VFYW: A Bunch Of Morons And Prii

For contest #354, we travel to sunny "Rift Haunt Acid"!

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

From the winner of the most recent contest:

I’m super psyched, and I didn’t expect to be the winner at all! My daughter gave me a tremendous high-five, since she’s been sucked into the excitement of the contest since our jaunt to Salem, MA for the contest last year.

For the prize, I’d love two free years of the Dish, please. And thank YOU for putting this together every week — it’s such a fun, interesting, clever, and well-versed community, these Dishheads. Looking forward to not having a clue for many months to come!

A sleuth dissents:

I was disappointed to see the Logan VFYW include a reprint of the following reader comments: “It’s a pretty building, but man, Mormons are weird. I’m sure you’ll get lots of cool history about them and their kooky religion.” Another: “It’s easy to tease the Mormons.” I would have thought it’s no longer cool in 2022 to still print statements like that about religious minorities (or other types of minority groups).

I had balanced those snarky comments about the Mormons with a classic scene from South Park — transcribed below for those who didn’t click the clip:

Gary: [to Stan] Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls. [turns around and walks off] 

Cartman: Damn, that kid is cool, huh?

And of course the Mormons will get the last laugh:

From a sleuth in Pomona:

Just a quick comment on the last contest: Logan is the stuff of dream and legend in my family, as my mother and her eight siblings grew up there in the early 20th century, so it was delightful to see it appear as a View spot! Going up Logan Canyon, people watching and treats at the Bluebird cafe, participating in proxy baptisms of the dead at the Mormon temple — all of this was part of my family’s formative years. When the Depression hit hard, my grandfather couldn’t sustain his self-employment in Logan as a craftsman after many people owed him money, and he didn’t relish continuing to ask for it.

I was only in Logan once — a brief visit with my father the summer after my mother died, when I was in college. We ate at the Bluebird. We drove up Logan Canyon. We saw the big old Victorian house where my mother grew up — empty by then, painted pink and with weeds growing high in the yard.

On to this week’s contest, here’s “your mediocre super-sleuth in NYC”:

With the extra week for the contest I was determined to find the window, but it’s a tough one. I’m either embarrassingly way off or somewhere in the neighborhood. Here are the clues I could find:  

1. The license plates vary — either they are long and thin, or short and stumpy. This puts us somewhere in the Europe, since several countries have license plates with multiple sizes.

2. At the bend in the road, the signs with the white triangle on a blue field have three black zebra stripes to simulate a cross walk. According to a really wonky video, there are five possible countries with that configuration: Estonia, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, and the Ukraine:
   

3. The sign that Dusty is covering has a backwards “R,” which means it could be in Cyrillic. That eliminates Estonia and Lithuania.

In solidarity, I’m guessing we are somewhere in southwest Ukraine. But that’s a long shot. I’m guessing no more than seven people will find this location.

Closer to three dozen. Our musical sleuth in Indy also has Ukraine on her mind:

There are so many clues in the photo and I’m coming up with zilch — except that it might be Eastern Europe and probably a Russian-speaking country. I thought I narrowed it down to western Ukraine with the mountains and the architecture, but nothing really seemed to fit.

I did look into some music from Ukraine and found there are a lot of metal bands. A lot. Also a lot of “mellow” stuff too. Very little in between. 

I did find a gem from a band called Gogol Bordello. They are described as Gypsy Punk, which is as amazing as it sounds. I found info about the lead singer on Wiki. Eugene Hütz was born in Ukraine and his family left their hometown after Chernobyl. He came to Vermont as a refugee with his family in 1992 when he was 20 yrs old. He formed the band in NY and released their first album in 1996. Nick Cave, of “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds” (check them out!), produced it.

Anyhow, here’s the gem from Gogol Bordello:

Feel free to disregard this musical offering if I have the wrong country. I just don’t know! With tomorrow being Thanksgiving, I just can’t keep looking. I have pies to make.

Speaking of Nick Cave, the Telegraph recently reported that he’s a Dishhead:

Despite appearances, Cave has always considered himself conservative in temperament, ‘but also contrary in temperament too’. On the day we met he had spent the morning reading the collected writings of the conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan. Cave, a fan, says he admires the fact that Sullivan occupies a position which is neither extreme Left, nor extreme Right, ‘and he expresses it in a beautifully nuanced way, whether you agree with it or not. There is something there about the idea of uncertainty and calmness and caution that I like.’

Nick, if you’re also a window sleuth and now reading this, give us a holler! And maybe if we’re really lucky, send us a view from your window:

From our SF wine geek:

Hi Chris and happy turkey day! Long time no play for me. I spent most of October consumed with wine-geek stuff and then the first half of November catching up on work stuff. Shiela and I are now in Portugal till the end of the month. I’m on the train from Porto to Lisbon today and thought, “What the heck, let’s see what’s going on with the VFYW.”

At first, I thought I may have picked the wrong week to get back in the game. Nothing about this photo stood out to me. No long-forgotten memory of a place I might have travelled through was triggered.

The word “motors” on the back of the Kia truck suggests some English-speaking region — or else a red herring. The dude in the shorts and the red baseball cap suggests somewhere in California, but I am biased in that regard, and the rest of the surroundings sure didn’t look like anything I knew in Cali. The chopped-off “Hotel” sign in the upper-right corner signaled a place where tourists might go — not much help.

Okay, so that leaves Dusty, who is partially covering a sign. Was the image reversed? No, the number 14 clearly appears above the sign. Did the business owners hang up a sign backwards? Well, that would be some bizarre marketing, so that wasn’t it. I finally realized the sign was probably written in Cyrillic, which includes the reverse R. But that still didn’t point me in any intelligible direction.

Another sleuth adds, “Thanks to Dusty’s magnanimity in not being a dachshund, I was able to determine that the country of origin was one that used the Cyrillic alphabet — which, granted, still didn’t narrow it down as much as I would have liked.”

Here’s the Chini-eye view: