For contest #418, we commemorate a priest who plotted to assassinate Hitler.

Chris Bodenner

May 11, 2024

∙ Paid

(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.)

From the winner of last week’s contest:

OH MY GAAAHHHHD, I accept this heap of laurels! Thanks very much — I would love the VFYW book (though I assume it will cost a small fortune to ship to New Zealand).

I’ve had a very challenging month, between our cat trying to die on us and requiring two surgeries within two weeks, work shit, and life shit. The life shit has been literal, as I had my first colonoscopy, like a responsible adult, on Wednesday. If anyone is procrastinating, just get it done. The prep is the worst part, but the drugs are amazing.

Minnie the cat is now recovering and on a lengthy cage rest. Although she is now suffering from “cage rage” and attempting constant jailbreaks, attached is a photo of our tiny treasure in a restful moment. I know you guys are more dog people, but you’ve got to love those speckled toe beans:

All of this is to say, this contest win is a massive bright spot for me this month. Thanks again.

Thanks for the speckled toe beans! Last week, the always-excellent email from the Alaskan globetrotter slipped through the cracks:

The tourism activity that most people associate with Tonga is swimming with the humpbacks, but I’m not sure I can endorse this with my eco preface. The pressure on local guides — no matter how local, nor how conscientious — to get viewers close to marine wildlife just seems to invite too much corner-cutting. I’ve seen this firsthand with dolphin viewing in Lovina, Bali, and I observed things from a professional perspective with orca viewing around Washington’s San Juan Islands and a boat-based, polar bear viewing off Kaktovik, Alaska (no longer allowed, but that story is very complex). Researchers have documented the same sorts of problems from humpback swimming in Tonga, at least for the most popular island chain (Vava’u).

If your need to swim with the big whales overwhelms your conscience, at least consider going to a lower-use location, such the smaller operations on ‘Eua. The Rock Garden on ‘Eua has some of the highest elevations in the Tongan islands, along with classic South Pacific beaches:

‘Eua seems to be the most scenic and best ecotourism option from other perspectives as well. Just a few hours by a ferry from Tongatapu, there are several small villages with moderate to cheap accommodation. Better yet, there is good hiking, climbing, snorkeling, and the usual beach-combing and relaxing. (Contrast that with the 12 to 24 or even 36 hour ferry journeys to more distant islands like Ha’apai, Vava’u, or Niuatoputapu.) If you want to be eco and go to those places, best save up for a sailboat and cruise there yourself.

I predict 60 correct guesses — if they get Tonga, they will get the location (if not the precise window).

Remarkably close: 59 sleuths got to Tonga. One of them — a film professor outside Boston — has some cinematic additions:

This January, Tongan film was big news at the Sundance Film Festival. Lea Tupu’anga (Mother Tongue), directed by Luciane Buchanan and Via Mafile’o, was screened to much acclaim. It’s extremely rewarding and important to see Pacific Island filmmakers getting recognition. Here’s a great interview with the director:

You might also enjoy this short film, The Legend of Kava Tonga:

Malosi Pictures produces many films from Tonga and the Pacific Islands. Especially notable is For My Father’s Kingdom (Vea Mafile’o and Jeremiah Tauamiti, Tonga, 2019):

And here are some films shot in Tonga that do not necessarily celebrate the heritage or culture of the island — or, for that matter, do much to celebrate Tonga at all: Tongan Ninja (Jason Stutter, New Zealand, 2002); Somewhere in Tonga (Florian Schewe, Germany, 2017), and When the Man Went South (Alex Bernstein, Tonga/US, 2014).

I actually started this email on 4/19 as soon as I saw the photo — it’s been sitting in my drafts folder now for 12 days — so I hope it’s not late. Hopefully I at least got the right island!

Here’s a followup from the “average super-sleuth in NYC”:

Sometimes I am amazed at what the VFYW community digs up. I thought the Hiko documentary that Berkeley found was incredible. If there wasn’t visual evidence, who would believe that every girl in Tonga learns to juggle?

So here’s my juggling story. Back when I was a little kid, my dad moonlighted as the on-call doctor for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at the old Boston Garden. Before each performance, we would walk around behind the scenes and chat with the performers. When the jugglers practiced, I would just stare at them thinking they were the coolest.

Finally, one time they showed me how to juggle, which I can still do with some proficiency. Although I have to say, juggling is not a particularly useful skill, and the local girls definitely did not think it was a cool thing to do. Only the girls in Tonga. But even they laugh at guys who juggle.

P.S. Thanks for using my photo from Tel Aviv in last week’s podcast post. It was taken the week before Iran attacked. I imagine the beach wasn’t so crowded the following week.

One more followup comes from the super-sleuth in Providence:

I NEVER woulda guessed Tonga, so I didn’t even try, but I’m surprised nobody brought up a song that’s an old favorite from childhood: Flanders & Swann’s “Songs for Our Time.” The “foreign phrase” portion of the song makes fun of typical 1950s pop-tune conventions. It’s utterly unplayable nowadays, one supposes, as it would seem to Gen Z to be irredeemably colonialist/imperialist in origin and slyly referential, akin to the “rape culture” theme in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”:

In any case, onward! I’m very much in appreciation for all that you and Andrew do to keep the Dish conversation intellectually stimulating, engaging, provoking, and multifarious.

Onward to this week’s view, a previous winner is getting vibes from Emerald Isle:

I’ll try a quick reaction (though I’ve never been to Ireland). Very cloudy. Looks like a European city. Not too wealthy, but perhaps gentrifying. Brick buildings with some copper roofs. A church. The number and style of street lamps. Green grass, bushes and trees, and park benches. Notably a canal and perhaps some light-rail tracks. I think it’s Dublin.

From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:

For this week’s VFYW Reimagined, I started out with an expressionistic take on the VFYW, focusing on the building in the distance:

Then, having recreated a facsimile of the submitter’s photo, I made three more versions of the VFYW Reimagined: an ink wash effect; an oil effect; and a watercolor effect. Here’s the latter:

From a previous winner:

I’ve run out of time to attempt this contest, but I’m convinced it’s somewhere in the north of England. The sign in the bottom-right says “Reserved Parking,” so it’s definitely an English-speaking region, and the whole view screams English city with canals, especially with the converted red-brick mill on the right. It could be Staffordshire, or Manchester, or Birmingham, or Leeds, or some other Midlands/Northern town … I don’t know.

Our super-sleuth in Japan also thought northern England — at first:

A very happy all-the-May-holidays to everyone … we are currently celebrating Children’s Day here in Japan!

I took one look at this week’s VFYW and felt a huge rush of nostalgia for the area I grew up in — the North East of England — and I felt almost sure that I recognized it as being part of Gateshead or Newcastle, which border the River Tyneto to the south and north, respectively. I went to school in Newcastle but lived further south of Gateshead, so I passed through an area that looked very much like this view on a regular basis: large red-brick buildings adjacent to churches. The sky is really reminiscent of a northern English sky, and the rubbish bins (trash cans) and seating also seemed somehow familiar.

