(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 write-up:
A city with a low boiling point.
The fourth deadliest volcanic eruption in recorded history.
Germany’s short-lived empire in a different hemisphere.
Ant sperm!
The triumphant return of A. Dishhead after two years of no VFYW postcards.
Awesome! Two free years of the Dish would be great. It will finally convert me into a long-term paying subscriber.
Here’s the link for those who love the VFYW and want to support it — and the Dish in general. From another recent winner:
Hi Chris! I received the coffee-table book a few days ago and really love it! The entries are so beautiful and I had no idea that the VFYW tradition was that old! I’m so happy to have chosen the book instead of a free subscription! I was also extremely surprised to find an entry from Guantanamo Bay! What a testament to the range of readers that Andrew has.
Quite. A previous winner in Oakland:
Closing out last week’s contest #495, the super-sleuth in Providence reminisced:
When I was a kid, and the attendant was in a smart uniform and washed the windshield, checked the fluids, and so forth, that was great … but that had completely disappeared before I was 10 years old. I do remember it fondly, though, sitting in my mother’s old Mercedes convertible while the attendant rushed around making sure everything was shipshape.
That’s how it looked from mom’s old Mercedes. Chuck Berry, quite famously, has a very different recollection of the same scene …
Working in the filling station Too many tasks Wipe the windows; check the tires; check the oil — dollar gas! Too much monkey business, Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!
Another followup comes from a sleuth in Vancouver, BC:
Readers will notice (or not) that Shell now relies solely on their logo and color scheme to identify their stations. Their name is unmentioned on their signage. This switch seems to have begun around 2010 and can also be witnessed in Canada, the UK, and Europe. Such is the power of a 120-year-old brand.
Another brand is discussed by the CO/NJ super-sleuth:
Before getting into the details of this week, I wanted to respond to Berkeley’s question about Jersey Mike’s (“Does anyone know if they’re any good?”). First off, chapeau to Berkeley — the esteemed buff of the big screen who is so successful in avoiding the small screen that he has not seen the ubiquitous Jersey Mike’s ads featuring Danny DeVito:
Secondly, a resounding yes: Jersey Mike’s subs are terrific. And I don’t say that just because I lived in NJ for 26 years. I think they are the best mass-market subs out there, and one of the only fast food places I will step foot in.
And, speaking of NJ, I agree with you and the Providence sleuth that the lack of self-service gas there is a bummer. I never understood it and, now that I am back in CO, I’m very happy to pump my own gas. But, alas, we are in the minority, and most NJ residents seem to take great pride in being exceptional in this regard.
Our super-sleuth in Bend sticks up for our collective best friend:
Your super-sleuth in Providence celebrated finally being able to pump one’s own gas in Oregon. I dissent! This is a disaster for Oregon dogs, who get very excited when pulling into a gas station, knowing that the attendant will always pass them a treat through the car window.
On out-of-state road trips, Oregon dogs become crestfallen at gas stations when the friendly attendant and the delicious treat never materialize. Perhaps they’ll have better luck when visiting New Jersey, although this does seem like a West Coast sort of thing. Years ago, James Fallows in The Atlanticpointed out some cultural differences between the gas station experience in Oregon vs. New Jersey — the two non-self-service states at the time. For example: “Maybe you can find the same kind of Rosie-the-Riveter era panache at gas stops in Secaucus or along the Garden State Parkway. But somehow I don’t remember it.” (And spoiler alert: the gas station in Bend had 52 beers on tap.)
One last thing — here’s a bumper sticker I’ve seen in Oregon:
“I want to pass along a recent view from my carriage house window,” writes the VFYW architect:
The Friday before the big winter storm, Con Edison frantically trenched the end of my street so they could eventually install a large pipe of some sort, covering it with steel plates at the end of the day. The following Tuesday they came back with a front loader and piled all the snow covering the trench into an urban iceberg across the street from me. Then, two days later a graffiti artist came along and left us a very strange piece of artwork on the iceberg:
Only in New York.
The Irish super-sleuth in Singapore replies to my recent call for view submissions:
Hello from Singapore, where we’ve just celebrated the start of the lunar new year, so a very happy year of the horse to you, Andrew, the doggo, and sleuths! The attached views are from room 1303 at the Heidi guest house in Yuzawa, Japan. Feel free to use if they work!
Part of the window frame should be showing. The other view he sent does have a frame, and it’s an especially cool view with icicles, so I’m going to post it as a regular VFYW in the main Dish this Friday, to give it a wider audience. And speaking of the year of the horse, I just learned it’s a special kind of horse:
The year of the fire horse in the Chinese zodiac commences on Feb. 17, the same time as the annual solar eclipse in Aquarius. This is the first time this particular combination of Chinese zodiac sign and element has rolled around in 60 years, and the hype is real. … According to Chinese spiritual author Helen Ye Plehn, the horse is “known for freedom, enthusiasm, intelligence, and a strong drive for movement and progress.” … Fire, meanwhile, represents visibility, passion, momentum, and transformation.
