Times 25170: 14 or 16?

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 29:54 …

… but not with full understanding of all answers; in particular 24dn which required my phone-a-friend option. Thanks again! Now I have to say that I didn’t like this puzzle much. It brought to mind the expression ‘let the dog see the rabbit’. Far too many puns for me and not enough wordplay to go on. No doubt there will be others who really enjoyed it. That’s how these things are.

Across
 1 GUBBINS. Reverse your BUG; then BINS. Never heard this to mean ‘rubbish’. More like ‘kit’ or ‘the makings’ as in roll-your-own.
 5 MOBSTER. Get your {gu}N from MONSTER; replace with a B for ‘British’.
 9 ROUGH,CAST. Enough said?
10 STOIC. This is SIC with OT reversed inside. He of Citium; not the Eleatic of arrow fame.
11 BIRDS NEST SOUP. The Wik tells me: “A few species of swift, the cave swifts, are renowned for building the saliva nests used to produce the unique texture of this soup”. Culinary advice: don’t mistake a Welcome Swallow for a Cave Swift!
13 HA,RE,BELL.
15 Omitted.
17 ENTAIL. Anagram: late in. A technical legal term meaning “a settlement of the inheritance of property over a number of generations so that it remains within a family or other group”.
19 FROG-SPIT. GO reversed in FR’s PIT. Used by the French to make 11ac.
22 THE OLD HEAVE-HO. First two from ‘elderly folk’. Then HAVE inc {us}E & HO for ‘house’.
25 INDIA{na}. Another spot of humour I could have done without.
26 REFASHION. Anagram: IRON SAFE inc H.
27 GREATLY. AT & L{arge} inside GREY.
28 LIMP,OP,O. It‘s gre(atl)y green and greasy. [O for ‘over’?]
Down
 1 GARB{o}. Film star who, every Thursday morning, takes away my gubbins. I sometimes take the time to greet her.
 2 Omitted. Another pun.
 3 ICHOR. Promote the I in CHOIR.
 4 SPARSELY. S{catter} and PARSLEY with EL replacing LE.
 5 MATTER. See 2dn.
 6 BE,SETTING.
 7 TWOSOME. WO (Warrant Officer) and S inside TOME. Well, I suppose there are two of them.
 8 RECUPERATE. RE-RATE including E and CUP.
12 SHOESTRING. Two meanings … again!
14 BRILLIANT. BRIAN & T for ‘temperature’, inc. ILL.
16 DREADFUL. One more pun: cf ‘Penny Dreadful’.
18 TREADLE. And again; this time the pun is on ‘sole’. Chambers, at least, also allows TREDDLE.
20 PRO,VISO{r}.
21 WHERRY. WHY inc. ER (ruler, the Queen) and R for ‘river’. The barge she sat in …?
23 EPSOM. Hidden, reversed.
24 INFO. This is the one I couldn’t see at first. It turns out to be ‘in for’ (about to suffer, as in ‘You’re in for it’) minus its last letter.

31 comments on “Times 25170: 14 or 16?”

  1. I thought I’d finally cracked one this week, but I failed to attend to the Franco-Spanish stuff, chucked in ‘sparsley’, and finally ‘harebeet’ (so tragic – ‘beet’ was my hypocoristic for Beattie). And I managed all the hard stuff. Good puzzle, notwithstanding; COD to SHOESTRING.

    Thanks to McT and McT’s mate for the gen on info.

    Edited at 2012-05-23 04:32 am (UTC)

  2. GARB went straight in but I took more than 5 minutes to find another answer and I continued to struggle most of the remaining solving time to complete the grid eventually and with some relief after 62 minutes.

    Diligent fans of ‘Downton Abbey’ will know all about ENTAIL which nicety of law was responsible for the premise on which the whole of the first season was constructed. No such subtleties were employed when plotting the subsequent series.

    I suppose it might be seen as a case of sour grapes if I say I didn’t like this puzzle but since mct has said it already I shall agree with him anyway. I really disliked 7dn but I can’t fault the other clues. Individually they are rather fine in their way but simply too much of a good thing, all together in one puzzle.

