(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.)
First up is our super-champ in Milwaukee, who writes our weekly animal reports using her expertise as a biologist:
I was really glad to see the Dish and the contest resurface after Andrew skipped a week before the holidays due to illness, because what I thought would be a super busy and festive Christmas was upended by my first case of Covid. So I had Paxlovid instead of sugar plums, NyQuil instead of eggnog, and isolation instead of visiting family :( When I saw that Sully was well and the Dish was back again with a new puzzle to work on, I gave a real cheer.
Feel better soon! The super-champ in Berkeley reflects on another year of the VFYW contest (launched in 2010):
A merry holidays to you, Chris. This strange, anonymous, quasi-community that the VFYW has become provides me more pleasure than I ever could have imagined. Developing a regular beat about cinema over the past couple of years has given me a creative outlet I hadn’t known I’d been missing. Sometimes I’m almost embarrassed by the number of appearances I make in some of the window write-ups, but I appreciate how generous you’ve been with them.
He’s far more generous with the time and care he takes every week to find the window, create a snappy collage of the location, and narrate a number of movies and TV shows that were filmed in the area. I often find myself watching new cinema recommended by him. One of the more memorable examples is Locke, a one-man tour de force with Tom Hardy:
(Update: I just realized that film was, in fact, plugged by our musical sleuth.) And a Berkeley-recommended film I watched last weekend was Dolores Claiborne, a masterful story with equal parts darkness and light, and an incredible cast:
Another star columnist of the VFYW is the musical one in Indy. She has some somber news this week:
So, an update on my absence recently. My father passed away on Tuesday. He went from just needing some PT to needing hospice care in a matter of a couple of weeks. He’s 92, so it’s not a tragedy, and it’s something everyone goes through, but it has been a crazy ride. Two months ago he was 100% healthy, driving, cooking, shopping, etc.
A word of advice: if you haven’t had to start taking care of your parents, not everyone can step up to the plate when something like this happens. You really find out who people are when the shit hits the fan and people have to start sacrificing for others. So all of this has been a mixture of heartbreak and anger.
Wow! How exciting! Now I definitely have to make a trip to Halifax. I’d like the book, please. Two reasons: selfishly, I’d like a trophy, so the VFYW book will provide that. And two, I look forward to the Dish each week and want to support you and Andrew, so let me keep paying for a subscription.
I’m on holiday in NZ with my family — my wife is from this incredible place — and your note arrived here on Christmas Eve. A welcome early present.
And well-earned. From a sleuth in Raleigh:
I’m a Dish subscriber and long-time reader (from back in the Bush days), and I’m also a long-time “non winner” (in NYT parlance) of the contest. Back when it first started, I actually did pretty well for myself, all things considered. I think I had the exact location and building five times, but I could never guess the exact window. (Twice I guessed the window right next to the correct window — aarrgghh!!). Somewhere along the line I stopped playing, but in the past year I started up again.
Anyway, it took me all of 10 minutes to identify the window for this week’s contest, so I am sure you will have hundreds of correct entries. I’m sure some enterprising reader in the area will find their way to the correct room and snap an almost identical picture, thus robbing me of my hard-fought and long-awaited victory. Back in the day I bought many VFYW books as gifts for family and friends, but I’ve never bought one for myself because I thought I would eventually win the contest — Chini be damned! Unfortunately, the win has eluded me all these years (playing more frequently would help), but I feel that I’m damn close this time … perhaps close enough to have an excerpt of my entry make it into the contest results.
Another followup comes from a rivalrous sleuth in Sydney:
I saw you had an entry from Auckland. While we Aussies love our Kiwi cousins, we are never going to let them get away with this claim: “I can probably claim to be the farthest away from Halifax of all the guessers: Auckland, NZ.” The internet to the rescue! There’s a website that shows the furthest cities from any city in the world. Sydney is about 2,000 kilometres farther than Auckland from Halifax. At last, we Aussie have beaten the Kiwis at something this year (don’t mention the rugby, please).
Here’s a followup from the cartoonist who goes by A. Dishhead:
HNY, Chris! Thanks for adding in my Christmas card to the stack. It was fun to make/modify, so I hope some of the sleuths enjoyed it.
Also great to hear Carole Hooven back on the podcast and learn her side of what happened in our old department. It’s terrible how spineless the faculty were, so I’m happy she’s left for somewhere she’ll be supported.
Anyway, no art from me from week, but I thought I’d submit an answer all the same. I’m excited to see this VFYW-favorite hotel chain return to the contest. I’m a fan! Maybe ask them to sponsor the contest ...
Oh, and I took some window snaps over the holiday break. The first one is from my hotel in Tokyo, and it’s a special for Chini … hehe:
In no time Chini will get that hotel, window, time of day, and temperature. Here’s our globetrotting sleuth in Alaska on this week’s view:
It’s as generic a landscape in neo-urban America as I can imagine. Perhaps you are simply challenging us to find something interesting to say about this metro hub of an airport hotel strip.
