(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.)
Wow, what a wonderful surprise! I’ll choose the VFYW book as my prize. I hope you had a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Thank you so much for all that you do, Chris. I’ve been a fan of the Dish for several years now, after one of Andrew’s appearances on Bill Maher led me here. I especially enjoy the weekly contest and all of the amazing responses from the VFYW community each week.
Here’s a belated entry for the Hamilton contest from our super-sleuth in Sydney, who was busy traveling in East Asia:
Two-hour flight delay! We’re back, baby …
Here’s the link for the AI podcast (it goes for 18 minutes … I keep telling it to stick to 10 minutes, but you know how podcast hosts are). The episode sounds a bit “ad-vertorial” at times, so maybe I’ll hit up Tourism Hamilton or Tim Hortons for a sponsorship.
I loved your final post of 2024. It had a number of connections with my family history: I have ancestors who took part in the Victorian gold rush; my mother worked for a signals intelligence unit in Brisbane that handled communications with MacArthur in the Pacific; and my parents knew the drag comedian Barry Humphries. I remember seeing one of his reviews, At Least You Can Say You’ve Seen It, in Sydney in 1974 — before Edna Everage became a Dame.
The Milwaukee biologist’s entry about jumping spiders was wonderful, particularly the moving documentary about the guy who found a new species of jumping spider. I also loved the Austin mixologist’s Perfect Gimlet! I became fond of gimlets as a young man after reading The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, in which Philip Marlowe insists that a true gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice. I never used that ratio, but for a while I insisted on using Rose’s, in more like a 3:1 ratio. It took me a while to admit to myself that Rose’s isn’t really very good — maybe it was better in Raymond Chandler’s day — and switch to fresh lime juice and simple syrup in a ratio of 2:3/4:3/4. But my wife and I agree that the mixologist’s recipe is indeed perfect, so I’m going to use it from now on.
One more followup comes from our super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:
I always enjoy our musical sleuth’s entries, and given the depth of Nick Cave’s catalog, it’s impossible to highlight everything. But I must object to the omission of “Ghosteen”. It was written in the aftermath of Cave’s loss of his teen son Arthur (a twin), and it’s so unbearably poignant in its navigation of the shoals of grief that it can be hard to take in one sitting:
But it is not maudlin! The opposite. The word that comes to mind is “ecstatic” — in the metaphysical sense of a mystic’s encounter with great living mystery. The album, in wrestling with death, brims with life — and afterlife. It feels like a breakthrough in Cave’s composition process — less “constructed”, more “discovered” or “experienced”. This is a community that openly grapples with grief, so I would feel remiss if I didn’t point people to what may be the high-water mark of Cave’s catalog.
Here’s a lovely retrospective note from our CO/NJ super-champ:
Happy New Year, Chris. I hope that 2025 brings you happiness, health, and prosperity. Thank you — to you and Andrew — for the Weekly Dish, the Dishcast and VFYW. These are collectively one of the highlights of my every week, and I look forward to another year’s worth of stimulation and provocation (the good kind).
In 2023, I started to get much better at the contest, only missing three views that year. This time last year, I set a goal to correctly identify every contest in 2024. Well, if we do not count the somewhat controversial mulligan of contest #412, then I am happy to say that I accomplished my goal. Honestly, I thought I was going to miss it at the very end, as this last contest of 2024 (or is it the first one of 2025?) was a doozy. It took me a while and required some heavyweight sleuthing, but I managed to nail it in the end.
The super-sleuth in Riverwoods wasn’t as successful this time:
Thanks again for enjoying my latest entry regarding the hip-hop scene in Melbourne. It’s even more fun to find the View and write a post about something fun or interesting. It’s so impressive that many sleuths can create posts on a weekly basis. Cheers to them in 2025!
OK, for this new contest, I picked Traunton, MA.
1) Because I couldn’t find the view
and
2) When searching the Union Jack flag in the USA, the result was it is still honored in Baton Rogue, LA and Traunton, MA. The Union Jack is part of the Hawaiian flag, but as far as I researched, Dollar General doesn’t have stores in Hawaii.
So let’s go with Traunton.
