(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.)
Good contest views — not too hard, not too easy — are tricky to come by, so if you’d like to submit one, we’d be grateful: contest@andrewsullivan.com. Horizontal photos are preferred, and make sure part of the window frame is showing. Please also send an image of the building with the window circled. If we select your view, you’ll get six months added to your Dish subscription for free. (If we don’t select it, there’s still a good chance we’ll post it as a regular VFYW in the main Dish column.)
Highlights from this week’s writeup:
The first feature film to depict a gay character in a positive light.
“The German actor best known for portraying a Nazi was actually an ally to gay people, a supporter of Jews, and a fierce critic of Hitler.”
Going deep with the cuttlefish.
The second highest minaret in the world.
One of Scorsese’s favorite bands — and you’ve probably never heard of them.
Wonderful! I would love a copy of the book, to give away — since I have it already for myself. I’ve been reading Andrew since the New Republic days. I really miss the Daily Dish and love following the contest, but I don’t always have the time to participate in the competition. Thanks again!
From our resident biologist:
Wow, what a lot of neat stuff in last week’s write-up! I love “New Slang,” which I got on a CD of songs from Scrubs. Your other sleuth’s profile of Neil Patrick Harris made me go back and look at his spectacular awards ceremony openers. And I’ll have to rewatch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog:
Also, super thanks to your sleuth for the kind words about my animal feature! That really made my day.
Another followup comes from the submitter of last week’s view:
Wow, what a fantastic week of submissions! Can I take a small bit of credit for taking the photo that inspired all of that goodness? LOL
I really enjoyed all of the entries, especially the food-related ones. We will be heading back to Wisconsin next month, hopefully to finally move into our house, so we will be traveling back through Albuquerque again. I will definitely look for some of those dishes when we pass through. Your sleuth who discussed Hatch green chiles was totally correct; they’re a main feature in Albuquerque.
I was lucky enough to try them because my cousin suggested it. She is one of the coolest people I will ever know. She’s lived in the Southwest for over 30 years and during that time has been a smokejumper, a Grand Canyon river raft guide, and a wild-animal rescue ranger in Sedona. Safe to say she knows everything about the area and she practically ordered me to have the Hatch chiles in something. We opted for something I would never have ordered otherwise: Hatch green chili stew. It’s a cream-based stew that kind of tames the heat of the chiles, so you can really taste them. I could have eaten a tub of it. I will definitely have it again when we pass back through, but that pork dish sounded kind of awesome too, so maybe I’ll opt for it as an appetizer and try a Dish-themed meal of all of the suggestions.
Thanks again; this contest is a Saturday morning ritual. I love playing a small part, even though I know I will never compete with your super-sleuths and win!
Here’s another followup — from our “a-maize-ing sleuth” in OKC:
I recognized the photo from Arizona shared last week by the super-sleuth in College Park:
It’s the Agathla Peak, north of Kayenta along US Highway 163. One day in January 2013, when we were driving in the rain on the way to Monument Valley, storm clouds suddenly cleared, and we were greeted by the striking pose of the same peak:
The 1,500 ft spire was formed in the same way as Shiprock. Both are erosional remnants of a former “volcanic plug” — the central trunk through which magma used to flow. In time, the inactive volcano was whittled away, leaving the hardened igneous core — the neck — standing as a lone tower.
“Agathla” was Navajo for, in Spanish, “El Capitan.” Did anyone free-solo it? Not likely, because climbing and base jumping are prohibited on Navajo land.
Yet another followup:
I came across this line from a sleuth in the VFYW last week: “(The downloaded version of this one is 9 megabytes and 19 megapixels, which for VFYW is extremely high res.)” I had no idea that option was available. How do I download the photos? I just fumble around trying to zoom in on the web page. Maybe there are others who would benefit from knowing.
Simply click the VFYW photo; then a new screen should pop up isolating the photo; then move your cursor to the upper-right part of the screen to click on the following icon to download the full image:
Next up is the ever-creative, San Mateo super-sleuth:
I think VFYW needs a logo:
Maybe I should use the Weekly Dish colors:
Or maybe Dusty should be looking out the window:
Or? What do you think?
I asked him to see what a non-haloed Dusty would look like, and he delivered — fantastic:
VFYW followups have increasingly become one of my very favorite parts of the contest. Here’s one more, from a previous winner in South Jersey:
I’d say I hope you’ve thawed out, but if you’re anywhere north of me, I’m assuming that’s not happening for weeks. (I’m dreaming of a white ... Valentine’s Day?) Seriously, this is nuts. Not. Good. Bald. Weather.
Too cold to find fun facts tonight. The permafrost layer on my head slows my cognitive function down to a crawl:
The UWS super-sleuth says hello:
Hope you’re keeping toasty! It warmed up a bit, but we still have giant mountains of very dirty snow all over Manhattan. It’s ugly, and I’m so tired of taking 10 minutes to get dressed to go out. If only I were somewhere warm — like, in our View!
On to that view, here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Rome:
You notice signs of recent rainfall: wet pavements and a cloudy sky. You also see lots of palm and other trees (the fact that many of them look stunted doesn’t cross your perception threshold, unfortunately). You jump to the conclusion that this must be a tropical country with a hot, humid climate — and with red taxis, of course.
In Costa Rica, a tropical country, all taxis are red — yet, after wandering the streets of San Juan and a few other cities for some time, you realise this photo isn’t from Costa Rica. Some taxis in Thailand (another tropical country) are red — yet, this isn’t Thailand either. In fact, this isn’t a tropical country at all, and its climate isn’t humid, though it’s certainly warm. Never jump to conclusions too hastily!
Chini reveals that we’re on the coast:
Our super-sleuth in Berkeley unpacks a few clues:
Consulting Wikipedia on the topic of trends in national road-marking — as in which countries use white as their color of choice for center lines — didn’t narrow the field a whole hell of a lot. I was already pretty sure we weren’t in the Western Hemisphere.
And those crazy-looking evergreens with tapering branches all symmetrically arranged in evenly-spaced tiers, scattered across the park below us — they turned out to be Norfolk Island Pines. But this view isn’t on Norfolk Island, and this contest isn’t going to be solved the way contest #391 was: with a special tree that grows in only one circumscribed place in the whole world.
Beyond the South Pacific, Norfolk Island Pines can thrive in coastal areas of Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, southern Florida, southern California, northwestern Mexico, and along the Black Sea in Sochi (not to mention many other protected microclimates including this week’s view location, which isn’t included in the list above).
So the key came down to identifying that little red hatchback in the foreground of our photo, which took some doing. Turns out it’s a Dacia Sandero.
“This was a fun one,” says our super-sleuth on Park Avenue, who also saw the red car as key to solving the view:
I didn’t really get a sense of place from the photo. Somewhere warm with the palm trees and the clay courts, not the US but maybe Mexico? Then I spent some time in Brazil and other parts of Central and South America. No dice.
The color of the taxi was the breakthrough, and a few searches around cities with small red taxis got me there.
Reimagining those taxis is our super-sleuth in San Mateo:
I immediately noticed, as you probably expected we would, the word “TAXI” painted on the street. Unfortunately, after a bit of research, I discovered that countries in which taxis are called and spelled “taxi” are so numerous that the “clue” wasn’t any help.
So I wondered if the petit red taxi was a metaphorical “red herring.” Now I’m wondering, if it had been a literal red herring, how would it have looked? Let’s use the VFYW Reimagined to find out:
But it wasn’t a red herring, so we should do away with the fish:
He follows up:
Upon further reflection, given that we now know that the petit red taxi was not a red herring, what’s the opposite of a red herring? A smoking gun?
Our super-sleuth in Brookline looks into the courts:
Basing my approach on the Wikipedia wisdom that red clay tennis courts are more common in Continental Europe and Latin America, I searched from Mexico in the west to Turkey in the east, looking for pictures of tennis courts in warm-weather cities surrounded by architecture and vegetation similar to our view. I was about to give up after doing a sweep of the northern coasts of the Mediterranean when the little sleuth in my head told me to check the urban areas on the southern side ... and I’m glad I did, because otherwise I would not have stumbled upon the tennis club at [redacted]:
Another sleuth insists, “It’s definitely my adopted city of Barcelona, Spain.” Our super-sleuth in Warrensburg mentions the right continent:
This was a tough one. The plants looked vaguely African or maybe Latin American, but beyond that I was stumped for a while.
But he got to the right place, per usual. The right part of Africa is identified by Roberts Creek:
At first glance the area looked coastal Mediterranean — a major city with a large park and clay tennis courts. I couldn’t determine if the red taxi was left- or right-hand drive, but I discounted Malaysia, since the contest was just in Kuching a couple of weeks ago. I’ve traveled a fair bit around the European coast and it didn’t look like anywhere there.
Then I looked around the Middle East, but I didn’t see much in the way of clay tennis courts. My next choice was North Africa.
Heh. Our super-sleuth in Yakima reveals the right country:
This week’s view has a complete lack of textual clues, save the universal word “Taxi”. Google, always a dubious botanist, suggests the palm trees are Canary Island date palms — which is not helpful, since that species been transplanted nearly worldwide. Although a local promoter once put up a billboard naming Yakima “the Palm Springs of Washington,” I can assure you palm trees are not abundant in central Washington.
So I tried the Google gestalt-o-matic.
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