    On edit, I forgot to say I also didn’t know the required meaning of GUBBINS. The Oxfords don’t recognise it either but Collins and Chambers have it.

    Edited at 2012-05-23 05:41 am (UTC)

      1. Before today I’d have said ‘paraphernalia’ as in COED.

        What is this new ‘Comment Form’ that now comes up when one clicks ‘Reply’? Is there an option to turn it off and revert to the normal ‘Reply’ screen?

        1. Yeh, I got this too.
          But now it seems to have gone away again.
          Try it and see how you go.
  3. Hmmm … yes … my very rough reasoning too. My brother always says “Have you got the gubbins, our kid”.
  4. …and a mistake. I went for treddle i.s.o. treadle. My experiences match those of jackkt in that GARB went straight in and then…nothing for ages. I, too, didn’t like 7d. I’m another who thought of GUBBINS as stuff. Thanks for the info on info, Mctext. I enjoyed the puns but COD to 3d.
  5. 19 minutes, despite confidently putting in THIMBLE for 18 down – something to do with rigging, I assumed, and in this puzzle such vagueness was at least possible. Couldn’t make anything Welsh of I?B?A at 2, so revised thinking in time for the two pennies to drop – solely (ho ho) and not that Jones.
    FROG-SPIT was a guess on the lines of cuckoo spit from cryptic, GUBBINS reluctantly entered, because in my obviously limited book it would never mean rubbish – it’s a Barnes Wallis sort of word. For quite a while, GARBAGE was my favourite, influenced, no doubt, by the only other clue I had in for the first minutes.
    I only knew one Zeno, he of the paradox. Apparently there are two others who were STOICs, and for all I know, dozens more. It fitted and nothing else does.
    INFO is (in my opinion), only understandable once someone else tells you how it works- then it’s fine.
    I thought TWOSOME quite clever, and it’s my CoD.
  6. 53 minutes tricky, for me. I must admit being mildly irritated by it, mainly baecause I wanted to finish it quickly and couldn’t. Can I blame the setter for my own inadequacies? I don’t see why not.

    I’d rather definitions erred on the side of looseness than dictionarial, with the possible exception of 7d, which is so loose it seems to have fallen off. As for INFO, I had to have a very long think about how it worked and I’ve never heard GUBBINS used in a sentence or even so much as a phrase. I shall make a point of injecting it regularly into conversations henceforth, since it appears to mean anything you care to want it to mean. COD to TREADLE, me being a sucker for a pun.

  7. Just over the half-hour. (Bother! Can’t I ever get below 30 minutes these days?) Enjoyed the puzzle; I don’t mind the double definitions and puns, they add to the variety.

    I had to spend ten minutes with the dictionary after I’d finished, just checking some of the definitions. GUBBINS to me is what you find when you open up some unfamiliar device or piece of machinery. “Let’s take the back off and poke about with the gubbins in here.”

    Similarly with FROG SPIT, which I always called cuckoo spit as a child; and what is the “floating” doing in the clue?

    There are a couple of clues where a word serves double duty, which is unusual for The Times, isn’t it? In 7 down “Sergeant Major” is both the definition and the WO; and in 14 down “nursing ailment” signifies ILL and indicates placing ILL inside BRIAN. Or am I making heavy weather of this?

    Sorry, seem to be going on a bit this morning; must not have enough to do!

    1. I took 7dn to be an &Lit. And ILL is a noun just clued by “ailment” I think.
    2. Oh, and FROG SPIT is defined in Collins as “a foamy mass of threadlike green algae floating on ponds”. This is not the same thing as cuckoo spit, apparently.
      1. Thank you keriothe and anon. Yes, ILL is just ailment (I’ve found it in Chambers); I’d only ever used it as a noun to mean an evil or a misfortune, never a disease or indisposition.

        Thank you also for enlightening me on FROG SPIT. Perhaps each pond should have one of those notices we used to see on buses: Spitting Strictly Prohibited.

