(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.)
Highlights from this week’s writeup:
A sleuth determined to climb the tallest building on every continent — and this city has one of them.
The oldest mummies in the world.
The bizarre sex between male and female harvestmen.
Probably the most inspiring billionaire couple you’ve never heard of.
Amazing! I’ve been reading the Dish for 20+ years, and I never thought I’d be a VFYW winner. I’d love a copy of the book. Merci!
Avec plaisir! Our super-sleuth in Bethlum just returned from Paris:
I have a follow-up to last week’s write-up: the gorgeous trees planted all throughout Paris are not sycamores (which are American and have mottled white bark), but a close cousin, plane trees (which have mottled greenish-tan bark, and are often lumpy). My husband uses both for building ukuleles, so I’ve heard much about the differences. We saw many fine examples of plane trees in Jardin des Plantes and Jardin du Luxembourg. Here’s one from the latter:
Lots of instruments in that tree!
Below is a taste of some street art from our boat trip up the St. Martin canal that included a long tunnel under the Place de la Bastille, nine locks, two swing bridges, and one lift bridge — pretty cool:
We did stumble upon the Hotel de Louvre by accident, and I immediately recognized the Metro from working on that contest:
A sleuth on the Correct Guesser list was also just in Paris:
After winning the Budapest funicular contest in February, I’ve gone back to being a lazy lurker again — just enjoying your and others’ hard work. But I can’t resist cluttering-up your inbox with a Paris follow-up, since I just got back a few weeks ago.
I remembered the gonzo splendor of the Opèra Garnier from my last visit in 1980 (man, I’m old), so I wanted to revisit. Well, behold the famed facade in early September 2025!
It’s completely covered by scaffolding encased in a gigantic photo-reproduction on fabric of the actual facade beneath. I love the absurd tension between the desire to mitigate poor tourists’ disappointment (a selfie right in front of the “sculptural” groups at the base might look almost convincing) and the ugly reality that somebody’s gotta pay for the mammoth restoration project!
Also, a first-time visit to the stately Musée Rodin yielded the funniest photo from the trip:
To me it says:
We are France. Unlike you, we have too much art, but not so much A/C. We think it entirely appropriate to nonchalantly curate a display that pairs one of The Master’s is-it-art-or-porn original bronzes, already mounted by him on a rather painfully placed pole, next to a similarly mounted fan and, for a pop of color, a fire extinguisher. C’est magnifique, non?
A less raunchy memory from Paris:
It’s always a pleasure to see a part of one’s entry included in the VFYW write-up. This time, I want to add a coda:
First, like so many of last week’s contributors, Paris holds a special place in my heart, having lived out the Hemingwayesque dream in the mid-‘80s when I was 25. (“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”) I had set myself down there for the better part of a year and was actually able to eke out a living as a freelancer for several Canadian media outlets.
And secondly, many years later, I bought a monumental 5x6 foot photo taken from the balcony of the Palais Garnier in 2012 by Vancouver photographer David Burdeny, which I hung in my office. As you can see (barely), facing the camera at the very end of the street is the location of last week’s window — the Hotel du Louvre:
Thanks as always for the contest; it’s part of my weekly routine — even if I don’t submit an entry very often.
Quality not quantity! Here’s some tourist advice from our sleuth known as “the a-maize-ing sleuth in Ann Arbor”:
For last week’s Paris write-up, I forgot to share one more tip: if you are lost in that city, on foot or on bike, you can adopt the Jean Valjean Algorithm: head to the lower ground. Just like water in the sewer, you will return to the Seine sooner or later. It helped me more than once.
One more entry on Paris comes our super-sleuth in Augusta, GA:
Greetings! I’m still playing follow-up. In contest #406, I mentioned French gaming giant Ubisoft (in the news again most recently for a controversially funded game add-on), but since we were right around the corner from the Louvre last week, I wanted to highlight a rather unusual videogame connection. Until just last month, Louvre patrons could rent a Nintendo 3DS containing an audiovisual museum tour, complete with 3D models of ... uh, the works of art they were presumably already staring at in all their 3-dimensional, real-life glory.
It could also be downloaded from the 3DS store in order to take a virtual tour from the comfort of your home, which makes a lot more sense from a marketing point of view.
On a completely different note, last week’s mention of Les Misérables brought to mind the most common complaint lodged against both the original novel and its many adaptations: that none contained an epic showdown between Jean Valjean and a robot version of himself. Fortunately, this was remedied in 1998 by a Japanese PC game called Arm Joe, which transplanted Valjean and company into a Street Fighter inspired 2D fighting game. Non-canon characters included the aforementioned Robojean, as well as a tea-drinking rabbit called PonPon, and a ridiculously overpowered character who was the human personification of Judgment. Special moves included Enjolras dropping a barricade on his opponents, and Marius summoning all his dead, skeletal friends to come to his aid.