Here are a couple of images from Gateshead and Newcastle, around where I initially thought the photo might have been taken:

However, a couple of things gave me pause. Firstly, it looks from the arrangement of the traffic lights as though the photo is taken somewhere people drive on the right; and secondly, there are piles of snow around, which would nowadays be very unusual to see sitting on a street in the UK. Despite the north of England being at latitude 55°N, the Gulf Stream (and global warming, probably) keeps it from being particularly Baltic most of the time. This made me think we may be looking at somewhere more prone to snow.

Therefore, I started looking for redbrick buildings in Canada, which in turn gave Montreal (where many photographs, are — somewhat controversially, I feel — labeled “Scottish red brick”… lol). Or possibly it’s Toronto. I’m fairly sure you can see a church down the road in the photograph, so I spent some time looking at “Montreal churches” online, but didn’t score a hit this time. I don’t know these areas at all, but I know enough to know they’re pretty large, so I’m just going to label this email as “Montreal” and leave it here.

I wish I had more time, as the canal and the apparent railway in the foreground of the photo are probably clues that are worth following, but if I start down that rabbit warren I will not be prepared for the classes I have to teach tomorrow!

The super-sleuth in Bend gets to the right country and region:

The “Reserved Parking” signs mean we are in the Anglosphere. This looks like an old, small, post-industrial city in the northeastern United States.

A sleuth in St. Louis writes simply: “Middlebury, Vermont, USA.” Another goes with Burlington, VT: “I’m not confident in this, but I desperately hope it’s true so I can learn more about the world’s tallest filing cabinet.” Atlas Obscura has him covered:

From a “first-time guesser”:

My wife and I have two little kids, so we are going to use that as our excuse this week (and every week until our children have left the house) for a rather lazy effort in the VFYW contest. My wife, a bit of a snob, had this first reaction: “Looks kind of shitty .. maybe Baltimore … or Scranton.”

My first reaction: “Looks like home!” I grew up on the Delaware River, and all of the towns between New Jersey and Pennsylvania had this look: telephone poles with big electrical boxes, brick brick brick, copper roofs, steel guardrails rounded at the end, streetlights with three bulbs, big blue waste bins. I could be wrong of course, but I’m going to run with a hunch. So picking a town a bit at random, I’ll guess Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

The bird’s-eye view from Chini:

Giuseppe, the super-champ in Rome, teases the right city by identifying one of the buildings:

Harder than I first thought. I had pinned my hopes on the copper roof of that prominent building you see in the distance (now I know it’s the Landmark Building, formerly known as the Odd Fellows Building … BTW, “Odd Fellows” sounds like an apt name for the VFYWC sleuths). But I couldn’t find it until I stumbled upon the place almost by accident.

Another tease with a few more buildings labeled:

I’ve got to say, this one had me stumped for a day. I was thinking definitely New England, definitely a small- to mid-sized town or city, and it most definitely has that light industrial/textile town sort of feel to it. Ware, MA? Lowell, MA? Manchester, NH? Connecticut? Vermont? All possibilities. In fact, too many possibilities to start simply plying the streets, rivers, and rails to find the correct fit.

Happily, I found a way in and it proved to point me to the correct city. Then there was the simple matter of finding the correct building, and the thornier matter of finding the precise window. From a bit of triangulation, as seen here:

A previous winner gets down to street level:

What’s Dusty hiding? A sign for Enterprise Bank, pictured below. You’ve also nicely blurred out the sign for USA Chicken & Biscuit — though based on the Street View photo (with the café in the background) it looks like they’ve moved:

The super-champ in Berkeley also deciphered that bank sign — and it was the key to his success:

Right away this wintery brick downtown brought to mind Worcester ex-armory from contest #373, so imagine my surprise when that window and this one turned out to be only 38 miles from one another. The drive between them takes an hour.

I can think of three previous contests where bank signage was an important clue, although with the previous three you deployed Dusty to get in the way. Those three were contests #353 (Logan, UT), #355 (Tunkhannock, PA), and #372 (Honiara in the Solomon Islands). Happily, this week’s bank had more than one sign and Dusty could only block the larger of them. You opted to blur the smaller sign. I couldn’t read it at all, but the general layout of the words was still perceptible, and something in the conventions of bank sign design makes them recognizable for what they are, regardless of how illegible someone has tried to make them.

So it came down to identifying a banking institution in New England whose signage has white lettering on a green field, and which has a yellow logo of some sort centered above the bank’s name. That turned out to be Enterprise Bank, which is a tiny chain (thank God) that has only 27 branches, none of which are found outside of Massachusetts or New Hampshire. And all of which are neatly listed along with their addresses on the company’s web site. It then became a simple process of elimination and ours was the 20th in the list.

A previous winner names the right city:

I had a visceral reaction to this view and instantly recognized it.

I thought it was going to be an endless slog of New England mill towns, but my first thought was Nashua, New Hampshire, from having been there quite a bit for work and … voilà.

A sleuth in Chicago exclaims:

Ah! I’ve been there! When I did a project in Nashua in 2004, I spent many, many evenings at the Peddler’s Daughter, which is right across Main Street from the building where this photo was taken.

The super-sleuth in Ridgewood gets very close:

This week’s window is taken from the Pool of Siloam located at 16 Franklin Street in Nashua, NH:

My first instinct was that it looked a lot like Turner Falls, MA, as well as the photo from the Worcester contest, so I just started looking at mid-size towns in that vicinity and came upon Nashua pretty quickly. New Hampshire was the 46th US state I’ve visited (still have ME, AR, HI, AK to check off), but I only drove a mile into it and quickly turned around back to VT after not seeing anything that caught my attention (to be fair, maybe a mile wasn’t enough). All I know about New Hampshire is from a friend who was from there who said there is an intense Hatfield-McCoy-esque rivalry between New Hampshire and Vermont residents where they belittle and just generally dislike each other.

The UWS super-sleuth also wasn’t impressed by the state:

I have nothing to say about NH, though I’m pretty sure I’ve passed through it. And I’ve long had it on my list of the 41 states I’ve been in (part of a contest with my husband). But I can’t recall a single detail. And I don’t want to reassess whether it belongs on my hard-earned state list. So moving on!

I do wonder, however, if we are now in the midst of a coffee series — i.e., given contest #417’s view of the Friend’s Café taken from the same building as the Coffee Post Café in Tonga. Not that two points constitute a trend …

Meanwhile, I just got the Tonga results and took a quick glance at the pictures. Thinking I might skip the bit that shows a restaurant dish with a fish head and … an eyeball?! Yikes. But looking forward to all the stories.

The ski-champ sends a “view of the window from inside” the coffee shop:

Here’s some window-hunting help from “the a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor:

To rule out the three windows on the left, which are in the “Bonhoeffer’s Backroom” and have higher lower-sill, I used some distant sight-lines (not shown here) and noted the low angle of the original photo (while the three windows are higher than the railings), and the shape of the window frame on the right side:

The windows in the backroom have different frames:

The tall window has what seems to be the right kind of side frame:

He ultimately identified the right window. A previous winner names the right establishment:

I’m originally from the Northeast, and this image rang a bell. It looks just like the architecture of the fading mill towns in the Mohawk Valley of NY, Vermont, and, of course, New Hampshire. And bingo! The photo seems to have been taken from Bonhoeffer’s Cafe, looking across the river at the aptly named Landmark Building in the distance (with the distinctive towers). I’m hoping one of the Viewfinders will contribute a lesson about the architectural heritage of these mill towns, the taste for these ornate, medieval-y towers and crenellations. It’s not a style I’ve seen in other parts of the country.

From the super-sleuth in Lafayette, CA:

The buildings screamed old textile mills, and after piddling around Lowell and Lawrence for a bit, I went upriver to Nashua where the Bonhoeffer’s Cafe awaited. I love these types of reclaimed spaces and this place looks amazing! I tried to recreate the view using Google Earth ground-level view. Not too bad, IMO:

A married team ventures a guess at the window:

Hook, line, and sinker, Chris! I got my girlfriend hooked on the VFYW. She insisted that my circle around this week’s window didn’t look good enough, so I re-did it:

The wine geek in San Francisco picks the window that’s just to the right of that one:

I had to pick from two possible windows, and I undoubtedly picked the wrong one. This is the same rotten luck I have when I am picking which checkout line to get into at the grocery store: I always, always pick the slowest line.

Another sleuth slides farther to the right and nearly gets the correct window:

A sleuth in Boston remarks on the train tracks you see above:

I don’t have a lot of knowledge about Nashua, even though I live so close by, except that it has a great river rail trail that flows 17 miles into Massachusetts.

Great contest again this week. I really have so much fun time sleuthing.

Berkeley has more on that riverfront:

In the foreground of our photo is the Railroad Corridor area of the planned Northwest Riverwalk. It isn’t even close to being completed, hence the still crappy asphalt and railroad tracks only a dozen feet from the patio railing outside Bonhoeffer’s Cafe & Espresso. The cafe’s long, narrow “patio” runs the length of the south wall and apparently just opened for dining on Tuesday.

Someday, when the riverwalk is finally completed, the cafe patio is bound to become a prime spot for people-watching while enjoying one’s lemon crepe and frozen chai latte. Till then, its ambience is going to leave something to be desired.

So what’s the right window? A sleuth in Australia knows:

G’day Chris. My first impression on seeing this VFYW was that it’s somewhere in Eastern Europe. However, further investigation revealed it is a view of Nashua, New Hampshire, taken from Bonhoeffer’s Cafe:

I’m learning a lot from VFYW contests. I remember Nashua photocopier ads on TV featuring Orson Welles (about 40 years ago — could it really be that long ago?), and I had always assumed Nashua was Japanese. Now I know it has a Native American origin!

I also learned from a recent contest that the Colorado River flows through Austin, which surprised me. It was only a few days ago that I learned it’s a different Colorado River to the one that flows through the Grand Canyon … which I probably should have figured out earlier, but I didn’t.

I’ve never been to Nashua, or anywhere in the eastern US. But I’m hoping to remedy that in the next couple of years.

Here’s the submitter with the full address:

I took this photo from the window of a cafe in Nashua: Bonhoeffer’s Cafe and Espresso, 8 Franklin St, Nashua, NH 03064. The cafe is really nice. It’s run by a church to raise money for various causes. It’s named after Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the food is great.

The window is on the back side in an alley along the old railroad tracks that street view hasn’t captured, but you can see it from the street view of the main road that is crossing the Nashua river:

The picture makes Nashua look much dirtier than it is. January is not the most colorful or photogenic time for New Hampshire towns!

Forty-three sleuths got to Nashua this week, and all but four of them identified Bonhoeffer’s Cafe. The runner-up notes:

The signage is a little confusing, because the prominent black-and-gold-lettered sign for Bonhoeffer’s isn’t on the back of the cafe building, but on the building next door, which is … the Pool of Siloam?? The internet tells me it’s like a free YMCA membership for the Gate City Church flock.

That sleuth is on the Correct Guesser, as is the winner this week — and the latter breaks the tie with 10 total entries under his belt (doubling the runner-up’s 5):

Crossing my fingers on the guess this week: a window in the rear of what appears to be Bonhoeffer’s Cafe and & Espresso in Nashua, NH. I’m submitting two photos because the better pic (#1) is clearly an older one, before the establishment built a back deck with a railing. Bing Maps’ satellite view (#2) gives a more up-to-date, if blurrier, view:

My guess hinges on the placement of the manhole cover that’s seen in the blurry Bing view. There’s clearly a manhole cover in the VFYW shot, and it lines up well with the window I’ve selected. (Notably Apple Maps’ view has some sort of dumpster obscuring the manhole cover.)

The only time I think I ever visited Nashua was in the summer of 2002, when I was doing a residency at MacDowell. Some fellows and I made an excursion one night to go see About A Boy and to do some candlepin bowling (for the first time). I’ve revisited both in the 22 years since, and can say with confidence that both are very underrated.

Here’s the weekly collage from Berkeley, who nails the window as usual:

The submitter follows up:

I took the photo on a morning breakfast out with my wife. During Covid, we became empty nesters when our daughters moved out to start their lives, and we did what millions of other people did: we sold our home of 25 years and downsized into new construction. I cannot tell you how much a new home without any maintenance concerns frees your frickin’ soul to enjoy life! It was a good move for so many reasons, but it’s awesome being free to travel at a moment’s notice without wondering if something might break.

I also want to give a special shout-out to my HOA fees for saving my back from shoveling snow, cutting grass and raking leaves! Oh, and a shout-out to Google Nest for letting me indulge my anxiety a little when I’m away, by checking on the temperature and the video doorbell.

I’m not sure what people’s recollections or thoughts on Nashua will be, but it’s a nice place to live and a great base for work (software) and travel. Here are some fun facts about New Hampshire and Nashua:

• Drive to Cambridge/Boston in 45 minutes (but not during rush hour!)
• Drive to ski at Loon in 1hr 20min and Killington/Sugarbush in 2.5hrs (smaller places are much closer)
• Drive to the ocean in 1 hr
• Mountain bike all over the place
• New Hampshire is usually ranked in the top 5 in median income, low crime, and clean air
• New Hampshire is ranked #4 in PreK-12 education

Moving to the state in the 1990s to raise a family and have a career worked out well — one of our better life decisions. It’s also been fun to watch it change from the ‘90s to now. It’s a much more diverse state now. On my weekend rides, the playing fields are roughly split between softball and cricket, so there’s definitely a strong South Asian influence.

