(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.)
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
A dangerous rapper who converted to Orthodox Judaism in prison
Always open to creative new angles. Our super-sleuth in College Park sends a view candidate I recognized instantly — because I’ve spent countless hours inside the window’s building (mostly doing the Dish):
Here’s a VFYW for an audience of one — Andrew. It’s a view out of the side door of the public library in Provincetown:
Here’s the circled window — on the side entrance door:
I hadn’t been to P-town in at least 35 years, since my graduate school days. I passed by the Atlantic House bar, which I’d visited illis temporibus, and it seemed appropriate to pay respects, since we were staying in the Atlantic House hotel in Narragansett. We also passed by Titcomb’s Book Shop in East Sandwich, from which I had previously bought a book only once before. I supported P-town arts by buying a print from Julie Tremblay’s gallery.
Anyway, our normal place in the OBX was closed for renovation over my spring break and it was a pleasure to head northeast for a change. I’m sorry not to have participated in most of the recent contests. I did look very earnestly for Bridgeport, CA, but foundered because I was convinced the site was in the Rockies, not the Sierras. Agh. So while I will not take credit for solutions without effort, I will still confess abjectly to my failures!
Andrew, Truman, and I will be heading up to Ptown for our annual road-trip soon. Here’s our super-sleuth who’s an architect in NYC:
Thanks for emailing me the video of the tallest building in each state. Very interesting.
Back in 2014, after my daughter and I climbed to the top of the tallest building on five of the continents, we toyed with the idea of climbing the tallest building in each state. After checking out a few online, we decided against it for two reasons. The logistics of getting permission for each building would be overwhelming. Also, as the video shows, many if not most of the buildings aren’t all that interesting.
I was curious, though, if someone has done it. I looked it up and it turns out last June someone finally did. Here’s the video:
The guy is insane; it appears he ran up and then down the stairs. We just walked up and took the elevator down.
From a VFYW newcomer:
Might as well use my time in the spotlight to plug my new substack, LoveMind. It was inspired by reading Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s books on brain lateralization and how it affects consciousness, and applying his insights to my own experience as a Zen priest and trainee in interfaith chaplaincy. I think this understanding explains the difference between Christians and Christianists — as one example pertinent to Dish readers. See this post or the About page for a flavor of what it’s about.
Sleuths are always encouraged to highlight their own substacks. From a fan of the VFYW:
I’ve re-upped my Dish subscription and now remember why I gave it up: I forgot what a fun time-suck the VFYW can be. If I give myself more than 15 minutes on this damn game, my husband will divorce me.
You can join her by subscribing here — to enjoy the full contest write-ups, the full Dishcast episodes, and the rest of the full Dish offerings.
On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks:
Good thing I upgraded the memory on my computer from 16 Gb to 32 in order for it to handle all the tabs the Chrome browser has open while I worked to solve this VFYW.
At first glance I felt it’s a Caribbean view, with its brightly colored buildings. The building in the foreground had green and yellow stripes, which made me look at Jamaica. The big yellow building across the water with maybe “HOODIES” written on it was a good starting point. The VFYW looks across a body of water like a river or a bay, so that helped narrow my search. No luck though.
I kept looking around the Bahamas and Dominican Republic, which had either sparse city-scapes or large mountains in the background. Still nothing.
He eventually got there. So did Chini:
Next up is a sleuth on the Correct Guesser list (for those who have guessed the right window before but lost the tiebreaker):
I was able to identify the city and the building, but without Google Street View, I can’t get to the window ... but I guess all the VFYW contestants are in the same boat! Tough one, so I hope I’m close enough to win!
The key searches here were from this zoom:
As in a previous submission (for the contest in Guatemala City), the banking system came to my rescue: Atlantic Bank.
That entry continues below. But first, our super-sleuth in Sydney notes, “Love the sign that says ‘Brodies’ (it’s a supermarket) … my son’s name is Brody!” Berkeley is less thrilled:
What kind of twisted game are you playing, Chris? Two tropical contests in a row with no Street View?! Okay, not absolutely zero Street View, but the few little blue dots scattered around on both locations’ maps weren’t much help.
From our super-sleuth in Yakima:
The white building behind Brodie’s shoulder turns out to sport the logo of Atlantic Bank, whose network is considerably narrower than its name implies — 14 branches, all in [country redacted].
The map was misleading, sending me on a fruitless search to the north for our window. I finally figured out Brodies is east of the bank branch. Even though [city redacted] mostly lacks Street View, Wikipedia has a photo of the nearby Bliss Center for Performing Arts that matches the building just right of Brodies in the view, confirming our rough location is east across the bay:
From our super-sleuth in San Mateo:
The clues this week are manifold, if insufficient: a yellow building with a BRODIES sign; a white building with an “Atlantic ???” sign and triangular logo (the Atlantic Bank); a yellow building with a “The B???” sign (“The BLISS”); and a bus with “Blackbird” and “WITC___” signs (WITCON). All the clues in your photos point to [city redacted], likely near the downtown/waterfront area. But still not enough for me to confidently identify the vantage point.
Identifying the “Blackbird” is our super-sleuth in Raleigh:
It’s been such a long time that I almost forgot how to submit one of these. I’ve had a crummy semester, which has been marred by big cheating scandals in both of my classes. So, I have spent almost all of my free time since the beginning of March trying to deal with this and I’m still not finished.
I had a break on Friday night and I decided to give the contest photo a look. After doing the usual enlargements, I found a few clues — one of which led me to directly to the location of the window view. In the grass lot in the forefront of the picture, there is a resort van from The Blackbird Caye resort in [redacted]. It’s on a small island across the bay, so that is where I figured our view is from.
Our super-sleuth in Brookland gets crafty:
Figuring out that this is [country redacted] was at once tricky but straightforward, and it required careful examination of the full resolution photo. (I can’t imagine doing this on a phone!) After false starts with Brodies (the palm trees indicated it wasn’t the Brodies in Salem, MA) and trying to figure out what “Atlantic Ba___” might be (turns out it’s Atlantic Bank, and I’ll bet that a bunch of entrants used this clue to find this place), I noticed a bit of scarcely legible writing on the van. Playing with the Levels command in my photo viewer revealed the following:
We aren’t looking at the Blackbird Resort, which is on Turneffe Atoll, but once I got to [country redacted], everything fell into place.
The right country is revealed by our super-sleuth in Chicagoland, who hasn’t participated much in the VFYW this year:
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.
