Problematic quote

[doomspark]

I ran into this one tonight.

"Skeins of water appeared among willows and ground-hugging leaves, reflecting the sky with a softness that made them spectral. A pond lay encircled by reeds surprisingly tall: caught between their spears hung white tufts from the the muskoxen who'd stopped to drink then moved on."

Please note the double "the" in the final part.

A brief Google search shows that there is a missing word. Here's the actual quote:

Skeins of water appeared among willows and ground-hugging leaves, reflecting the sky with a softness that made them spectral. A pond lay encircled by reeds surprisingly tall: caught between their spears hung white tufts from the umingmak, the muskoxen who’d stopped to drink then moved on.

At any rate, I respectfully submit this that the puzzle may be removed until / unless correctd.

[admin]

Puzzle is now deleted, thanks!

[doomspark]

Another problem quote:

"We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least one-thirtieth of a second ago. We think we are in the present but we aren't. The present we know is only a movies of the past and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means."

Note the "a movies" - the actual quote rightly says "a movie".

This one can be fixed by deletes the "S" from the quote in the puzzle, and removing the "S" from ASHTREES in one of the clues (and then, of course, making sure all the remaining S's are properly accounted for).

[admin]

Puzzle is now deleted, thanks!

[doomspark]

"Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P.T. Barnum meant when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute". But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic, however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney."

Nothing wrong with the quote, but a couple issues with the clues:
OLYMPICHOSTCITY
— Athens in 2004 of Beijing in 2008 (3)

Shouldn't that be "or" instead of "of" ?

GOESAWOL
— Leaves the base illegally (2)

"AWOL" isn't a word. It's an acronym for "Absent Without Official Leave".

[sionnach57]

But certain acronyms are in such widespread use that they are considered words, SCUBA and RADAR, for example. One could argue that AWOL is in the same category.

[DogMa]

I'm pretty much a Miss Thistlebottom, but I agree about AWOL. So does Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/AWOL

Also, of course "of" should be "or," but it's such a (distressingly) common error, I think a lot of people will automatically read it correctly, and those who don't will realize the error and will not be misled. It should be corrected, but there is no need to delete the puzzle on this account.

[sewaneesue]

I like Miss Thistlebottom better than DogMa!!

[DogMa]

Well, I thought it was clever when I came up with it years ago, when I started a blog about my dog. Miss Thistlebottom would be a better handle for here, I agree! :-)

[sewaneesue]

Dogma, was it a "thorny" experience to pet your dog's rear end? I hear the readers' groans; sorry.

[DogMa]

LOL! No, I meant "DogMa" seemed like a clever name for the owner of a dog and a dog blog. (But you got that, right? And you probably know where "Miss Thistlebottom" comes from.) Actually, I can see Miss Thistlebottom being a good name (or at least a good nickname) for a dog who's allowed to go off-road. After a walk yesterday, I spent about 30 minutes finding and removing tiny Velcro-like seed pods from our current dog's coat.

[sionnach57]

There is a small error in this otherwise fine quote:

"The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind - one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd - left one in a shrinking minority."

— Alexander McCall Smith
— The Careful Use of Compliments

An extra 'h' has crept in to turn 'wit' into 'with'.

[sionnach57]

"Hidden among the lupins were irises of a maroon shade so deep they looked black. Farther on there were other irises, purple and pink, and a buff color veined with brown. The field ended in a downslope of grass starred with red, white and purple anemones, and in the distance there was a lake of pure lapis blue."

— Olivia Manning
— The Levant Trilogy

A perfectly fine quote from the delightful Olivia Manning. And yet it has an average solving time of 3002 seconds. That's 50 minutes, for a text with no obvious difficulties. What is the sticking point? There is no way to know for sure, but I am willing to bet that it is the following. To figure out that the fourth word is "lupins", one has to get the u and the p from clue Q , which is something like "a polyamorous love triad". Without the answer to that clue, one will just have l__ins. Which allows for an awful lot of possibilities before one figures out that the missing letters are u and p. Because good luck ever finding the solution to clue Q as THROUPLE. So I bet a lot of people wasted a lot of time going back and forth between l__ins and THRO__LE. Up to 50 minutes in many cases.

So, although the quote is OK, the puzzle itself is booby-trapped because the solution depends on guessing the appalling term THROUPLE which, I mean, seriously? But there is no decent pathway for a reasonable person to arrive at it, because, let's face it, l__ins could be almost anything.

And yes, I am grumpy today. But here's the thing. I spent the first 22 years of my life in Ireland. Nonetheless, I cheerfully bow to the hegemony of American culture, geography, and -- most irritating -- sports in good number of the clues. It's not that I will ever care who was inducted into the baseball/hockey/football/basketweaving hall of fame in 1992, but this kind of information is apparently part of an American's mental furniture. Some passing knowledge of football, basketball, and baseball seems essential. So fine, I will pretend to know the difference between a short stop and a quarterback. And I did work in corporate America for over 20 years, where I witnessed the rotting of some fine minds simply by the rampant proliferation of appalling sports clichés. I've worked on teams where everyone gave 110% to perfect their Hail Mary passes to achieve the slam dunk that would leave the opposition in complete disarray. I actually kind of like that many of the clues force me to learn stuff I would otherwise never know, even if some of that specialized knowledge relates very specifically to certain TV shows in the 1950s or 1960s. Because almost every puzzle includes at least one joy-bringing clue, to which the answer might be Piggly-Wiggly or higgledy-piggledy, or any one of a huge variety of clues so clever and satisfying they just make a person beam with satisfaction.

But there are limits. And there are certain standards. And a clue where the answer is THROUPLE is , quite simply, beyond the pale.

[DogMa]

I have to agree with sionnach57. "Throuple" is an abomination, and it is not in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary—thank heaven. What's next? Will we be asked to consider "nite" and "thru" real words?

[Davey24]

I fdon't know whether it's useful to add to this so long after the last post about the Levant quote, but I was given this puzzle today and had a bad time getting it right. But the problem was not THROUPLE, a word that's become ever more familiar since 2021. The problem was that I didn't know the last vowel in EDSHEERAN, and "grass stirred...with anemones" seemed a lovely apt phrase. I suppose "starred" is better!