VFYW: Passing Gogh

For contest #419, we head to place where a famous painter was inspired - and confined.

(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.)

My apologies to all the paid subscribers who received the unfinished, prematurely published results earlier today. I accidentally hit the wrong button — a fat-finger error — and though I immediately closed the tab before the page refreshed, the damage was done. Ugh.

Moving on, here’s the winner of last week’s contest:

THIS IS AMAZING! Thank you! The first time I ever won an award was when I was six years old. The sadly now-defunct World Magazine (a children’s mag published by National Geographic) ran a contest inviting kids to send in their inventive sandwich recipes. I sent in mine (“The Tuna Tower”) and forgot about it the way you did as a kid of six in 1978.

Then, lo and behold, I received the news by hand-delivered telegram that I was one of the contest winners. Later that summer, National Geographic sent a photographer from Nashville to take my photo for the issue. (I can’t imagine being a photographer getting the assignment to drive three hours to take the photo of a six-year-old sandwich contest winner. A gig’s a gig, I guess.) In October 1978, my photo and recipe was featured along with about five or six other kids’. The grand prize winner got his face on the cover:

Me, I was just stunned to see myself in print, in the inside pages. I won a free subscription to World Magazine until the age of 12, as well as a certificate boldly proclaiming my award. Since adulthood, I have to hung that award in my kitchen.

Yes, since then I’ve won other awards on occasion, but aside from a trophy at a major film festival, winning the VFYW contest — finally — after 10 entries (and many more aborted attempts) ranks as highly as that first experience with World Magazine … even if the news wasn’t delivered by telegram.

For my prize, I’d like the VFYW book because a) I’m happy to keep paying for my Dish subscription, and b) like the World Magazine certificate in my kitchen, it will allow me to tell friends about what an absolutely fun contest this is.

A previous winner keeps things honest:

In case anyone gives you a hard time, my apologies for misleading you last week: Humber River Hospital is actually in North York, which is still part of Toronto. The error is entirely mine, but hopefully no one noticed or was bothered by it.

Here’s a gorgeous photo from the super-sleuth in Toronto:

Before getting to my solution for this week’s contest, here’s an obligatory picture of this week’s celestial show — in Kiowana Beach, Ontario, May 10, 10:41pm:

From a previous winner in NYC:

Tough contest this week! It seems impossible, but then I remembered a maxim I’ve developed, which I call Chini’s Razor: “Except in rare cases, we must assume Chris has given us enough information to reach a solution.” 

So that leaves us with a few clues: architecture, foliage, mountains, bell tower. The architecture here is unmistakably Southern Mediterranean, and the foliage is a match too. That leaves a wide geographic area, and the bell tower is absolutely no help. The pitch of the pyramid roof, while reminiscent of the Second Circuit in downtown Manhattan, is oddly rare in Italy and Spain. Most pyramid roofs are either much sharper or much, much flatter. 

That brings us to the mountains. They’re a match for the craggy, dolomite-esque look around Pietrapertosa and Castelmezzano. These towns are basically twin cities — there’s a zip line between them! — but the trident-shaped peak actually seems visible in some pictures from Castelmezzano, Italy. So that’s where I’ll land my guess. 

From a previous winner in Tewksbury:

This was an interesting one: a completely searchable and distinct mountain yields a seemingly stunning town, dripping in history and natural beauty, where every single house has the same roof material and exterior coloring, and where the streets are lined with trees so that street view is of no help. Once I found the tower in the upper-left corner of the picture, I knew where I had to look on the map … but holy needle-in-a-haystack, Batman.

A previous winner provides a clue:

At first I thought it was going to be an easy one, but in the end it almost cost me an ear! Ok, enough bad puns. It’s Mother’s Day here in Australia, so the family has given me a strict dad-joke limit for the day. Luckily it’s been raining here in Sydney nearly non-stop for a couple of weeks, which made it an ideal time for a tricky VFYW.

The super-sleuth in San Mateo teases the location with a piece of art — but this time, it’s not created by AI:

I’m not going to try to create another VFYW Reimagined this week when we already have this painting from Vincent Van Gogh:

The “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor takes over for the VFYW Reimagined:

I asked DALL-E to create a VFYW in Van Gogh style:

Chini gets even more creative with a reimagined bird’s-eye view:

For this week’s clue, here’s a technique I use sometimes. See, I try to get inside Chris’s head and imagine what he was doing when he picked the week’s view. For this one, I imagine him sitting just outside his camper. It’s late spring in the Rockies, long past sunset. A clear and biting cold is rustling the pines, and Chris is cross-legged on a chair with his laptop to hand.

And looking up at the towering heights of the mountains, and the starry night above, he thinks, “Enough of these easy views. If I have to edit 89 entries I’ll go insane and wind up in an asylum. So let’s give them a hard one. Then tomorrow I’ll just get in the van, and go.”

From our super-sleuth in Mableton, GA:

My guess this week is based on the architecture and horticulture. A search of “Mediterranean tree large seed pods” makes me think the foreground shrubbery are carob trees. Wikipedia tells me, “The male flowers smell like human semen.” Um, is that a feature or a bug? Is it a turn-on or turn-off? Additionally, I’m guessing the small tree in the middle is an olive? Maps for the two species nicely overlap.

I thought I could find that ugly hill in the background. But as usual, Google fails me. “Ugly mountain (country)” returns no helpful results. However “(country) mountain” works better. Algeria has some strange-looking mountains, but they are in the desert. Maybe we are on the other side of the sea? Dubrovnik, Croatia has some slightly-strange mountains and lots of red-tile roofs, so I’ll go with that. Plus, you need crazy wrong answers for the top of the page, right?  :-)

Our super-sleuth in Bend gets closer:

I recognized this view instantly — as no place that I know. It looks like Sicily, though. But which window? I’m guessing one of these: 

Heh. From the beginning of the entry for the super-champ in Austin:

I enjoyed the contest this week. Not too easy, not too hard — just right. My first thought was Spain, given the architecture and foliage, but I conceded that it might be Italy or France. It definitely has a Mediterranean feel. The key was finding the large rock outcropping in the background, which took a good deal of searching. There are actually quite a few rock formations that look similar in the Mediterranean area.

Another gets to the right country: