. And yet, cultures are bound together by common stories, a shared sense of what's important and what's not. Who decides what is worthy for us to embrace and what we can ignore?
The answer, for better or worse, is nobody. Or better, it's some large collection of people who work for Fox News, USA Today, The New Yorker, Encarta, and so on. You'd have to include The New York Times in that last. And to a tiny but measurable degree, Will Shortz. There's something about inclusion in the NYT Crossword that legitimizes people, ideas, and certainly words.
Richard Wagner doesn't need any help from a crossword. Rock fans, I imagine, would argue that neither does Glenn Frey. But now that I see him immortalized in tiny squares, I have the vague notion that he must be important, that he's someone I should spend the effort to get to know. Do you feel the same?
Update: It turns out Peter Boyle the Emmy winner is the same as Peter Boyle the movie actor, best known to me for his horrifying turn as the monster in Young Frankenstein.