Financial adviser Edelman / SAT 11-7-15 / Title heroine of Massenet opera / Cluster in marquise / Quartet in No No Nanette / Ice Road Truckers locale / Offside detector / 1998-2010 major-leaguer Kapler / Suffix on AriZona can

Constructor:Barry C. Silk

Relative difficulty:Easy


THEME:none 

Word of the Day:RADIO GALAXY(4A: Centaurus A is one) —

(google)

I did this while chatting with a friend online, so ... starts and stops ... so I don't know how long it would've taken me if I'd been going at it in earnest, but I doubt more than 5 or 6 minutes. I struggled precisely no times. I kept waiting for something terrible to happen and it never did. The hardest corner to get was the first one, and that's just because it was the first and I had no traction yet. But COMPUTERS ended up being right (Me: "No way, too obvious ... wait, what?") and then nothing was ever a problem again. Got GARDEN from the "R,"OKAPI from the "I,"PLEISTOCENE from the "PLE-," and on and on and on. BON JOVI, gimme, AVA, gimme, GABE Kapler, gimme, CESAR, gimme, MCA IMO ZIMA ETON THON HOSER TESLA RUPP ... all gimmes. Ditto HAYS and DIEU and ENS. I don't get that many gimmes on most Wednesdays. Really, really weird. Seems a solid enough grid. More trivia clues than clever clues, but I will single out 18A: Mold in the freezer? (ICE CUBE TRAY) for its particular excellence.

I took a couple of screen shots, figuring I'd track my progress through the grid, but then the whole thing was over so fast that I only remembered to get a couple. Here's the opening gambit. It's really just a boring shot of a completed NW corner (I titled it "COMPUTERS/IMO" because that's how I got started up there):

From there it was a quick trip down ETON to THON and then right into the front ends of all those long Acrosses in the SW:

 Honestly, I don't know what else to say about this one. I blinked and it was over. It took some doing to get CORSICA (41D: One of the 27 regions of France) and TOE CAP (?) (39A: Boot feature), but everything else just fell.

Thus, good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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