Here’s a sampling of the action:
The following entry from a first-time sleuth is about a month too late, but it’s hard to turn away a first-timer:
I suppose the contest from the September 12th blog post is over, but I just saw it, and I think I have it nailed exactly. The logic is this:
Start with driving on the right side of the road, then add in the shape of the license plates and the fact that the mix of cars, SUVs, minivans, and small trucks looks like the US or Canada.
Add in what might be mountains in the background (or just a cloud) and you get the western US or Canada.
Then see the GLF truck, from a company that operates in the US and Canada.
Then notice the Moxie’s sign — the only name left visible in the view, no doubt intentionally. Given its location, it’s probably a restaurant.
So google “Moxie’s restaurant” and you can get their list of locations. No surprise that it looks to be a Canadian chain. Go to locations and you very quickly see one in Calgary, which is consistent with the (maybe) mountains.
The address is 29 Hopewell Way NE, Calgary. And Google Maps street view shows the exact spot to be the SE corner of the intersection of 48 Avenue NE and Barlow Trail NE:
Given the Moxie’s clue, I assume that lots of people nailed it right on the money.
Indeed — 58 sleuths got to Calgary, and almost all of them picked the right hotel: Courtyard Marriott Calgary Airport.
On to this week’s view, here’s Hue of the Falcon Heights couple:
I realize this entry is late and incomplete — and all those other bugaboos of the completist — but it looks like the Philippines to me. Not that I’ve ever been (I try to emulate a pine tree in Minnesota in all I do), but at least the pics I’ve been poking through suggest it.
Getting more specific is the super-sleuth trio in Vancouver, WA:
Thomas here, this time. Our team ran out of time, so I decided to submit a city name as a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Assed Guess): Manila, Philippines. Thanks for all the weekly challenge and delight.
Another goes with “Vancouver, Canada.” So did this sleuth: “The photo was taken from the ~20th floor of the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel in downtown Vancouver.”
Our super-sleuth in San Mateo writes at the end of his entry:
Now that I’ve explained how I solved the VFYW based on identifying three distinctive buildings, I wondered if anyone (other than Chini) could solve the VFYW without those three distinctive buildings. Then I thought, wouldn’t that make a good VFYW ReimaginedTM? So let’s back up a bit to actually show the vantage building, but from the wrong side:
Our previous winner in Honolulu names the right continent:
¡Qué odisea! This one was quite a slog, and I’m having flashbacks to contest #465 as I wade through the interminable sea of identical apartment blocks somewhere in South America.
Another wonders simply, “Argentina?” Guessing another SA country is the super-sleuth on the UWS:
So very tricky! I’ve found a building that seems so like the one we’re looking at ... and though I know it’s wrong, it’s all I’ve got. I don’t even have an address, but it’s in the Las Mercedes neighborhood of Asunción, Paraguay. Somewhere in the map area here:
I’m looking for a South American getaway that’s safe and easy. Maybe this is it?
The Albany super-sleuth spots the humans in view:
The prominent horizontal story dividers (probably not the correct architectural term) reminded me of the buildings from contest #465 in Asunción, Paraguay. Process of elimination (didn’t look like America/Canada, Europe, or Asia) pointed to South America. The two ladies on the balcony of the building across the street seemed like they could be from South America:
From our super-sleuth in Riverwoods:
I couldn’t locate strong clues (besides mountains), so I searched “where are cages used on balconies” — and Brazil it was. I remember the contest was somewhere else in Brazil a few years back, and I think it fits the big city by mountains. So I’m hoping for a little luck to keep my view streak at four.
From the beginning of the entry from a sleuth in Sherman Oaks:
I have now self-diagnosed myself with ADHD. Your contest is seriously eating into my Call of Duty time.
When I saw this week’s view, I quickly thought of South America, with its mix of styles. Maybe Colombia, but I noticed some of the trees were without leaves, which means it was not near the equator. That left Buenos Aires, Santiago, or maybe Sao Paulo. But the mountains in the background meant Buenos Aires was out, since it’s a port city and has no mountains near it.
He settled on the right city — as did Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome, who matches up the mountain:
I chose the tallest building in the metropolitan area, the Gran Torre Costanera, and started looking through photos taken from the tower, checking the shape of the mountains. Five minutes later, I found what I was looking for:
The rest was a trivial task.
Not so trivial for this sleuth and his furry companion:
I have been bested by buildings beyond my brain’s bandwidth. The bernedoodle sums it up:
Our super-sleuth from Santa Monica reveals the right country:
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