(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.)
I can’t believe it! Thanks Chris. I’ll take the two free years — only because I purchased the book years ago on my own, thinking I would never win.
Next stop, super sleuth? You never know.
You’ll get there. The A2 Team asks:
Am I noticing it just now, or is it a new kind of thread in the recent write-ups: taking care of aging parents? Seems to come up ever more frequently. I can relate: I’m currently in Germany to see my 90-year-old mother — still healthy and smart, but with failing short-term memory. Not a place you want to be in.
Here in Nuremberg, I get to go into town to buy Christmas stuff for all my children and grandchildren. Here’s a photo of the most famous Christmas market in Germany — Nuremberg’s Christkindlesmarkt:
Too easy for a contest, I’d assume, but as a contribution to the regular reports on bookstores from the Brookline sleuth, let me note that this photo was taken from the bookstore of Korn & Berg, which happens to be Germany’s oldest bookstore, founded in 1531. Nuremberg has a couple of these institutions that go back to the days of the Reformation and the print revolution. For instance, the school I attended here for a few years has been around since 1526.
“Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash” also happens to be the title of a favorite album by the Pogues. It was produced by Elvis Costello, who said, “I saw my task was to capture them in their dilapidated glory before some more professional producer fucked them up.” The cover art is pretty choice as well, seen below. Here’s “Sally MacLennane,” a song built on a sort of double entendre:
It’s debatable whether drink or women were singer Shane MacGowan’s first love. Sally MacLennane, while no doubt lovely, is a brand of beer.
Almost as famous as their music was Shane’s smile:
From our videogame fanatic in Augusta, GA:
This week, I can only offer a followup to the Annapolis contest. Several sleuths mentioned author Tom Clancy’s connection to the area, and while he’s no doubt best known for his books and the films made from them, he also bears the distinction of having had his name appear in the title of more videogames than that of any other person, with over 40 games bearing the “Tom Clancy’s” moniker.
The Clancyverse first appeared in game form in a 1987 strategy title based on The Hunt for Red October (some extremely non-exciting footage is here), followed by several more action-oriented versions released to tie in with the 1990 movie:
The 1986 novel Red Storm Rising — whose combat scenarios Clancy actually planned out using a miniature wargaming system — also spawned a strategy game. A bit of a digression here, but when I went looking for footage of the PC game, I also found this video of the battle from the “Dance of the Vampires” chapter of the book being modeled in the DCS World sim that I simply had to share, since it’s such so painstakingly detailed!
By the mid-’90s, Clancy was looking to further expand his brand into original game content, and in 1996 he founded Red Storm Entertainment, composed of the employees of the small studio that had collaborated with him on the submarine sim Tom Clancy: SSN.
(Clancy actually appointed his friend and technical advisor on that game — retired Royal Navy sub commander Doug Littlejohns — to run the company, even though he had never played a game.)
In 1998, Red Storm released Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, the first of a series of highly acclaimed tactical shooters that put the studio on the map and led to its acquisition by Ubisoft a couple of years later. Ubisoft made good use of the Clancy license (he himself was only ever involved in the creation of the very first game, and actually sold his name outright to Ubisoft in 2008), launching Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon in 2001 and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell in 2002, which both spawned long-running series of their own.
Changing subjects entirely — I know I’ve gone on for far too long already — but with all the crabs in the latest contest, I can’t go before sharing this meme-inspired crustacean combat game. Behold the majesty of Fight Crab!
If Ubisoft ever gets its pinchers on that as well, I’m sure we’ll soon be looking forward to Tom Clancy’s Fight Crab: Featuring Rayman and All the Guys from Assassin’s Creed!
A quick heads up before 2025 is up. You probably already saw the “Home News” message that Andrew wrote in the main Dish this week, but in case you missed it, here’s the rub:
We haven’t changed our subscription price for five-and-a-half years, even though inflation has eroded 25 percent of the value in the interim. So to keep up a bit, we’re raising the price for new subscribers — to $6 for a monthly plan and $60 for an annual. No current subscriber will be affected — so don’t worry.
But we’re not doing it till the New Year!
That gives all of you who keep telling us you mean to get around to subscribing a golden opportunity. Here’s your chance to lock in the low current price before it goes up. We really, really hope you do.