It will be interesting to hear the input from other New Englanders, but I will preemptively rebut all insults as follows:

• Massholes. I love my Masshole friends and coworkers, but please stop pretending New Hampshire is some redneck conservative state! It’s middle-of-the-road, with a two-party system where your vote for president might actually swing an election! Your envy is transparent, and our Market Baskets are cleaner.
• Vermont. Just be quiet, Vermonters. Your state is upside down and looks unstable. It’s clearly high, and it only remains standing because it’s leaning against New Hampshire. Our maple syrup is better. And please stop sending Bernie Sanders to DC. Sure, Vermin Supreme runs for elections here, but we don’t actually elect him! Just because Bernie wears mittens rather than a boot on his head doesn’t make him sane.
• Maine. Mainers are too obsessed with hating Quebec to hate us. Our yearly interaction is on the Fourth when they watch in envy from across the border as we set off legal fireworks! We mock them with hand gestures using our seven remaining fingers.
• Rhode Island: Nothing to say about RI. Buddy Cianci’s family may be reading, so I don’t want any trouble.
• Connecticut: You’re Yankees fans. And you, like the Yankees, suck.

The DC super-sleuth writes, “Sorry, no time this week to come up with any fun facts.” But he provides two of the most gorgeous shots emailed this week:

The super-sleuth in Albany has more fun facts about the city:

Nashua — due to its location in southern New Hampshire by the border of Massachusetts, the lack of sales tax, and the presence of several shopping venues — is a prime destination for Bostonians.

The city was also the site of two notable events in political history: first, in January 1960 when John F. Kennedy launched his presidential campaign in front of City Hall; then 20 years later in February 1980, the city hosted the Republican primary debate in the Nashua High School gym, funded by Reagan. He had tried to pull a last-minute stunt by inviting the other primary candidates onto the stage, over George H.W. Bush’s objections, and when the moderator tried to cut off Reagan’s mic, he famously boomed, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!”

Speaking of politics, the biologist champ in Milwaukee gets topical:

I’m going to shamelessly piggyback on breaking news for this week’s animal: the brain worm! Although Robert Kennedy Jr. has been pretty vague about this, the parasitologists I’ve seen commenting on it all focus on a tapeworm. And tapeworms that can form cysts are definitely found in animals in New Hampshire. Two humans in NH were infected by them in 2022, and one of those patients reported seeing a real increase in the number of cysts in moose when hunting.

But what are these worms and why do they form cysts? After all, your average tapeworm is an intestine-dwelling creature, specialized to hang on to the lining of the intestine and absorb digested food across its body surface. For those who’ve never seen one of them, here’s the general anatomy:

Note the suckers and hooks on the head, and the absence of any organs except reproductive organs in the segments. Bathed in a nutritious soup, this animal doesn’t need guts, livers, etc. It fertilizes its own eggs, often by one segment mating with another, and then sheds the egg-filled segments, to be passed out in the feces.

Nobody has one of these in their brain. In fact, it could not live in the brain. What people do sometimes get in their brains or (more commonly) body cavities are the immature form of the tapeworm.

Like malaria, the tapeworm life cycle involves two hosts: the primary host, in which the tapeworm has sex and produces eggs; and an intermediate host, which will be eaten by the primary host. So tapeworms that parasitize cats might use mice or fleas for a secondary host; tapeworms that parasitize sheep might use grass-dwelling insects; and tapeworms that parasitize larger meat-eating animals might use their prey, like the moose mentioned above. It’s that last group that can sometimes cause problems for humans.

If somebody eats an egg of one of these tapeworms, it will hatch into a tiny larva in the intestines. Here’s a dog tapeworm egg, showing the larva inside with its little hooklets:

After it’s eaten, the bile salts and digestive enzymes will activate it. Then it will cling to the intestinal lining with its little hooklets, secrete digestive enzymes to get it out of the intestine, and enter a blood vessel, where it goes adventuring through the body. It usually enters muscle, but sometimes infects other organs; wherever it lands, it develops into a cyst or bladderworm.

What’s the cyst like? Imagine you took the very first segment of the tapeworm above — the part with the head. Then imagine you pushed on the top of the head until you pushed it inside out, into the worm’s body. Here’s Buchsbaum’s illustration of the two larval stages:

And here’s what the cysts look like in the heart of a sheep, all ready to be eaten by a carnivore:

When a cyst reaches the intestines of its primary host, the little inside-out head will pop out, and the worm is ready to grab on to the lining and get on with its life. Sometimes these cysts are a larger problem, though. In some species of tapeworms, the larva doesn’t develop into a little cyst with just one inside-out head; it develops into a mega-cyst with many heads. Buchsbaum, again:

This was the genus infecting the New Hampshire victims:

On chest auscultation, the physician heard localized wheezes … images showed a noncalcified 4-cm mass in the lower lobe of the right lung. … The ruptured cyst was excised, and histologic examination showed the presence of a laminated outer cyst wall and numerous daughter cysts … We postulate that both patients acquired E. granulosus infection either by consuming produce contaminated with infected canid feces or through consumption of eggs shed in their dogs’ stool.

But brain? Really? Once again, Buchsbaum:

To be fair, though, the presidential candidate could have had a completely different brain worm, at least if he hung around with carpet pythons. But that’s another story:

Oy. I’ll delay the super-chef’s food report for now.

More on the cafe at the center of the contest:

Bonhoeffer’s Cafe seems very cool. It serves non-profit, fair-trade coffee, and it’s aptly named after Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a fierce anti-Nazi German theologian who ended up being hanged for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler. His is an incredible story of adhering to principle in the face of incredible adversity. Hopefully others will share a short biography, but in today’s environment the idea of sticking to one’s core beliefs rather than going with the mob resonates in disturbing ways.

The building with the copper domes hosts Odd Fellows Brewing, which gets good reviews. The building was home for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows from 1882 to 2007. The IOOF is a lodge with a long history. To bring it back to Australia, there is a large financial services firm known as IOOF:

IOOF was founded in 1846 as a friendly society which was formed to provide aid to its members throughout times of sickness and unemployment, as many friendly societies were formed before the widespread introduction of government welfare packages. The society funded these activities through joining fees and re-occurring membership fees.

From the super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:

Well, well, well. This window seems right up Andrew’s alley: a coffee shop named for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, Evangelical hero, actual hero who who died resisting the Nazis, and a man of complex affections (per The Dish). One can pretty assuredly assume this is a church-run coffee shop just from the naming and the neighboring business called Pool of Siloam — the spot where Jesus healed the blind man.

Now, it needs be said that Evangelical-run business of this type have upped their game considerably in recent years. It used to be that a place like this would serve a grocery store bagel and Folgers in a styrofoam cup, with a side of Chick Tracts. But the menu at this place looks tremendous. It’s almost as if they want people to think Jesus doesn’t just push weak ridiculous crap. That perhaps genuine faith might inspire someone to stand up to cynical divisive tyrannical populist breakfast foods, even at great cost. And for that I salute them.

The Albany sleuth adds, “I’m a sucker for a crepe, and Bonhoeffer’s has a nice selection.” Berkeley notes, “It was just dubbed the best coffee shop in the Nashua area in New Hampshire Magazine’s ‘Best of New Hampshire’ poll for 2024.”

