(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 have to say I’m a little surprised, but rather happy. I enjoy the contest — as do my friends in London. But we struggle when it’s a USA view (for obvious reasons).
Can the other subscription go to my golfer friend, Richard?
Every time I read “Richard”, I hear Louis CK say it:
The VFYW biologist sings the praises of her peers:
Great write-up last week! I loved the section from the Tree of Life, and I’m betting the Palau clip was the jellyfishes. And the chef will enjoy my fruit bat entry in the Guam contest, #400 — along with a classmate’s story about eating them for New Years dinner.
I had some questions from the Ireland quiz, which I forgot about in my 100th-post excitement. I really want the chef to tell me more about those phalluses rising from the ground in Asheville. Send pictures.
Also, in the short story last week, what are glassworms?
Chaoborus is a genus of midges in the family Chaoboridae. The larvae are known as glassworms because they are transparent. They can be found commonly in lakes all over the world and can be up to 2 cm (0.8 in).
Another followup:
I’m always amazed what other sleuths focus on to solve these puzzles. I wouldn’t have even thought of trying to identify, by name, that US Navy vessel in last week’s VFYW.
The “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor has a flashback to the hotel featured in contest #432 — Rosemont, Illinois:
I’m sending my entry late this week, as I just returned from travel tonight. Last Friday, while riding in an airport taxi, I suddenly saw a familiar-looking building:
The super-sleuth on the UWS was helped by a pro-tip from last week:
I can’t believe I just learned the trick of saving the window as a jpeg, which you can then magnify. I could never figure out why other sleuths could read signs and distinguish features that were just way too small or blurry for me. I’m hoping this will help me up my game!
The “Intrepid Couch Traveler” seeks clarification:
I actually solved this view on Saturday, but I didn’t get around to writing you until now. I hope I’m not too late. I always get confused about the midnight deadline. Is Wednesday at midnight the first midnight after Tuesday, or the midnight after Wednesday has happened?
The latter. I’ll make the VFYW description less ambiguous from now on: “The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST).”
On to this week’s view, the couch traveler circled the clues that helped him most:
From our super-sleuth in West Orange:
My first guess was Houston, TX. What we can see recalls the weird adjacencies created by the city’s lack of zoning — but nothing so bad as the sex shop next to the upscale mall. (Sadly the shop recently closed, making the Galleria that much stuffier.) The downtown also looks simultaneously modern and empty — an illusion created by Houston car culture and the subterranean mall.
But to my surprise, Houston is actually thousands of miles away from this week’s window!
Our super-sleuth in San Francisco had a similar start — and names the right state:
Well, I started this week way off — about a thousand miles off — in the American Southwest. (I actually grew up less than 200 miles away, but on the much rainier side of Washington.) Mission-esque building in a place that looks relatively flat and dry … but the Southwest turn up complete dead ends. Squinting a bit further at the street sign, it kind of looks like “Prague”, but that turns up a bunch of dead ends.
Our self-described ski nerd writes, “In the reflection across the street, is that the photographer standing in the window, a digital ghost, or the wrong window?”
The Ridgewood super-sleuth doesn’t see it: “I would feel a little better about my window guess if I could see the photographer in the reflection on the window across the street, but alas they’re not visible.” Our previous winner in Tewksbury is more confident about the reflection:
WINDOW INCEPTION ALERT — the window from which the picture was taken is in the picture itself!
He also provided a photo of the window building and the correct window circled, but that reveal will have to wait. Maybe you can recognize the city from the Chini-eyed view:
From a sleuth in Alexandria:
For this week’s view, I thought of trying to figure out which American cities in states with front license plates have silver-and-red fire hydrants. That didn’t help, but I did learn that the color of fire hydrant caps designate the water flow per minute of a particular hydrant. So the red cap in this picture means 500 gallons/minute or less, or relatively low-flow compared to others. The color of the body doesn’t mean anything.
The super-sleuth in Riverwoods also focuses on the hydrant:
It doesn’t seem busy enough to be Manhattan, but Google says NYC does use silver-and-red fire hydrants. I also couldn’t find a building with the medical frieze.
