(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.)
Edinburgh again so soon, Chris? Some of us are still sore about contest #70 — a controversial ruling that gave the incorrect door number as the winner (further discussed in #71). Stop the steal!
Too soon. From a sleuth who whiffed last week:
The contest reminded me of a magical visit to Stirling Castle that my wife and I made in 2019. Darn, I thought the view had to be in Scotland, and I even looked back through my pics to see if it was Stirling, but it was trickier to find than I expected and I ran out of free time to keep looking.
A sleuth in San Francisco tries to clear up a mystery:
From last week in Edinburgh, a submitter speculated: “the window at the top is blurred on Street View for some reason (perhaps someone was hanging out on the day they went around?)”
My hypothesis: It’s an artifact of the way Google’s photo-stitching software sometimes foregrounds a background cloud, as in the following image of St. John's Chapel on the Fulham Road in Chelsea, London, which appears to have generated its own orographic cloud:
Another spooky sighting — for the new contest — comes from this sleuth:
While I was scooting along in Street View to get a good view of the building, I saw a bunch of mysterious-looking figures lining the road. I believe they are called Ondel-ondel. I slowly watched them emerge as I went down the road, and then zoomed in to get a closer look at each one as I passed by. I finished moving by the last one and decided to turn around to take another look ... and saw nothing but an empty sidewalk. I was so startled that I was actually frightened for a second.
Of course, it was just an image from a different day, and they reappeared in the next shot, but I think it’s appropriately Halloween-themed that for a moment it seemed as though they had vanished back to the spirit world.
Here’s the before and after:
Here’s our queen of the window views, Kathleen Waldron, after a long absence:
I never enter a guess for the contest itself, but this looks so much like SOME BIG CITY in China that I am going with Beijing. The massively tall building the photo was taken from and then the little cobbled-together houses in the old neighborhood — hutongs — scream China.
Another sleuth focuses on the main clue of the week:
Seems that the sign for Pressto — an international chain of laundry businesses — narrows it to about 25 countries. And the abundance of greenery plus the housing density immediately makes me think of Mexico City. I can’t quite find that particular sign anywhere, and I’m low on time this week, so I’ll just go ahead and make Chapultepec Castle my official guess.
From our super-sleuth in Bethlum:
Was Dusty on holiday or on strike this week? I’m surprised she didn’t make an appearance to hide that Pressto sign. Perhaps she has an aversion to cleaners ...
She had an aversion to most things that weren’t food. For newer members of the Dish who might not know the difference between Dusty (the inspiration for the Dish logo) and Bowie (the three-legged beagle you occasionally see photos of), here’s an old photo of the dearly departed Dusty:
The Pressto sign wasn’t so “presto!” for our favorite married team:
S: Have you looked at the VFYW yet? I’d say Thailand. G: No. I’ll take a look … I would guess Africa. There are banana trees. S: South America? G: Pressto is an international Spanish dry cleaning and laundry franchise. Present in only 25 countries. We need to look at the large cities in those countries. That should be straightforward. S: Must be South America. G: The satellite dishes seem to indicate we are on the equator and it’s a big city with an elevated train system. I am thinking somewhere in [redacted]. S: Maybe. Where did you see Pressto? G: It’s just below. S: Whoa. That is obvious. Dusty is slacking.
From a previous winner in Kitsap County:
Our UWS sleuth from NYC looks at the map:
Oh, how you got my hopes up by not “Dusty-ing” that Pressto sign. Wikipedia confirmed my suspicion that it was too good to be true with this map of where to find Pressto laundry/dry cleaning franchises:
Our super-sleuth in Ann Arbor asks, “I feel like my teammate and I are doing way better outside of the Anglo-Saxon world, having failed miserably at the last two contests, where we got no further than the region (American West, British Isles) … or is it that you mercifully keep some clues in photos from more exotic places?” Yep, I do, in order to strike a balance of “challenging but gettable.”
Our Coloradan sleuth in NJ serves up the aerial this week (Chini just went straight to the window):
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