San Mateo has details on the notable building in the distance:

The VFYW is looking toward the historic Landmark Building at 142 Main Street at Temple Street. Here’s a photo of the Landmark and a reverse view from the vicinity of the Landmark toward Bonhoeffer’s Cafe & Espresso (in the red box):

It was originally called the Odd Fellows Building, and the IOOF occupied it from 1892 until the lodge held its last meeting there in 2007. The building is still considered to be among Nashua’s architectural gems. It’s five stories tall and constructed of warm brick with distinctive corner towers projecting skyward.

Although they no longer have a lodge in Nashua, the IOOF still exists, with over 3,000 lodges worldwide. According to their website:

The exact date of the first founding of Odd Fellowship is lost in the fogs of antiquity. Some historians trace its roots back to the Medieval Trade Guilds of the 12th and 13th Centuries. Others estimated that it existed before 1650. What is clear is that there were a number of Odd Fellow groups in England in the 1700.

What’s more, the name “Odd Fellows Building” still graces the near-rooftop of the Landmark Building, and a neon IOOF sign from the 1950s is still displayed by the building’s main entrance:

Today this iconic building continues to be a vital part of downtown Nashua. Its upper levels provide office space to assorted businesses, while the ground floor hosts a variety of shops, including a chocolatier, a deli, and a wine store.

From the super-sleuth in Ann Arbor and his wife:

The A2 team misses a contest every once in a while, but not two in a row, usually. We dreaded the thought of having to look over every mill town in New England, but the church peeking out in the background helped. Bonhoeffer’s Café is named after Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a key figure of the resistance against the Nazis who has hanged — together with members of the resistance around Graf Stauffenberg — in the last weeks of the war. The cafe presents itself as dedicated to many good causes, which I appreciate, but I don’t know — to see his name on a place where people hang out to have fancy coffee doesn’t look right to me.

Looking up Nashua, I was intrigued to read that there used to be six railroads coming together here. One of them was running right behind the café, as you can see in this old bird’s-eye view:

This must be our VFYW sight-line:

Railroads were a major factor of American unification — from the need for unified time zones to mobility to tourism — contributing significantly to a cultural homogeneity that has amazed so many foreign visitors in the 19th and 20th centuries. Trains still move a much larger share of goods in the US than they do in Europe, which is ironic, given that European networks are denser and faster, and mostly electric, too. Passenger trains, however, no longer reach Nashua. Amtrak has this to say:

Nashua, New Hampshire
Bus Stop – Curbside Bus Stop only (no shelter)
Unstaffed station
ATM not available
No elevator
No payphones
No Amtrak ticketing kiosks
No restrooms
Unaccompanied child travel not allowed
No vending machines
No WiFi
Arrive at least 15 minutes prior to departure

Otherwise, Nashua seems to be doing fine.

From the super-sleuth on Park Avenue:

This one had that New England red brick look, similar to Worcester in a contest last May. And it has the lovely overcast winter skies that remind me of Maine in March. Although, it could be mid-summer up there and they still seem to have snow. I wonder if the location was inspired by the Bonhoeffer discussion among Dishcast listeners following the Rod Dreher interview 🙂

Not much from me on that area I’m afraid. I do love upstate NH, particularly on the Vermont side. The kids have gone to camp up there since they were little, and so we have spent much time around Hanover and north of there in Orford/Fairlee. Hard to believe that nature can produce so many variations of green. Each time I go up 91 and through Windsor and the other towns founded in the early 1700s, I can’t help but think what a tough time that must have been up there then — and given that Nashua seems to have been founded around 1650, the same thought applies.

Maybe the cocktail maven will default to a good old New Hampshire craft IPA, since that area seems to be saturated with them.

Here’s the maven:

It looks like we are in an actual coffee shop this week, rather than in an ATM booth next to a coffee shop last like week. Here’s my window guess:

On to the cocktail for this week. Like its neighbor Vermont, New Hampshire is known for its delectable maple syrup. I’ve used maple syrup in the past, notably the Smoked Maple Fussfungle, and it’s a really nice sweetener for a cocktail, especially with citrus. (Try a maple whiskey sour sometime, subbing maple syrup for the simple — it’s fabulous.) To complement the maple syrup, I picked another iconic flavor from the northeast: the humble blackberry, which grows all over New Hampshire.

So, with my two main ingredients selected, I decided to do a take on the classic Bramble — a gin-and-lemon drink that typically uses blackberries and blackberry liqueur, but can also use other berries (I’ve had some nice raspberry brambles). I found a good bottle of blackberry liqueur, or Crème de Mure:

I’m calling this “The Sugarhouse Bramble” — a great drink for early summer, with muddled fresh blackberries and a touch of maple syrup. Here’s how mine turned out:

And the recipe:

• Muddle 3-4 fresh blackberries in a rocks glass
• Fill the glass with crushed ice
• Add 2 oz gin (I used Empress Indigo)
• Add 3/4 oz lemon juice
• Add 3/4 oz blackberry liqueur (I used Drillaud)
• Add 1/2 oz maple syrup
• Stir gently with a bar spoon
• Garnish with fresh blackberries
• Sip and stare out across the Nashua River

I found the Sugarhouse Bramble refreshing and tasty. The maple definitely comes through and gives it a depth that simple syrup wouldn’t. My wife loved it, and I made a batch for us to drink while we watched Dallas killing it in the second round of the NHL playoffs. The Leafs got eliminated, but we can still root for a (sort of) home team.

And here’s your VFYW chef — on another bye-week for cooking, but he spotlights some scrumptious fare:

This one was fun, with lots of rabbit holes: the green copper roofs, the kinda-looks-like-Wendy’s sign. Once again we were travelling so did not have a family dinner, but had we done one, I might have made a New England boiled dinner or a Red Flannel Hash — a sort of corned beef hash with beets:

Neither of these is unique to New Hampshire, however. What does seem to be unique to New Hampshire is USA Chicken and Biscuits — the place with the mysterious sign across the river in the VFYW. No wonder I couldn’t find it with a search on restaurant chains; despite the ambitious name, it has only two branches, in Manchester and Nashua. Now, there are foodies who will fly to Copenhagen for a meal at noma (guilty), and there are foodies who will seek out the regional greasy spoon (also guilty). In the latter category, we have @the_roamingfoodie, who posted this wonderful video on Instagram about that newly opened Nashua branch of USA Chicken and Biscuits.

In addition to the chicken and biscuits, the place has a mysterious dish that appears to be a hash of chicken, beef, onions, carrots, and bell peppers, layered on top of rice and salad, and drizzled with tzatziki sauce and … barbecue sauce? Essentially a halal cart chicken. With beef. And barbecue sauce. You have to watch the video. Note also the sensuous dipping of chicken tenders in honey mustard sauce and buffalo sauce.

Drizzling seems to be a thing in this corner of Nashua. Here are dishes from Bonhoeffer’s, the Hidden Pig next door, and the Peddler’s Daughter across the road:

I guess a travelling squeeze-bottle salesman passed through town.

