VFYW: An Easy Egg To Crack

For contest #420, we head to the heart of Cajun country.

(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 in France:

Quelle surprise and merci buckets!

I’ll take the free two-year subscription. Thanks for running a fun contest!

This sleuth was having fun elsewhere:

Oof, last week was a missed opportunity! I had the joyful distraction of a visit by my two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, so I didn’t participate in VFYW. I glanced at the picture, thought a little about it being Mediterranean, but didn’t go back to it.

I should have! Sheesh, my wife took a picture of me with that mountain peak in the background while exploring the Greek and Roman ruins:

We went the week after France began allowing vaccinated Americans to enter the country. (This was also our first trip from our newly purchased travel base in Nashua that I mentioned a few weeks ago — the beginning of lots of trips.) We had Provence to ourselves and it was stunning!

That was the good news. The bad/sad news was we originally planned to be in Edinburgh for our daughter’s graduation after four years of hard work, but Scotland was a late holdout and still had a 10-day hotel quarantine, which made it impossible. Luckily, Aer Lingus had Paris flights available, so they switched us with no change fee. Lemons, lemonade, etc.

Here we are in the Dublin airport, switching flights in the early morning — masked, but it felt good to be free to enter Europe again!

Another followup comes from the super-sleuth on Park Avenue:

I’m quietly pleased with myself for getting the right house last week. As with the super-sleuth in DC, it took me ages to match up the roof profiles, to work back to the house. It was a fun write-up — thanks! — and tonight we are going to make the Sidecar du Sud, since a Sidecar is one of my favorite cocktails!

The sleuth who submitted last week’s view addresses the super-sleuth in San Fran:

As for the wine, we did not get to Trévallon, but we did spend an entire day in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, with an extended tour of Domaine Bois de Boursan with the winemaker, Jean-Paul Versino, and had a private lunch at the Les Caves St-Charles, where a Tardieu-Laurent Rogue and a Grand Tinel Blanc were the two wines of the day. Here’s most of the wine we had at the villa during the week (there were seven, sometimes nine of us for dinner):

From a previous winner “way out west”:

Great stories last week! I loved the Van Gogh Pokeman tie-in, as well as Van Gogh’s messy room cleaned up before “Mummy” arrives. And I agree with you regarding the Dr. Who scene. My wife first showed it to me last year, and it brought tears to my eyes. Thanks again for mentioning it.

Yet another followup:

I have to confess that I did not spend much time exploring the area around this week’s location, as I spent time going back to last week’s contest exploring the area around  Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. I’ll be in France with my wife in July and August, and I think we should visit that area. She is a middle-school art teacher (who is retiring tomorrow), so a visit to the Van Gogh-related museums in Provence would be fantastic.

Happy retirement! Another artistic followup comes from “your average super-sleuth in NYC”:

After Renoir in the Chatou contest, Van Gogh in the Saint-Remy contest, and Monet at Giverny in last week’s contest as well, I noticed you snuck in a view from Moorea in the main Dish. That island is less than 20 miles from Papeete, which is where Gauguin painted. Here’s his painting Nafea faa ipoipo? (“When Will You Marry?”), the fourth most expensive painting ever sold, at $210M:

Now we just need a view from Cezanne’s Aix-en-Provence.

On to this week’s view, a previous winner in Canada writes:

Well, we’re getting ready to celebrate our colonially established Victoria Day and the long weekend up here, so I’m getting anxious to be done with the workday. What better way to kick off the holiday weekend than to invest some time in hunting down The Window.

Another thinks it’s located at the “Huntsville Alabama Elements Laboratory.” The super-sleuth in Albany observes:

We are across the parking lot from “CGI,” clearly. I’ve never heard of them, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find the location, right? Ok maybe not. Their website says they have over 90,000 consultants and other professionals across the globe, in 400 locations worldwide.

Another sleuth winnows that list:

The CGI sign on the adjacent office park was an obvious clue, but CGI (an IT consultancy) has hundreds of locations worldwide. How to narrow it down?