On to this week’s view, here’s our super-sleuth in Alexandria:
I had a devilish time with this contest. I couldn’t spend too much time with it because I work as a naturalist/illustrator and I’m on a deadline for some signage, so I’m frantically drawing beaver lodges, wooded trails, and Powhatan Indian villages and can’t sufficiently go down the rabbit holes this will require. I also can’t read the signs at all … sigh. I spent a long time researching blue-and-white triangular security camera signage — no luck.
Anyhow, I think this picture was taken in either northern Mexico or northern India, due to the pine trees and somewhat equator-adjacent architecture and scenery — maybe in a college town? I focused on the food cart, which didn’t have any dried squid on it, so there goes northern Thailand.
I found a whole category of infrastructure known as “hostile architecture” that I had not previously known about, thanks to the spiky baffle on the view’s lamppost, which was installed to prevent people from climbing up the pole (not pigeons nesting).
I guess it was there to prevent the food cart guy from siphoning off electricity — who knows — or indicative of a city with a large homeless population? Ugh, many tantalizing clues and no ringer for me: no truck logo, national flag, or HVAC system to help me out.
Those spikes were crucial for our ski-nerd sleuth finding the city:
I ran out of time (heliskiing and then taking my daughter on a tour of Colorado colleges). My best guess is [city redacted]. A big clue is the 360-degree camera on the pole with anti-climbing spikes, which matches a photo from TELRAD [redacted], announcing its expansion into “Smart City Solutions” (i.e. Big Brother Video Surveillance):
I found similar instances of the surveillance cameras on poles with spikes in [city redacted] — for example:
Near that were dual street lamps matching those in the view:
Back to CO/NJ, who names the right part of the world:
This view was freaking hard. (BTW, I’ve been expecting a VERY hard contest for #500 in a few weeks, so this caught me off guard.) Sometimes the window contest is a sprint and other times a marathon. If I keep with the marathon analogy, this week I felt absolutely great through about mile 20 … then I hit a wall and wondered if I would finish the race.
That said, it took a few seconds to figure out that we’re in Latin America.
From the beginning of Berkeley’s long entry:
By bedtime Friday I wanted to punch somebody in the nose — either the person who’d submitted this week’s view photo, or the person who chose to run it — both of whom, it seemed to me, should’ve recognized that solving it would probably be nigh on impossible, considering how little there was to go on. At least that’s what I was thinking as my head hit the pillow without having come anywhere near settling on which Latin American country I thought it would turn out to be.
The Brookline super-sleuth points to the key clue for unlocking this view — a small blurry sign:
A couple weeks ago I was getting bleary-eyed from looking at aerial views of red clay tennis courts. This week, I’m doing the same with red brick pathways in urban parks. But thanks to the textual clue on the CCTV sign near the bottom-right, I could at least limit my sleuthing to Spanish-speaking countries:
The visible words “siendo monitoreada” form the bottom part of the phrase “esta zona está siendo monitoreada” that appears on various signs alerting folks in the Hispanophone world that they are on camera. The vibe seemed more like Latin America than Europe, and at first I thought maybe Mexico City or Buenos Aires. I looked for triangular signs like this in Latin America and seemed to be getting a lot of hits in [country and city redacted], such as this one outside a church:
San Mateo uses that sign for inspiration:
This week I don’t need to identify the vantage building to invent the Reimagined. The surveillance camera in the VFYW sports a triangular sign with blurred words at the bottom. The sign is, I believe, an important clue for solving the VFYW, so for the Reimagined, I decided to unfuzz the words on the sign to make it readable and move it up to the top of the pole:
Here’s a country guess from our super-sleuth on the UWS:
OK, I admit it: I’m stumped. This felt like both South American and India (I know: useless). It looks like there might be Spanish words on a sign on the lower right, and Google kept directing me to Mexico City. So that’s my half-assed guess, since I have nothing else.
Looking forward to finding out where we are ...
Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods also picks the Mexican capital:
After a few weeks off from sleuthing (but still enjoying the views and write-ups), I got the itch again. But it wasn’t until a few hours ago that I finally cracked the sign’s words “Prado Monitoreada,” which means “Park is Monitored,” thus I assume we’re in a Spanish language country. So I’m taking a WAG because I couldn’t identify any other clues to help: Mexico City, Mexico.
VFYW is a tough sport!
It certainly is this week — only 21 sleuths got to the right country. Our super-sleuth in Yakima names it:
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.
