VFYW: Needle In A Bay Stack

For contest #415, we're in a lux neighborhood with an earth-shattering past.

(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, an obligatory View From Your Eclipse, courtesy of the super-sleuth in Toronto:

I thought I’d share my view from not-quite-a-window (Magog, Quebec at 3:29pm):

Damn. From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:

I could have sent my entry yesterday, but I was preoccupied with building a camera obscura to view the (partial) solar eclipse on Monday here in northern California:

From the winner of last week’s contest:

We had a busy weekend of eclipse travel (with a totality successfully observed in clear skies) and I’m way behind on my emails, so I hope you’ll forgive the late reply. I can’t believe I actually won! My wife said to take the VFYW book. Thanks to you and Andrew, as always, for the great content and for creating such a fun intellectual diversion for me each week!

Another followup comes from a sleuth in Tahoe:

Last week’s Chilean view brought back all sorts of memories from an October 2010 trip to scope out a possible move to Chile for one semester so that our three dual-citizen daughters (German and American, aged 3 and 7 at the time) could continue their Spanish immersion — and German! (Chile has a not insignificant number of German-speaking schools.) After flying to Puerto Montt, we visited German schools in Puerto Varas and Frutillar on Lake Llanquihue, and continued on to Villarrica and Pucón (with a lovely stop at the Los Pozones thermal pools) — both on Lake Villarrica and both looked down upon by the mighty Villarrica volcano.

We interrupted our school research with a hike along the W trek along Lago Nordenskjöld in Torres del Paine (as mentioned by the Alaskan globetrotter), which is about 15 miles north of Río Serrano as the Andean Condor soars. We intended to take four days, but without trying we covered the 40+ miles in three days, staying at the refugio Chileno after exploring the Mirador Los Torres, then at the refugio Paine Grande after hiking below the Cuernos del Paine. Our hike ended at Refugio Gray, where we took a boat across Lago Grey. Simply stunning geography:

A previous winner writes, “My wife and I honeymooned in Chile in 2012 but weren’t able to visit Torres del Paine due to a strike, so last week I felt double scorned.” Giuseppe wraps up a meta-thread from last week:

One more word about mulligans and streaks. (Chris, feel free to forward this only to the interested parties, if you think it would be too boring for the general audience). Berkeley wrote, “A view demonstrates itself to be impossible if and when at midnight on Wednesday every damn one of us has come up with bupkis.” I see his point, but IMO this definition is more subjective than one might think.

Here’s an example. There were two contests where only one player (Chini both times, needless to say) submitted the correct guess: #215 and #270. So those two contests couldn’t be considered impossible by that definition, right? But what if Chini had been ill during those weeks, or his PC had broken, or he was on a field mission for the NSA? No one would have guessed the right location, and we would all have considered the contests impossible. We don’t even know if some accident prevented Chini from finding Ouagadougou! Besides, why complicate a very simple game with too many rules and exceptions? A streak is a streak of correct guesses — that’s enough.

This week’s view is set to shatter the previous record for right guesses in the Weekly era: 127 for contest #311 in Florence, Italy.

Actually 86 sleuths got to the right city this week, and 72 got to the right building. Here’s the reinterpreted view from San Mateo:

Given the recent earthquake on the East Coast, this week I imagined how a future (hopefully far, far, far in the future) earthquake might appear from this week’s view:

A previous winner guesses a city in Delaware:

Strange view this week, in that there’s simultaneously a LOT to latch onto and not a lot at all. None of the features here are unique, except perhaps the wavy pattern on the sidewalk and the weird Gothic entryway in the bottom right corner. 

I’m almost positive this is the wrong answer, but the view gives me a “midsize American city with a decent downtown” vibe, and Wilmington fits the bill. I also had the rare experience of being able to evaluate a guess in person as my Amtrak train coasted through Wilmington this morning. I came away thinking it’s plausible and I’ve made the mistake of not submitting plausible guesses before!! My backup guess if I could submit one would be Detroit. 

Dying to hear how people figure this one out, but I suspect there’ll be more than a few entries of people who’ve walked this very street!

Indeed — and the first emailed entry came from a super-sleuth who lives in this city:

Thanks for the local photo this week! I wanted to respond as soon as I saw it, in case quick answers count! No need for me to consult anything, as this view is one of my routes home from meetings downtown.

From an OG Dishhead who got to the right building this week:

I’ve previously been published for sharing photos of my wife’s black dog, who continues to happily live with us and our children.

More recently, I was quoted lamenting that I did not recognize a view from my hometown of Evanston, IL — it was just a few blocks from where I lived for many formative years. But I have not been a regular guesser of these views, as I don’t have anywhere near the skills of the regular Viewfinders.

I’m a longtime Dish reader, somewhere around 20 years. I go back to feeling “tech savvy” because I would read the Dish blog feed in an RSS reader. In many ways, Substack harkens back to RSS readers, with the tech made easier.

I shared that quote with one the co-founders of Substack I caught up with this week, and he was chuffed. From a first-timer:

I’ve enjoyed the VFYW contest over the years, but this week is my first time guessing — and solving. Lots of great fun! Having lived in NYC for 20 years, that city was my first thought, since it’s obviously a commercial and high-rise residential neighborhood in a city laid out in a grid pattern. Then I thought Manhattan due to the perpendicular parking. Most NYPD precinct houses and NYFD firehouses have next-to-no parking, so they allow their people to park perpendicular to the street. Then I noticed the slope of the street. So maybe the Upper West or Upper East Side?

The big giveaway, however, was the partially blurred but still somewhat legible street sign for California St — not in NYC. So what hilly cities laid out in a grid pattern with mixed use high rises would have a street named California?

He went on to name the right city. So did the Berkeley sleuth-champ:

At first I felt pretty proud of myself, because I spotted all those paired retrofit plates on the building opposite us and decided right away that we must be in earthquake country. Then I noticed the literal triangularity of the planters along the sidewalk and realized it meant they weren’t just on an incline, but on a damn steep incline. (Turns out to be a 15.8 degree angle, which may not sound all that steep until you realize it’s just 3.7 degrees less arduous than Baldwin Street in Dunedin, which in contest #404 we learned is the steepest street in the world.) That incline would account for why the cars opposite the planters are parked perpendicularly. How often do you see that?

That’s when I realized, “I’ve driven on that street! I’ve walked on that street — on that block, even!” It isn’t that I recognized any particular element in the photo, but having worked as a stagehand in the neighborhood back in the late ‘80s, I’d gotten generally familiar with the look of those streets.

It was only later that I realized how truly easy this view is, when a neighbor pointed to something in the photo that I hadn’t given myself time to notice. At the bottom, near the red Tesla, there’s a street sign bearing the barely legible word California. Now, a town in France called Lacanau has a surf shop incongruously named California Street, but that won’t sidetrack anyone who doesn’t want to be sidetracked.

I hope you’re prepared for a thousand right answers this week, because this view’s gonna have a success rate of 100%.

A previous winner names the right city:

I’m currently in Llano, Texas, awaiting the eclipse with Texas friends who have a cabin here. Cloud cover moved in overnight and it looks like rain for Monday, so we’ll probably be skunked:

But we are here with friends, so no matter what happens, we will have a great time.