On that note, here’s the Baltimore super-sleuth:
I was trying to figure out why there’s a caduceus on the wall of the building across the street (which appears to be a parking garage):
Grok tells me that two snakes coiled around a torch — as opposed to a rod or staff — is not, in fact, a caduceus:
The symbol of two snakes coiled around a torch with flames is not a caduceus but likely a decorative or symbolic emblem evoking enlightenment or duality. Without specific documentation, its exact meaning remains a mystery, possibly hinting at the hotel’s cultural or spiritual aspirations — or just a fancy way to dress up a parking structure.
The use of the caduceus as a symbol of medicine is (according to many) an errant practice:
The caduceus, a staff entwined by two snakes with wings at the top, is often mistakenly used as a medical symbol, despite its historical association with the Greek god Hermes, a messenger associated with commerce and communication. The proper medical symbol is the Rod of Asclepius, which features a single snake entwined around a staff.
The caduceus is used as a symbol by the United States Medical Corps, Navy Pharmacy Division, and the Public Health Service (among others).
From a previous winner in Toronto:
I’ve been a bit too busy for sleuthing lately (both tax and election time in Canada), but I abandoned a timely night’s sleep for this week’s project.
The building of curious architecture that we’re looking at across the street seems to suggest something religious and/or medical, with the caduceus symbols on the walls, the possibly stylized crosses near the roofline, and the little turret on the corner. These features sent me off on a wild goose chase at first, but in the process I learned that the caduceus doesn’t actually have a history as a medical symbol (that would be the Rod of Asclepius), but has been adopted as one anyway, due to their superficial similarities, I guess.
I’m slightly more knowledgable about Greek mythology now.
From the super-sleuth in Bethlum:
This week I went on a small side search for silver fire hydrants, hoping to cross-reference towns with those hydrants with the street name, but ultimately the street name was the key without anything else. I just needed a visual tour down the avenue to get to the right part of the city.
Naming that street is the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:
Had the beagle covered up the second street name, this would have been difficult, but with “Sprague” so clearly visible, it didn’t take long to track down this view.
Back to the Toronto sleuth:
The flag shows that this is clearly an American city, but the the frequency with which streets named Sprague appear in the United States made this a dubious hint. So I started out searching for cities with silver-and-red fire hydrants, and then for kookily theatrical streetlights that seem more reminiscent of the eyes of Big Brother. That led me nowhere, so I went back to Sprague.
I searched Google Maps for Sprague streets or avenues in the US, and started picking them at random, checking them out in satellite view to identify which Spragues passed through what appeared to be central business districts. Then I dropped into street view and tried to spot tall buildings like the one shown at the left in the image.
This could have been an all-night effort for an unlucky sleuth, but I got quite lucky and hit a bingo on the third try.
Our super-sleuth in Brookline spots another clue:
Thanks to the unblurred “Sprague” street sign and the unusual black cylindrical parking meters visible in the photo, this ended up being a pretty quick sleuthing session. I found that similar meters can be found in parts of Los Angeles, with payments made through the ParkMobile app. I figured that the VFYW meters were also payable via ParkMobile, and it occurred to me that the purple labels were significant, so I searched for images of ParkMobile parking meters with purple on them and came across coverage of some newly installed meters in downtown [city redacted].
From the super-sleuth in Yakima:
Hey! It’s my hometown! This particular view looked a lot drabber when I was growing up and leaving for college, but it had been spruced up to match the view by the time we’d moved back to town and held our wedding rehearsal dinner at this hotel in 2002.
My memory was also jogged by the fortuitous coincidence that the color scheme of the fire hydrant in the view exactly matches the colors of the hydrant in my childhood front yard (even though it turns out the hydrant in the view is not representative of the rest of the city’s color scheme, and my childhood hydrant is also a different color than it used to be.)
Here’s our resident Burner, who names the right city:
The Yakima super-sleuth and I — and all other NW sleuths — have an advantage this week, assuming that Google Maps gives you the nearest results.
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