Times 25020: Gold he touches turns to everything

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 12:46.

Another Championship puzzle. Why do they publish those on Wednesdays? And how many more do I have to go? Still, this was on the easy side I found. At least, I have a full grid after nearly 13 minutes. Now all I have to do is work out a few missing parsings. Wish me luck!

Across
 1 W(OR)TH. OR (heraldic) for gold. ‘Having | less current’ is WITH minus I.
 4 S,A,FE,TY P,IN. ‘Kind endlessly’ is TYP{e}.
 9 D(E,MEAN)OUR. ‘Plan’ (verb) is MEAN.
10 PHLOX. Sounds like ‘flocks’.
11 S,T(RAT,O,C)UMULUS. S (singular); RAT (desert); O (round); C (about); all inside TUMULUS (mound). “Cloud forming a low layer of clumped or broken grey masses”.
14 R(IT)E. IT is cruciverbal for (sex) appeal.
15 MALINGERER. Anagram of ‘reign’ in an anagram of ‘realm’.
18 AFTERS,HAVE. ‘Afters’, Brit informal for dessert (course).
19 One nice clue excluded for starters.
21 UNEMBARRASSED. Reversal of DRAB MENU including {w}RASSE.
24 WIL,CO. Starters of W{orld} I{ssuing} L{atest}.
25 BRIMS,TONE. Gonepteryx are bright yellow; like sulphur perhaps?
27 T(HE)REUPON. HE (His Excellency) in an anagram of ‘Peru not’.
28 MID,AS. Reversal of dim.
Down
 1 W,I,D(ESP)READ.
 2 RA,M. RA for ‘artist’.
 3 HEAR(T)S. Last letter of {verdic}T.
 4 SLOWCOA,CH. Anagram of ‘Was cool’; CH = Companion of Honour.
 5 FOR,UM.
 6 TO(POLO,G)Y.
 7 P(ALM S)P,RINGS.
 8 NE(X)T.
12 RATATOUILLE. Anagram: it eat all our.
13 F,RI(END)LE,SS. RILE for ‘anger’.
16 I(N,V)ERSION. Anagram of ‘noisier’ including V for ‘volume’ after {ra}N{ge}.
17 G(RUES)OME. A g{n}ome is a maxim.
20 RAN,SO,M.
22 BE(B)OP.
23 SWOT. Reversal of TOWS.
26 Omitted. Lift and separate after ‘on’ and forget the comma.

39 comments on “Times 25020: Gold he touches turns to everything”

  1. 24:48, although I’m sure I was much more relaxed than I would have been if I were solving in a competition.

    I was just about to click submit when I noticed two empty unchecked cells in 19ac, so technically it was my last one in. PHLOX was my penultimate entry partly because I spent too long trying only vowels in the first unchecked cell.

    I certainly thought this puzzle was easier than the last few. I wrote in quite a few of the longer answers just from the definition and a few checking letters and then checked that the wordplay worked, e.g. STRATOCUMULUS, MALINGERER, UNEMBARRASSED, RATATOUILLE (I was glad I could remember how to spell it).

    I didn’t know BRIMSTONE was a butterfly, but the wordplay was pretty clear once I had the checking letters.

  2. 37 minutes, with the last five spent on the unfamiliar PHLOX. In response to my venerable American colleague, I think the thing is to remember that the folk at the finals needed to complete three puzzles in an hour. If they started with either of the other two, which were tougher IMO, then they may not have had the time (probably just ten minutes for them) to do this one justice.
  3. Maybe too easy… I got careless and misspelled RATATOUILLE and, impressively, FORUM. So my sub-14 minutes counts for nought.

    PHLOX/TOPOLOGY the only area that really offered resistance.

  4. 23 minutes; once again the contest puzzle takes me half the time of many of the dailies. Except that I had one, truly dumb, error: wanting to get lunch before the cafeteria closes, I put in a number of words simply from the checkers, without stopping to figure out the clue until afterward, if then (I doubt I’d have ever parsed 11ac, for instance; but having S_R was enough). And I just now noticed that I put in ‘pull strings’ at 7d for no good reason whatever other than that I had all the checkers, and didn’t even bother to check what the clue was. But at least I’ll have lunch.
  5. 25 minutes. I needed the wordplay to prevent myself writing STRATACUMULUS at 11ac. WRASSE had to be dredged up from the depths of my mind but I had no problem solving the actual clue.