San Mateo is even less certain:
This week’s VFYW was taken in I, Don’t, Know, United States.
According to ScrapeHero, as of December 15, 2024, there were 20,376 Dollar General stores in the United States. Texas had the most DG locations, with 1,882 stores, which is about 9% of all DG stores in the country. I could spend $95 for a data file containing a complete list of all DG locations in the US with geocoded addresses. But I won’t.
Thanks to ScrapeHero, I can show you the exact location of this week’s VFYW — which is also this week’s VFYW Reimagined. There’s no Chini yellow circle, because it would be too small:
The super-sleuth in Yakima was overwhelmed by options:
Yikes! This view was positively evil. So many distinctive features, all of which lead nowhere. The flat-topped cupola on the brick building. The dish antenna on the church roof. The distinctive ADA ramp. The parallel parking markings — simple line divisions with no serif-like Ts on the end. 12-over-12 double-hung windows with stone lintels. (Did you photoshop something off those lintels?) Unusual street-lamp design. Square brick chimney with a flat cap. The Union Jack in the coffee shop. The iNeonlife coffee sign turns out to be a generic product available on Amazon.
And then there’s that Dollar General store. How I spent my Christmas vacation:
Now that I’ve perused thousands of them, I’ve discovered the DG store in the view has several unusual features, which in a just universe would make it an easy find. Atypically for DG, it’s urban, not suburban, on a street front, with no parking lot. It has a green shaped-metal roof. And it still sports the 1984-1995 logo:
By 1995, there were maybe 6,000 DGs, compared to 20,000 now, so you might expect 30% of the stores to still carry this logo. In fact, most older DGs have switched over to the modern logos (1995-2009, and 2009-present):
In my search sample of 3000+ stores, I found less than one in a hundred still using the old logo (one each in Memphis, Chattanooga, and Clinton TN; Winston-Salem NC; Richmond, Inez, Manchester, and Scottsville KY; Alexandria, Marion, and Lynchburg VA; Fairmont WV; Northern Cambria, Punxsutawney, Hamburg, and Duncansville PA; two others lost to my own undecipherable handwriting — and curiously, most of the stock photos used at the top of modern newspaper financial news articles about DG). You’d think that would make the old-style logo an easy target for an search.
Reaching for straws, I thought you might even be playing a Christmas joke on us, so I inspected Bethlehems, Bethels, and Nazareths in PA, NY, NH, CT, GA, KY, MD, MA, TN, and WV. Turns out there IS an old-style-logo DG in Holidaysburg, PA, but it isn’t the one in the view.
There goes five fruitless days of my life that I’ll never get back. I can’t wait to find out which secret clues the super champions use to ferret out this location.
For my hot springs report, it’s tentative, because I didn’t find the view location. I could be totally wrong if the view is Midwest (near Arkansas) or Western. If the view is Appalachian, but extreme southern VA or south of that, the nearest spring is Hot Springs NC, previously covered in the Asheville contest. So here’s a report for anywhere in Appalachian northeast of Wytheville, VA or east of Greensboro in NC, all the way to Maine:
The nearest spring over 100 degrees is Hot Springs, Bath County, VA, with a flow of 1,700,000 gallons per day at 106 degrees F. This was the site of the oldest spa structure in the US, built in 1761. A later structure, the Gentleman’s Bath House, was built in the 1820s, and a Ladies’ Bath House in the 1870s.
The Omni Homestead Resort and Spa, six miles to the southwest, purchased the pools in 1925. Some of the spring water was piped to the resort for use in private baths and other pools, but the original “Warm Springs Pools” remained open.
From the US entry into the war after Pearl Harbor until June 1942, the Homestead served as a high-end internment camp for 785 Japanese diplomats and their families until they could be exchanged through neutral channels for their US counterparts. Later, in 1943, the resort was the site of a League of Nations conference that led to the foundation of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.
In 2017, Bath County forced closure of the Warm Springs Pools for safety reasons, since the old wooden structures had rotted and threatened to collapse. In 1921-22, the Homestead rehabilitated the buildings for $4.6 million and re-opened them to the public:
Back to the window search, here’s the UWS super-sleuth:
Hope you had a fabulous holiday, lots of rest, maybe some adventures ... and that you didn’t lose any sleep over giving us this utterly obscure View to gnaw on for three weeks ...
