glass ball environment
n.— «Iraq, in intelligence parlance, was a “glass ball environment,” meaning the weather was often conducive to collecting images from above.» —“Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War” by Michael R. Gordon New York Times Oct. 20, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...