For contest #389, we find beauty in a bleak place. (And don’t miss the hyena lady-dicks.)

Chris Bodenner

Sep 15, 2023

A followup on last week from the super-chef:

It was fun reading about Rothesay after visiting there. My wife and I have a bad (but sometimes good) habit of not doing much research and just wandering around discovering things, which means we occasionally miss things. In this case, we missed the toilet museum. And last time we were in Hobart, we missed the wall of cunts at MONA. Fortunately we’ll have another chance at that this January, when we are visiting Tasmania again, as part of a trip to Australia with daughter no. 1 and her family.

Fun for the whole fam. Looking to this week, the super-champ in Berkeley exclaims:

Key-ryste, Chris! A month to play around with a view of Scotland that amounted to a dropkick. Then, for a vaguely tropical scene empty of searchable detail (and with no Street View), we get six days!

Indecipherable billboards, unidentifiable air-con units, a building with an “A” on it. A man on a roof wearing what looks like a shoulder-belt arrangement similar to what I wore in sixth grade as a school crossing guard at Alto Elementary. So a security guard, maybe? One probable satellite dish that’s too far away to derive anything from. No water tanks. No shoreline. Nondescript buildings that only serve to block our view of the wide open space behind them, a space that’s marked only by tall and evenly spaced light poles and what might be a frangible tower — which could indicate the presence of an airport.

If only our room had been on a higher floor, we’d have known for sure about the airport:

From Team Bellevue:

Flat out near impossible this week. We wonder how many people will get this one, because we’re sort of having trouble believing we actually stumbled onto it. Our first lunch of searching made little progress. Our second lunch felt like we actually went backwards. But in the end, with hard enough heads and a good bit of luck, our streak lives on.

Our UWS super-sleuth from NYC gets us to the right continent right away:

Total SWAG from me this week. Not that I think Liberia, West Africa, is completely out of the question. But I have not set foot on the continent and wouldn’t know where to begin. I had my chance in the late ‘80s, when my dad and stepmother lived in Botswana for two years. But the timing was bad for a visit, so I never went. I’m reasonably sure this isn’t Botswana, but I wouldn’t bet the condo.

I console myself by something in last week’s column — stemming from the Berkeley sleuth pointing out an error about a West Sacramento view (#206). At first I thought he might be referring to a view I contributed in 2013 (#144), but that was Sacramento, not West Sac. So I checked it out — and realized it was something I’d commented on at the time. I was on a lengthy project in Sacramento (hence view #144), consulting to the California State Teacher’s Retirement System. The view was from one of their windows. There’s a good chance I knew the contributor, since my work at CalSTRS involved interviews/focus groups with over 550 of their people. My comments at that time were a gentle reprimand to a commenter who had some incorrect facts and assumptions about CalSTRS.

BUT, the consoling thing was that you referred to me years ago as “a reader who works at the building.” A reader. One of many. But in last week’s column, I was the Upper West Side super-sleuth from NYC. How far I have come in the last decade! Even if Liberia is 14K miles off from this week’s View, I’m feeling pretty damn good!

So thank you for all of it: the contest, the weekly write-up, and the promotion!

The contest in general has evolved so much over the years.

The grand-champion of the VFYW, Chini, remarks on the difficulty this week and floats a clue: “After a week off quaffing watered-down Scotch, it’s nice to get a small taste of the hard stuff again — or, as they might say in this week’s country, ‘alcool fort’”:

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