Here’s the beginner of the entry from Team Bellevue:
We had widely spread reactions to this photo at first glance. I was sure we were doomed, because of the late holiday start/looming deadline, and everything seems so generic. But other (clearly smarter) members of Team Bellevue thought it’d be an easy one. They were right.
Quick Reads:
Sure feels like America: cars, license plates, buildings, and English signage all feel like USA.
Dusty covering up what our guess is a US-Bank sign? (That turns out to be wrong!)
A crucial bit those “it’ll be easy” members of Team Bellevue pointed out: the colored pattern on the background building. Interesting.
Some sort of traffic-light enforcement sign — perhaps a warning about photo ticketing?
The colored-building detail was promising, so we started there — but no amount of “office building colored patterns on side” searches turns up this particular edifice.
From a first-timer to the contest:
I’m hoping my entry gets included this week, so I can get behind the Dish paywall for at least a month (after which I’m sure I’ll be addicted and will finally provide my credit-card info). 'Til then, thank you for the tasty morsels you provide in your weekly newsletter, and have a merry Christmas!
Access granted! From our sleuth in Shiprock:
At first glance I thought the photo looked a lot like Lloyd Center in Portland, OR — perhaps a nod to where you said you were headed for the holidays. I am as well, visiting my brother and his family. Hope you enjoy your time in the Rose City as much as I will.
The high point of my trip was skiing at Mt. Hood with my girlfriend — a life-long snowboarder tackling a PNW mountain for the first time — and my 14-year-old niece, tackling the top lift at Timberline for the first time:
She asked for that hat for Christmas so she could deflect the “Boner” nickname at middle school — a right of passage for any Bodenner.
From the PNW to the DMV:
I bet the contest this week gets the record for most correct submissions. I figure you get at least five answers that involve recreating the exact shot. If I lived in the DMV, I’d try to do so myself.
But where in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area? The super-sleuth in Bethlum determines the right time of year: “While it’s the winter solstice right now, in our window view, spring has recently arrived, based on the cherry blossoms in the view.” The Park Avenue sleuth adds, “I thought initially the cherry trees were a pink herring — but no!” Another:
DC, of course, is famous for its cherry blossoms, but they were a gift from the government of Japan in 1912. This website rightly says, “In Japan, the flowering cherry tree, or ‘Sakura,’ is an important flowering plant. The beauty of the cherry blossom is a symbol with rich meaning in Japanese culture.” We lived in Japan for three years, and it’s hard to fully describe the importance of Sakura. On TV they have forecasts for when the flowering will occur, and a popular activity is cruising on a boat down the Meguro River past avenues of the trees in bloom:
Thank you for running the contest — I can only imagine how much time it takes to wade through all the entries — and your broader work with the Dish. The benefit of being in Australia is I get a bit of distance from some of the topics that Andrew writes about, but many of his principles are like mine. I imagine it is, at times, a lonely battle against lunacy on all sides.
I have also come to realise how fortunate I was to win the contest when I did (in Montenegro, on August 11, 2023 … you never forget your first). I also appreciate that you’ve referred to me a “sleuth” — only about 50 more contests and I hope to upgrade to “super-sleuth”! It feels a bit like karate belts, working one’s way up the rankings.
A super-sleuth belt is actually bestowed to contest winners with at least 25 entries, not 50 — so if you happen to be one, but I haven’t yet referred to you as such, please ping me and I’ll tag your email address. One of our superist sleuths, Giuseppe, also stopped to smell the blossoms this week:
I’d call this one an easy hard view. It’s intrinsically tough — a nondescript American city with cherry trees and a building with a multicolored façade — yet the solution came almost effortlessly. In this case, googling “cherry trees in the US,” I eyed a NatGeo article that begins with these words: “Washington, D.C.’s famous fluffy cherry trees were gifts from Japan.” So I said to myself, “Well, why not?”; googled “Washington DC color building”; and found the location (in the D.C. metropolitan area) in a few minutes.
Also, welcome back to A. Dishhead! I really missed him and his postcards and movie posters. Hope he’s here to stay!
Chini is eternal:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to the Dish team and all the crazies who do this every week. Now let’s get on with another year of sweet, sweet view-hunting pain! (No clues this week — too much, ahem, home-field advantage.)
From the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Chattanooga:
After thinking it could be anywhere, I became fixated on the DC area as a place with reasonable density for a ‘60s-era, first-ring suburban office area. For no good reason, the roads around Silver Spring seemed right. The buildings seemed too tall to be in the district. The colorful “fins” were the clue to hunt with across US 1. I didn’t know what the adornments were called, but they reminded me of the Seattle Amazon HQ buildings and an article referred to fins. So I googled “colorful fins on 1960s office Maryland.”
He got to the right location eventually, as did this first-time sleuth: “If you can believe it, I was initially convinced that this was in Madrid, of all places.” Our previous winner in Bend follows the signs and gets to the right state:
There is a “Photo Enforced” traffic-signal sign in the view, and most of them look like this:
But the one in the view seems like it must say “Photo Enforced” on the top line, and then has a second line of text. I looked at a bunch of them and these were the only ones I saw along those lines:
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