Let’s say a sleuth can review an image of a Dollar General Store in five seconds, and (to simplify the math) there is no extra work involved in teeing up all the images in some sort of order. How long would it take said sleuth to look at images of all 20,000 Dollar General Stores? About 28 hours. So more than one full workday over each of the last three weeks.
Of course there are other possible paths. One could look for some kind of aerial tram, which seems to be peeking over the D in Dollar, or try to figure out where the Republic of Tea “embassies” are. (No such list.) Or search for British Tea Houses, or even cafes with British flags. Or try to read the writing on any of the blurred signs or that white bucket. Or one might notice what is either a route sign (yay!) or speed limit sign (boo!) just to the left of the lamp post ... and then realize it’s also indecipherable. Lamp posts, church steeples, gigantic satellite dish, the brick building that looks like it’s in Virginia ... the list of possibilities goes on. But it leads nowhere.
So I’m just throwing out my wild guess of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, even though I know it’s wrong. Because I otherwise have nothing at all.
Gatlinburg is about 500 miles off. Our Alaskan globetrotter makes another proximity guess — and gets about 285 miles away from our window:
Tough one this week. With the holidays and some travel to contend with, Valya and I have not found the correct Dollar General store (out of nearly 20,000) in an older downtown in the southern Appalachians. The British flag in a coffee shop (no doubt spelled “shoppe”) ought to offer the decisive clue, but it eluded us. Given that the VFYW has been in NC lately, I refused to even look there, and my lingering instinct pointed me toward Blacksburg, VA.
But we checked many of the Dollar General stores in that area and couldn’t find a match, so we’ll join the (short?) parade of wrong answers this week. My proximity guess is Radford, just over the hill from Blacksburg, but it really could be anywhere from GA to PA … yet I will be surprised if it is farther than 50 miles from the Appalachian Trail.
On the outside chance that we are within 100 miles of the View, I have a river recommendation: the New River below Claytor Dam, between Redford and Glen Lyn. This is not the more famous downstream segment in West Virginia’s New River Gorge, which offers whitewater thrills in a National Park. But Virginia’s New River segments offer several recreation opportunities in a similar setting — and many fewer people using it. A dam licensing study lured me down there about 15 years ago, and I spent a fine week paddling, tubing, and fishing the 56 miles of Class I-II river. Exhausting wet labor, but somebody had to do it.
Fun fact is that the New River is dishonestly named; geologically it’s probably the oldest river on the continent, forming between 10 and 65 million years ago when the slope of the continent ran northwest. As the Appalachians tectonically uplifted, the river was able to erode the rock faster and keep its direction despite the new topography, creating a so-called water gap. On Virginia’s New, you slice right through three distinct folds/ridges in the range, offering sublime scenery. The one higher-use section on the river is in the first of these folds, at McCoy Falls (aka Big Falls), where there is a tubing concession catering to a constant summer and early fall supply of families, Hokies, and Highlanders (students from nearby Va Tech and Radford U, respectively).
There is some whitewater action at McCoy and other play waves during winter/spring high flows, but most of the miles are just pleasant paddling, with periodic refreshing swimming holes. If you bring a snorkel and mask, you might even catch a glimpse of a candy darter, a rare fish endemic to the river that ornamentally belongs on a Caribbean reef.
You occasionally meet a few powerboat-based anglers chasing bass and crappie, but the valley is remarkably pastoral and the country roads are mostly out of sight (although not always out of sound). There are scattered beaches you could use for camping, but few people seem to take multi-day trips, because public lands along the river are scarce. Driving back to a hotel each night was my only complaint from an otherwise delightful week of fieldwork. Information on renting boats or taking trips in the area can be found here.
Back to fishing for the window, here’s the super-sleuth in West Orange:
We’re in the United States here — Dollar General is an American brand — which means we’re looking for an English-themed tea spot somewhere in the Mountain West or the Northeast — probably the Northeast from the mountain range and the steeple. Moreover, we’re not looking for a fancy tea spot. On the continuum of places-that-serve-tea, this is closer to a Brooklyn bagel shop than Alice’s Tea Cup (a plus in my book). That narrows it down … but not enough.