If you’re a longtime subscriber and have the means to help us keep up with inflation, we’d also be deeply grateful if you choose to increase your sub. It’s easy to do. Just click on the “Upgrade to founding” button at the very top-right of this page, and pick a price higher than $50 a year. Or, if you’re reading this page over email, click here to find the “Upgrade to founding” button. Upping the price only takes a few seconds, since your payment info is already loaded as an existing subscriber.
Also, if you still need to get something for a friend or family member for Christmas, gift subscriptions are available. It could be a good way to stay in touch with a loved one over the course of 2026 — to share in the window search and all the fun facts it generates from the incredible army of sleuths.
On to this week’s view, here’s our super-sleuth on the UWS:
I’d like to pretend that I was this close to guessing this View, and that I would certainly have gotten the answer if I weren’t so pressed for time this week. But the sad truth is, I haven’t the faintest idea where this is. I know we’re in the US (duh), but I can muster only an unsupported-by-any-data guess: somewhere outside Salt Lake City, Utah. You know, in one of those “facilities” with school buses and enough “attachments” to warrant a big sign.
I very much look forward to learning how the super-super sleuths figured this one out. Hoping I can pick up some tricks ...
Meanwhile, I’m off to a place where I hope to capture a challenging View for you. Stay tuned!
Yes please! Our ski nerd observes:
There’s a dealer across the street with Caterpillar’s corporate branding:
The mountains were somewhere in the West, and I prepared myself for a long slog through all the Cat dealers in the ten Western states.
It’s indeed in the American West. But still, that’s a lot of CATs, as Berkeley illustrates below:
The only thing I know about heavy machinery is that you aren’t supposed to operate it after taking certain medications. So having a Caterpillar dealership as the only noteworthy feature in the photo wasn’t exactly a confidence booster. Of course I checked to see how many of them might need to be combed through, and that looked a bit daunting:
From our Warrensburg historian:
Thanks for leaving the “Cat” visible — that’s short for Caterpillar, a construction equipment manufacturer. I tried for a while to guess the name in front of “Cat” — where they put the local dealer’s name — and that led me on a wild goose chase. At first I thought it might be “Empire,” which is based in Arizona; and then I tried “Quinn,” which is in California. Neither was correct, needless to say.
The entry from Yakima begins:
All the skyline trees are evergreens, and the topography is clearly Western. Because of the patchily forested slopes, I expected we were somewhere semi-arid, like Nevada or Montana. I didn’t recognize the bare patches are really seven-year-old scars from a 200,000 acre wildfire.
There are more Cat logos than Cats in the photo, but the Parts/Service/Sales markings above the door suggest we could be looking at a dealership. I ruled out Washington and western Oregon by gestalt. So I started a satellite search for Cat dealers with long buildings in drier forested parts of western states. I started with “Caterpillar dealer Oregon,” but the buildings were all too small.
The Intrepid Couch Traveler is “traveling this week”:
No time. WAG: Bozeman, Montana?
Our super-sleuth in West Orange is “Saving this one for the holidays”:
Can’t quite get it. But I’m close!!! How may Caterpillar facilities can there be anyways?
Our public art maven in Bethlum goes with “Somewhere in the American southwest”:
Too much happened this week and I lost track of the contest. I did start looking at CAT dealers in southern California, especially near San Bernardino, but I wasn’t able to zero in on the area. I dislike mountain profiles (maybe more than church spires) as one of the more important data points, so I’m not feeling it this week.
Holiday duties/activities are also taking my time, but that’s not an excuse. Happy Holidays to you and your kin.
You as well! Riverwoods takes a swing at another state: “I couldn’t get through all the CAT locations in the southwestern USA, so I’ll just guess New Mexico.” Chini provides a hint below — and mentions the location of the first-ever contest for both the Daily Dish and the Weekly Dish:
You know the week’s contest is gonna work out when your random first search pulls up a view from Farmington, New Mexico. But this week’s view is a fair bit north of that town:
From the Falcon Heights couple: “Looks like Nevada, at an Empire Cat location, but we could not find it.” San Mateo is also stumped:
This week’s VFYW was taken from Nowhere, Noplace, Nohow. Or rather, this week you’ve stumped me! I could say that I’m not a Cat person.
The VFYW bartender on Park Avenue names the right state:
I’m going to keep searching because this one is driving me nuts.
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