The ski-champ knows the town well:

I visited Nashua many times in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I worked in a Palo Alto lab for Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the first generation of computer startups. DEC had a large software facility on Spitbrook Rd in Nashua, which everyone simply called Spitbrook. I thought Spitbrook was a town until the first time I rented a car and couldn’t find it on the map (the Avis agent enlightened me).

A rush-hour drive from Boston’s Logan International to Spitbrook could take a couple hours. But DEC operated a helicopter shuttle among its various facilities in the Boston area, and it was a kick flying to Spitbrook over gridlocked highways. The pilots had a gig providing traffic reports to local radio stations.

At one point, DEC was second only to IBM. But unlike most Silicon Valley tech companies, DEC never fully recovered after the Black Friday stock-market crash on Friday, October 13, 1989. The helicopter service was one of the first luxuries to get cut in DEC’s long decline over the next nine years.

As far as skiing, there are many small and medium-sized ski areas within a couple hours of Nashua — including Waterville Valley, Sunapee, Bromley, and Okemo — and massive Killington is just over two hours away. The nearest ski area is Nashoba Valley, a small hill 15 miles to south. It’s got four chairs, seven surface lifts, 250′ vertical, 100% snowmaking and night-skiing coverage, and the largest tubing park in Massachusetts:

The daughter of the ski area’s founder, Pam Fletcher, was on the US Ski Team and podiumed a few times on the World Cup. She’s best known for running into a course worker on a warmup run an hour before her race at the 1988 Calgary Olympics, breaking her leg. She ran marketing and sales at Nashoba for many years and is World Pro Ski Tour Reporter at CBS.

From skiing to curling — from the super-sleuth Clinton, CT:

The cool thing about this week’s View is that I’ll be up in Nashua in two weeks for the annual meeting of the Grand National Curling Club, which was founded in 1867, and was, until 1958, the National Governing Body for the sport of curling throughout the United States.

Now it serves as an umbrella organization, representing approximately 70 separate local curling clubs (and over 7,000 curlers), located primarily in the states along the Eastern seaboard — from Maine to Florida — but also representing clubs in Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Nevada. The GNCC Men’s Championship, known as the Gordon-Emmet Bonspiel, goes back to its initial event, held in Manhattan in 1869, and is the second oldest contested sporting event in the United States. Only the America’s Cup yachting races have been continually contested longer.

Nashua itself is home to the Nashua Curling Club, which a four-sheet dedicated ice facility located just a few miles from this week’s window. I curled there for a weekend last year:

Belated happy birthday to you (as I neglected to wish you the same a couple weeks ago). If I can come up with shot from Nashua when I’m up there, I’ll send it along. In the meantime, I’m in the midst of (finally!) typing up a submission with several windows and something of a treat (at least it was for me), but I have to wait for one of our fellow travelers to send a pic he took. More soon …

From the Irish super-sleuth in Singapore:

Continuing my shameless pandering streak, there’s an Airstream dealership about two miles away from Bonhoeffer’s Cafe. Looks like a decent selection too:

I’m taking my own out of storage soon for a New England roadtrip. A recent winner “way out west” recalls a similar trip:

My sole visit to New Hampshire was with a friend during our west-to-east coast trip in 1979, with the final destination being NYC, from where we planned to fly to Europe on the least expensive flight we could find (Laker Airways, I think it was).  After spending the day in Montreal we headed south back to the US in my tiny Ford Fiesta, our goal being an arrival in Boston, where my twin brother was in grad school. We crossed Lake Champlain at sunset, and my only memory of New Hampshire during that long night drive was of the seemingly never-ending road and trees before us, lit as if in a tunnel by the car’s headlights. That’s the sum total of my life’s experience with New Hampshire. Pretty paltry, eh?

Anyway, currently being hammered by pneumonia. Sucks big time. Going back to bed.

P.S. What are the criteria for photos submitted for the VFYW contest?

Part of the window frame in view; ideally a horizontal photo; and ideally accompanied by another photo showing the building with the window circled. And the full address is also nice, as are details about the submitter’s visit. If I end up selecting your photo for the contest, I’ll extend your subscription by six months for free.

From the CO/NJ super-champ:

The notable person of the week is awarded to the father of the home videogame console, Ralph Baer. Born as Rudolf Heinrich Baer in southwestern Germany in 1922, he was expelled from school at age 14 due to anti-Jewish legislation implemented in Nazi Germany and had to go to an all-Jewish school. Facing persecution, he and his family fled to the United States in 1938, where he later became a naturalized citizen.

In the US, Baer worked in a factory for a weekly wage of 12 dollars. After seeing an advertisement at a bus station for education in the budding electronics field, he quit his job. He graduated from the National Radio Institute as a radio service technician in 1940. Three years late, he was drafted to fight in World War II and assigned to military intelligence at the Army headquarters in London. On returning from war duty in 1946, and funded by the G.I. Bill, Baer graduated with a degree in Television Engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago, and he was consistently employed as an engineer.

In 1956, Baer joined Nashua-based defense contractor Sanders Associates, Inc. (now a part of BAE Systems, Inc). There he played a key role in the development of electronic systems for military applications, and he worked at Sanders until his retirement in 1987. With the reduction in TV prices, he saw a market opportunity for applications outside of standard TV viewing. In 1966, he started to explore the possibility of playing games on television screens.

Baer had first got the idea while working at another electronics company, Loral, in 1951, but they were uninterested in the project. While at Sanders, he wrote a proposal to convince his supervisors to allow him to pursue the concept. He was given $2,500 and the time of two other engineers, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch. Together, they developed the first commercial gaming unit, the “Brown Box Console” — so named because of the brown tape in which they wrapped the units to simulate wood veneer. Baer recounted that in an early meeting with a patent examiner, he set up the prototype on a TV in the examiner’s office and “within 15 minutes, every examiner on the floor of that building was in that office wanting to play the game.” The Brown Box was ultimately patented on April 17, 1973 and became jointly owned by Ralph Baer and BAE Systems. The patent made an extraordinarily large claim to a legal monopoly for any product that included a domestic television with circuits capable of producing and controlling dots on a screen.

Sanders licensed its system to Magnavox, which began selling it as Odyssey in the summer of 1972 as the first video-game console. It sold 130,000 units the first year. Odyssey consisted of a master control unit containing all the electronic gear, two-player control units that directed players on the screen, and a set of electronic program cards, each of which supported a different game. Plastic overlays that clung to the screen to supply color were included. To supplement the electronic action, a deck of playing cards, poker chips, and a pair of dice were included.

Several months after Odyssey hit the market, Atari came out with the first arcade videogame, Pong. Though Pong became better known than Odyssey and was in some ways more agile, Sanders and Magnavox immediately saw it as an infringement on their patent. They sued Atari in 1974 for usurping their rights. Atari settled with them by paying $1.5 million to become Odyssey’s second licensee. Over the next 20 years, Magnavox went on to sue dozens more companies, winning more than $100 million. Baer often testified.

He went on to develop and patent several other hardware prototypes, consoles and consumer game units, including the electronic pattern-matching game Simon. Simon and its sequel, Super Simon, remained immensely popular in the U.S. through the late 1990s.

In 2022, the revenue from the worldwide gaming market was estimated at almost $347 billion. In 2006, President George W. Bush awarded Baer the National Medal of Technology for “his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive videogames, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms.” He was later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010. By the time of his death in 2014, Baer had more than 150 patents to his name.

Another notable figure is highlighted by the SF wine geek:

I haven’t been to Nashua and so have no stories to tell. And there isn’t much of a wine industry in New Hampshire to write about. I did note, however, that one of the notable people from Nashua is professional wrestler Triple H:

I did some poking around to see if he had ever wrestled Tonga Fifiti (aka King Tonga, aka Haku) — featured by the CO/NJ super-champ in last week’s contest — but I couldn’t find a connection.

From the public-art sleuth in Bethlum:

I think I first heard of the political significance of Nashua as the first primary in the presidential election from West Wing, and that’s about all I know about it. I’ll stay away from politics this week and stick with art.

Nashua holds itself out as the only city in the US that holds an annual International Sculpture Symposium. This year’s symposium opens on May 9th and runs through June 1st. Some of the pieces from prior years are interesting. Here’s “Bird Dreaming” by Jocelyn Pratt — I wonder if its dreams are nightmares, since it’s sitting on a wishbone:

Next is “U R A snack” by Jim Larsen — more nightmare material, possibly:

And then there’s “Ghost Wilkie” by Joseph Montroy, and it has a similar feel to some earlier sculptures from the contest views that pulled me into this gig:

Nashua also has a decent amount of street art, and I stumbled on a great piece as I was looking at the Landmark Building. In the back of that building is an Irish pub, Casey Magee’s, which on its side has a great mural, topped by the saying, “Take courage when the road is long don’t ever forget, you are never alone.” Good advice this year here in the ole US of A. Nashua has an organization called Positive Street Art, which produces murals and supports legal graffiti walls in the community as well as dance.

More of their work:

That’s all she wrote this week!

The super-champ in Warrensburg also helps out with public art — and an amazing story from the world of sports:

What got me interested this week started with a mural just a few blocks from Bonhoeffer’s Cafe & Espresso:

As you can see, this represents pitcher Don Newcombe and catcher Roy Campanella, two players for the Nashua Dodgers. Here they are in real life with Campanella on the left, Newcombe on the right:

Prior to their arrival, Nashua had a long history with baseball, hosting a string of minor league teams from 1895 to 1933. This heritage came in handy in 1945 when Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was looking for a suitable location to build a farm team. Nashua was also attractive for another reason: its large French-Canadian population.

While this might seem a strange reason to put a baseball team in a city, there was a method to Rickey’s madness. He had by this point decided to break baseball’s biggest unwritten rule: the color barrier. To this end in 1945, he signed Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers’ AAA club in Montreal and began to make plans to sign more African-Americans to the Dodgers’ farm system.

It was in this context when Dodgers executive Buzzie Bavasi chose Nashua for a low-tier club that could integrate black players. The rationale was similar to that of putting Robinson in Montreal: French Canadians were seen as relatively progressive on issues of race, allowing black players to integrate teams without as much overt racism. Nashua, then, with a large French Canadian population, seemed a safer bet than elsewhere.

Bavasi wasted no time as the club signed Newcombe and Campanella from the Negro Leagues in 1946. In doing so, the Nashua Dodgers became the first racially integrated club in the United States. While the pair encountered racism elsewhere in New England, Nashua was on the whole supportive. As Newcombe’s widow later recalled, “Nashua has held a special place in Don’s heart, always,” she said. “While people of color were facing so many hardships all over the country in 1946, Don considered his experience in Nashua to be a positive one. The people there valued Don and Roy, which allowed them to focus on the reason they were there in the first place, to play baseball. That is all they wanted to do.”

Both players eventually went on to great success in the majors. Newcombe would become the first pitcher to win the Rookie of the Year, the Cy Young, and MVP awards, finishing his career with 153 wins. Campanella played over a thousand games in the majors and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969. And while their careers began long before they came to Nashua, it’s neat to think about how this small town played such a big part in baseball history.

Sending a bonus VFYW, the ski-champ bemoans the end of ski season:

16″ of cold snow in Truckee, CA on May 5! Unfortunately, all the resorts except Palisades are closed (Kirkwood closed last weekend), and I’m not about to buy a $250 day pass at Palisades :-<

Berkeley looks to the silver screen:

Nashua proper hasn’t been a draw for movie production. I don’t think a camera crew for anything worth the celluloid has ever paused for a coffee break within the city limits, let alone shot any footage here. But in the Merrimack Valley where Nashua is located, that’s another story. A few movies worthy of mention have been shot wholly or in part within 10, 20, or 30 miles of the city.

Norman Jewison’s classic crime-romance The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) dipped at least a toe in the area. The movie’s an exemplar of late-Sixties cinema. This was Faye Dunaway’s first film to be released after Bonnie and Clyde, which had made her a sudden superstar (and Steve McQueen is just as cool in this as he would be later that year in Bullitt). The Thomas Crown Affair is about a blasé rich guy who plans and executes a multi-million dollar robbery; a sexy insurance investigator; and a lot of sexual tension.

Almost all of it was shot in and around Boston, so the next time the VFYW lands in that vicinity, I may trot this one out again, but one single scene in it, starting at around the 40-minute mark, was shot on and above a dairy farm 11 miles east of our Nashua espresso parlor. The Campbell-Turner Dairy Farm in Salem had been family-owned-and-operated providing milk products to the Merrimack Valley for 64 years when in 1962, according to one of the owners, “We had someone come to us and ask if he could put a glider port in.” So for the next 28 years it was a dairy farm with a glider port. The Thomas Crown Affair’s script included a scene involving a glider, so this is where they came to film it:

But don’t let Steve McQueen’s rep for doing his own stunts fool you into thinking that’s him doing loops in the sky. In every shot where he’s recognizable in the cockpit, that cockpit is mounted on an elevated tripod. The actual pilot in the scene, soaring in the actual glider, was named Roy McMaster — one of the greats in the biz. The gliders are long gone now, and the farm was closed in 1994 and converted into Campbell’s Scottish Highlands Golf Course.

Here’s a trailer for The Thomas Crown Affair:

Louisa May Alcott spent some of the happiest years of her life around Concord, Massachusetts, which is about 20 miles south of Nashua. It’s where she set her semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age novel Little Women, which has been the source material for seven theatrical film versions since the first two silents were released one after the other in 1917 and 1918. And that’s not counting a crazy number of TV mini-series- and TV movie versions, including a 68-minute Japanese anime from 1980. The 2019 version directed by Greta Gerwig is said to be the first one to take full advantage of Alcott’s natural link to Massachusetts, having been filmed entirely in the state, much of it not far from Nashua. Here’s a nice little brochure on the subject.