Luckily, though, we have the sign across the street!
Zoom in and it’s clearly a Christmas display; the acrostic is decently easy to make out. So is the word “CHURCH” — a natural guess given what else we know. So we’re looking for a town near something called “P____ood B____ Church.” Eliminate “Baptist Church” — the letter shapes are wrong — but “Bible Church” is a nice fit, and came to mind for me having grown in the South.
He eventually got to the right place, as did our super-sleuth in San Fran:
What a way to close out 2024. Seems like it should be easy with a big prominent Dollar General sign, but they only have about 20,000 stores in the US. So the brute force method isn’t practical (especially for those of us with young kids).
However, you were kind enough to leave a few clues to help us reason our way to the correct location, but they were tantalizingly difficult. The topography puts us somewhere in the Appalachian range — which is also where the highest density of Dollar General stores are located. It’s a small town up against a mountain, which doesn’t narrow it down much. Those lampposts are reminiscent of WV, OH, and PA, so we are at least in the northern part of the Appalachians. That narrows it down to approximately 2,143 stores (968 in Ohio, 904 in Pennsylvania, and 271 in West Virginia).
It’s indeed one of those states. Chini circles the right window as usual, and here it is from afar:
The legendary sleuth adds, “A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Years to the Dish team and everyone out there in greater Dishdom!” Here’s another top sleuth, Giuseppe:
The crucial clue turns out to be the brick building on the right. It’s hard to tell what it is at first, but after a few tries I figured it out: a post office. This doesn’t sound like very promising information, unless you know when it was built: almost certainly during the New Deal era. There are only about 1,500 of them, so finding the right one is a breeze — ehr, almost.
He ended up at the right window. The CO/NJ super-champ also got there via the post office:
I turned my attention to the red brick building on the right. It looked pretty official and — given the extensive handicap ramp on the façade facing the street — I thought it might be a government building. The most common government buildings are post offices, so it seemed like that might be a place to start looking.
Although there are a lot of post offices, unlike Dollar General stores, there IS a wonderful Flickr site that features photos of every post office in the country, arranged by state. Even with hundreds of photos per state, I figured I could flip through them pretty quickly.
Well, I started with New York and thought I immediately struck gold. The post office in Whitehall, NY on the second-to-last page of the 23 pages of New York post offices looked like a match — with the red brick construction, neoclassical windows, and simple open cupola. I Googled “Whitehall, NY post office” and found a Wikipedia page with a photo of what I thought was a perfect match:
Only problem: the handicap access is on the wrong side, and there is no driveway up the left side of the building.
Well, if this was not the right post office, I was very confident that the one in our view must be a post office designed and built around the same time. Although I was prepared to continue the search on Flickr, I thought that there might be a quicker way. In the Wiki page on the Whitehall PO, it states that the building was designed by the Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department under Louis A. Simon. A bit of research into Simon revealed that he was one of the principal architects of public works during the New Deal era. There is a website that catalogues all the New Deal sites in the United States.
They have some good search tools and you can browse by site type. There are 1531 listings for post offices and, on page 12 of this listing, I found the right one. Here’s the photo:
The ski-nerd champ also found that website, called “Living New Deal”:
The building was completed in 1938 with Treasury Department funds. Like many New Deal buildings, it contains government-commissioned art, a plaster bas-relief “Signing of the Constitution” by Hazel Clere:
The super-champ in Berkeley uses his unblurring superpower to name the right town:
As long as I kept looking for clues across the street, this view drove me into a brick wall. I wasted something like an hour checking out brick churches in Kentucky, because I’d found one that was close-but-no-cigar to the brick building in the photo (which in the end turned out to be a post office anyway). And there are millions of Dollar Generals, so that was no clue (or not a useful one until it got combined with the real clue).
The real clue appeared when I shifted focus to the window itself (where the Union Jack wasn’t even a decent misdirection). The sheet of paper taped to the window next to the neon “Coffee” sign is what gave the game away:
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