      2. Well I got lucky then as I made the leap from the little green critter inside cuckoo spit being a froghopper to frog spit.
    3. I think just ‘ailment’ is ILL, but I agree on 7dn. An unusual clue-type, used in the Times for the past few years, which I think Mark Thakkar dubbed a ‘partial &lit.’, to differentiate it from a ‘semi-&lit.’. I don’t mind them and enjoyed this puzzle overall, sharing others’ reservations about the definition of GUBBINS.
  8. 34 minutes. Tricky puzzle, and I’m with those who didn’t enjoy it I’m afraid. Too many puns and loose definitions.
    I’m not sure about “Jones’s place” in 25. The character is named after George Lucas’s dog.
  9. I think it may have been a popular term in the RN in WWII. I certainly remember my father using it in the 50s. An ENTAIL is also part of the plot in Pride and Prejudice because the Bennett estate is entailed on the egregious Mr. Collins. 22 minutes – held up by the twosome and I’m glad I’m not the only one who said what the??

    Edited at 2012-05-23 03:28 pm (UTC)

    1. Glad you mentioned P&P, the most famous ENTAIL in literature. My late husband had his aunt’s estate entailed to him because her father, who had left the house to her, didn’t want her own husband to inherit it. So I am actually the benficiary of an entail. It seemed so archaic!
  10. A strange mix of the ‘that’s obvious’ and the ‘what the heck’ After an application of tippex, I managed to sort it all out in 21 mins ish.
  11. 22:26 .. I liked it.

    Last in: WHERRY, which rang a faint bell (from Dickens?). Shamefully, I spent quite a while trying to justify SHERRY, an excess of which I thought might be a reason for having to cart a monarch around in a boat. Sorry, Ma’am.

  12. I found this pretty straightforward and was surprised to find that my 18:38 was good enough for 12th on the leaderboard.

    I think the wherry is the tradional boat of choice on the Norfolk Broads as Woodforde’s Wherry, one of the finest ales known to man, is brewed thereabouts.

  13. 20 minutes after the hottest round of golf this year. We’ve gone from course under water to too hot for comfort in about 2 weeks!

    Funny old puzzle as most others have said. Almost as if the setter was trying just a bit too hard to be clever and witty and falling slightly flat most of the time. I associate Zeno with stoicism so no problem there but don’t really like 7D, a Warrant Officer and a son hardly describes a TWOSOME.

  14. It only took me 15 minutes, possibly because yesterday’s was such a swine that this one seemed easy in comparison. But I didn’t like twosome. Too much of an overlap between wordplay and definition.
  15. A little over 40 today but all correct which was a relief after a miserable (and late) DNF yesterday. I enjoyed this one as it always felt solvable today. Like others I started with GARB and finished with WHERRY but fairly steady otherwise. 7d did seem a little loose and I wondered if in fact I was missing a reference to a book which featured an SM and son. My COD to INFO which for once with this sort of clue I worked out before coming to the blog!
  16. Didn’t time it, but I scribbled in answers while having a half-ear open to a seminar on ethics (unfortunately and why we should have them).

    GUBBINS and LIMPOPO from wordplay. Last in was SHOESTRING. Tricky offering, but fun.

  17. I always thought a gubbins was what you called an incompetent person or got called. Not too keen on one or two others, e.g. the wording of 18 though the pun has mileage. But more 14 than 16 by some way. 29 minutes.
  18. About 30 minutes, ending with SHOESTRING. Overall, I liked it. Like vinyl, not troubled by GUBBINS due to not knowing what it meant in the first place, and I’d never heard of FROG-SPIT either. I also agreee with those expressing some dissatisfaction about TWOSOME, which I entered with a shrug. That’s one that, as Jimbo says, fell slightly flat. But I did like the two long ones today, so a nod to the setter for those as the best of the bunch. Regards.
  19. A sluggish 14:07, making heavy weather of several straightforward clues (tiredness still taking its toll). Despite that, I actually enjoyed this considerably more than yesterday’s – possibly the only person who did, by the look of it!? And at least GUBBINS went straight in.
  20. Something over 74′; how much over, I don’t know, as I seem to have dropped off for a bit. Very annoyed with myself for coming up with HAREBELL early on but not accepting it, because I was thinking of ‘about’ as a reversal indicator. Even more annoyed at the time it took for me to remember the soup.
    The various states of the US abolished entail early on, one of the reasons the US was (back then) the most egalitarian society (for whites) on earth.

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