A few distance shots of the March family home were of Alcott’s own residence, Orchard House, which is now a museum in Concord — 22 miles south of us at 399 Lexington Road. But it would’ve been disruptive to the museum to film more in it than a schoolroom scene, so they built an exact replica of Orchard House three miles away from it on a 90-acre estate up Lowell Road north of Concord. A stately mansion on that property known as the Brooks Stevens House served in the movie as the home of Mr. Laurence, the March family’s wealthy neighbor. And a pond on the estate was used for the skating scene in which Amy falls through thin ice. (Unhappily for preservationists in the region, the property was purchased for $19.2 million in 2018 and the new owners chose to have the lovely mansion demolished. So if you visit the area, don’t go looking for it.)

As for the “filmed entirely in Massachusetts” bit, they may have gone a little overboard. Even the scenes set in Paris and New York were filmed not all that far from Nashua. The Crane Estate, 35 miles east in Ipswich, played the part of Paris. And Lawrence, MA did what it could to stand in for 19th century New York City. It’s right across the state line from Salem, which puts it only about four miles from that scene in The Thomas Crown Affair, and 15 miles from Bonhoeffer’s.

The movie stars Meryl Streep as Aunt March, Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Emma Watson as Meg, Florence Pugh as Amy, and Laura Dern as their selfless and tolerant mother, with Timothée Chalamet on hand to provide a Y chromosome and to set hearts aflutter. It’s not at all bad.

I’ve gotta confess, before this week I was inadequately hip to the jive regarding a sketch comedy troupe named Derrick Comedy, which made a splash in the early days of YouTube. They’d escaped my notice back then, so when I started looking into their work this week for the cinema report, it became my introduction to the origin story of Donald Glover, aka the rapper Childish Gambino, about whom I’d been only vaguely aware until very recently when I devoured his brilliantly funny espionage miniseries on Prime: Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Back in 2006, he and his college chums at NYU had churned out short comic videos, many of them displaying a level of crassness worthy of South Park. The easily offended should tread warily. (For example, their sketch called “National Spelling Bee” probably needs a vocabulary trigger warning). Their sketch called “He Really Gave It To Me” had me burying my face in a towel by the end, because I didn’t want my wife, who was in the next room, to think I was dying:

What’s all this have to do with Nashua? Maybe not a lot. Except by 2008, the troupe had managed to scrape together a budget from their YouTube earnings and Clearasil commercials to be able to produce a feature-length sequel to one of their sketches: Mystery Team (2009). They shot the movie in and around the city of Manchester (which is only about ten miles north of our window), because two members of the group had grown up there, and their family homes were available for location shooting.

The “Mystery Team” in Mystery Team is a trio of dweeby, soon-to-be high school graduates who throughout their childhood had run around their neighborhood in the fictional town of Oakdale being child detectives, à la Encyclopedia Brown. Their “cases,” which they would accept at the price of a dime, had been at the level of finding lost cats. But now, just as they’re about to launch into adulthood, about to graduate, still virgins, still stunted in their nerdiness, the trio is presented with a new case: a child hires them to “find out who killed my parents.” Hint: they do.

You’ll see Donald Glover, Ellie Kemper, and Aubrey Plaza younger than you’ve ever seen them before, unless you were a schoolmate. You’ll see recognizable spots in Manchester including Derryfield Park, Bunny’s Superette, Reeds Ferry Lumber Company, and especially Millennium Cabaret at 390 S. River Road in Bedford, which in the movie goes by the name of “Ponytails Gentlemen’s Club” and which provides the movie with the biggest, messiest, grossest, funniest comic set piece in all ninety-seven minutes of the thing. All in all, I had fun.

Our super-sleuth in Providence has some family ties to this week’s view:

Heya Chris! Hope all’s grand with you and with Andrew (and Truman)! This week’s contest was always going to be an easy one for me: one look at the old brick downtown/loft buildings, etc. on a controlled narrow river (in this case, the Nashua River) meant that this was New England, and likely north of Boston (coulda been Woonsocket, coulda been someplace in failed-industrial Connecticut … maybe, but it’s hillier there). I started with Haverhill, MA since I’d recently been there. (I actually ate lunch at the OTHER outpost of The Hidden Pig — the Nashua one is right across the tracks from the VFYW location — and I can attest that the Haverhill one was tasty, as they put pork/bacon in LOTS of things, hence the name). I moved on quickly to Lawrence and Lowell, MA — but the rivers are too wide — and Nashua was the next one … BINGO!

I shoulda solved this sooner, since I know Nashua quite well — and the one nice, tallish, late-Victorian commercial building in the middle distance DID look familiar. My dear aunt and godmother is a stalwart of the Nashua Episcopal parish, which is a few doors farther down on the same side of Main Street. And even closer to the VFYW location is one of my favorite little buildings in New England — the former Hunt Memorial Public Library:

It’s a 1903 work of the great Gothicist partnership of Ralph Adams Cram & Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (a partnership which was, at the time of its foundation, quite possibly more than just professional, though both went on to marry women … and split with some acrimony).

From the super-sleuth in Bend:

I recall people from that area jokingly referring to the city as “Nausea, New Hampshire,” so my music video submission for this week is my favorite song about nausea, by Beck:

Here’s Berkeley one more time:

Your sleuth last week who visited Tonga in 1987 hoped the mixologist would “figure out a clever way to make kava taste like something other than slightly spicy muddy water.” (He didn’t, at least for the Tonga writeup, but only for want of kava.) But we can hope that someone’s managed to do it, because on Main Street in Nashua, about three quarters of a mile south of Bonhoeffer’s Cafe, someone has opened a kava bar named Root Awakenings, where they serve up beverages such:

• “PB&K Oasis: traditional kava served with chocolate drizzle, blended with cocoa and peanut butter powder, chocolate almond milk, and topped off with whipped cream and garnish”
• “Calm and Joy: In-house Almond Joy-esque creation blended with a traditional serving of kava and topped with whipped cream and garnish.”

I suspect, though, that these aren’t likely to be my cup of kombucha.

A previous winner gets the last word this week:

Life gets in the way of fun contests, as it is wont to do — but living is good too, so no complaints. My son was in hospital for planned surgery last week (all went well, and he’s recovering nicely). So what with being nurse Mum, enjoying some pleasant spring weather, and catching up on last week’s work, I didn’t get around to submitting an entry for this week’s photo. (For what it’s worth, it appears to be from Bonhoeffer’s Cafe in Nashua, NH.)

But I did manage to take a photo from Humber River Hospital in Vaughan, Ontario:

I doubt it’s of use for the contest, since the 401 highway in the foreground and the CN tower in the skyline are dead give-aways. But it was a nice day, and I always enjoy the blush of green (can a blush be green?) this time of year, as the leaves come out.

This week: Nashua, New Hampshire. Next week:

Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is two Wednesdays from now, at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.