    I have to admit that I came here with the wordplay at 14ac misunderstood – not that I had spent very long thinking about it. I had taken ‘appeal to stop’ as ‘right’ (i.e. that’s enough) sounding like (referring to) RITE.

  6. Like everyone else I didn’t stop to work out all the wordplay, so thanks to mctext for doing the donkey work. 32 minutes for me, having also been distracted at the end by ‘pull strings’ – although I knew there had to be a second ‘p’ in there somewhere.

    The BRIMSTONE is reckoned to be the butterfly that gives all butterflies their name, if you get what I mean. It’s the only British butterfly that could conceivably be described as butter-coloured.

  7. Andrew K:

    First time I’ve had trouble with the Times club website. Safari can’t open it this morning. Drat!

    1. Happens to me sometimes. Download the latest version of Camino, out today. No problems there.
  8. 17 min after a rather slow start. I was in the morning session and would have been quite happy with this! Rather liked the clue for rite and enjoyed the whole thing.
  9. This puzzle is the opposite end of the normal distribution to 25011 the Saturday puzzle that led to the discussion on solving technique.

    This is very straightforward – about 20 minutes to solve. One can enter answers based upon obvious definitions and a couple of checkers – hence very fast solving times. I suspect that the ones used in the final will be closer to 25011 and require the harder technique of working the cryptic to match a devious definition. I’ll be thinking of you McText!!

  10. 12 minutes, and would (I think) have relished this in the morning semis. An odd collection of (mostly) overcomplicated wordplays, effectively pushing me into Times 2 mode, solving from definition only and letting the wordplay take care of itself. So thanks to McText today for doing the donkey work on, for example, UNEMBARRASSED which I am ditto to admit I left unparsed.
    The only clues where I needed the wordplay were WILCO (where I was tempted by K) and the range of letters needed for RATATOUILLE.
    CoD to the neat (in this company) RANSOM
  11. Straightforward enough, with a COD to forum merely for a delightful definition. 20 minutes, slowing at end in NE.
  12. Yes, same as others, I found this a quick solve, chucking in words from definition and then working out the cryptics (or not) afterwards. Unknowns for me today were the fish (WRASSE), the butterfly, and the expression of agreement. Thanks for sorting out RITE and MIDAS, McText!
  13. I thought this was one of the easiset of the crosswords on the day. Still a nice effort mainly,

    MC, there are four more to go, assuming the last of the R2 Prelims next week is followed by the Grand Final grids. Good luck! See the PM I sent you recently.

    1. No, only the final puzzles to go now. They’ve published both sets of prelim puzzles in the order 1-3-2 for some reason, and this is puzzle 2 of Prelim 2.
      2. I found last week’s by far the hardest of these three. As it was the last puzzle I imagine I would have been feeling fairly confident when I got to it, and a gibbering nervous wreck about fifteen minutes later.
  15. I agree – although I might say ‘I plan to (do something)’ rather than ‘I mean to …’, the words aren’t really equivalent.
    1. They don’t have to be 100 per cent equivalent, merely plausibly synonymous in certain contexts, as is the case with “plan” and “mean”.
  16. 10 minutes, and if I was hazarding a guess, it might be the spelling of RATATOUILLE (that last I and L) that could have bumped a few off in this one. I got the right one, but something was nagging at me that maybe it could be spelled the other way around.
  17. 17 minutes – would have been quicker but the boss came into the room so I had to cover the piece of paper. This time I wasn’t deterred by the finished by 75% of competitors message at the top, although I still took longer than yesterday. Main hold up was Phlox, like Beauvis I was trying for a vowel in that first space.
  18. 11 minutes. Only PHLOX and the butterfly were unknown.
    Based on my performance outside competition conditions the second set of preliminary puzzles was about 5 minutes harder than the first. I like to think that if I had been in this prelim I’d have taken a bit of time at the end to reconsider LAMPLIGHT and plump for the right answer. That’s what I like to think.
  19. No problems except for not parsing 1ac…still don’t see why “having” means “with”.

    Any helpers out there?

  20. Same here, on the easier side, about 15 minutes, ending with RAM. Not too much to say, except that the SLOWCOACH and SWOT are new to me, and that the 2 long acrosses (11, 21) went in first, and I checked the seemingly overcooked wordplay afterwards. Regards to all.
  21. 8:16 for me. I felt I should have been a couple of minutes faster for such an easy puzzle, but I suppose I just have to accept that it takes me longer to parse clues like these nowadays. (Sigh!)

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