First, this is obviously North America from the architecture, street design and license-plate shapes. That still leaves more than 60 locations in the United States to go through, but we are also looking for one in a low-rise suburban, pancake-flat region that has lush but not overtly tropical vegetation. No mountains (so not California, Colorado, etc), no palm trees (not Florida) and no skyline (not New York, Chicago, etc).

A newcomer narrows it down further:

This was my first time trying one of these, so perhaps it was easier than most, or maybe I had rookie luck:

• It’s obviously the US or Canada, given the parking and street layout.
• It has to be eastern-ish, because of the trees and greenery.
• CGI is labelled pretty clearly on the office park building, and their website lists a finite number of office locations.
• Not too finite, though, because I had to run through 42 possibilities into Google Maps before finding the location.
• In Google street view, it’s not obvious why the beagle is necessary, so I’m curious about that.

More on the beagle soon. The super-champ in Berkeley narrows it down to three states:

Fortunately only about half of CGI’s listed office addresses in the US are located in the Virginia-to-Central-Texas-via-Florida region, so the task turned out to be less daunting than it had threatened to be. Focusing on just the offices in the southeastern coastal states and searching those in list order resulted in my only having to check out the five addresses in Alabama, the singleton in Georgia, and the pair in Louisiana.

Chini knows which one:

Another squints, “The remnants of STOP painted on the surface of the parking lot narrowed it to North America — along with the cellular towers and the American-model SUV captured travelling on the street mid-photo.” Another sleuth picks the right state:

Hello! It’s been a while, but I saw this one come in and thought I’d give it a go. Immediately, as a Southerner, it’s giving “the South” vibes: the street, the architecture, the flora, and the vehicle. So, I figure I’ll start in the American South, because go where you’re comfortable, right?

The layout looks like a university or medical complex. Of course, there’s also that interesting glass structure across the way. There’s no way on God’s green earth that that’s not referred to as “the egg,” right? So, I started googling “[Southern state] the egg university.” I skipped Alabama, because as a proud alum of a school with 18 national championship wins, I know that it’s not there. So I started with lesser Alabama, also known as Mississippi. Nothing. Louisiana? Voila.

Also, Roll Tide!

Another sleuth identifies the odd structure:

The hidden “egg” is the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. My first thought was a smaller college campus in Vermont, but no blue eggs in Vermont.

The super-sleuth in Ridgewood writes, “Well, this one wasn’t too difficult. I googled egg building campus, and it was the ninth result”:

Another writes, “Shouldn’t the beagle have been hiding the CGI logo on the neighboring building, not the egg?!?” From the Providence super-sleuth:

WTF Chris, did you overlook the CGI logo on the wall? I see Dusty is covering something on that dome structure, but there is nothing there when I look at it in Google Earth. Did you place Dusty over the CGI, and then she wandered off when you weren’t looking?

Haha, nah, I was just trying to make an easier contest, since we’ve had some tough ones lately. From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:

The egg inspired me to turn it into an item of intimate apparel for this week’s VFYW Reimagined:

A related LOL comes from the newly minted super-sleuth in Chicagoland, who was also confused as to why I covered the egg instead of “CGI”:

I suspect there was a Dusty malfunction:

The CGI building made this a straightforward lookup on the CGI locations page. You may even top a hundred correct guesses this week. Have fun curating that!

Nearly 100 emails came in this week, but fortunately their contents were more concise than usual, so they was easier to curate. A sleuth in Roseville, MN names the right city in Louisiana:

The view looks like a campus of some sort, perhaps with the “I” in CGI meaning “Institute,” so I googled “CGI institute” and fairly quickly found the CGI website with their logo matching the sign in the photo. The infrastructure and vegetation (roadway, lighting, concrete vs. asphalt, a cypress-appearing tree) told me this is somewhere in the eastern US, likely farther south than north.

To determine which of CGI’s many facilities this is, I noticed another clue: the many communications towers in the background. My job is cell-phone tower development — primarily leasing, zoning, and permitting.

Many larger jurisdictions in more, shall we say, progressive parts of the country have zoning regulations that restrict the number of towers permitted in developed areas, mostly based on the assumption that towers are unpleasant to look at, and to some extent that they lower property values (which is not true). Given the number of towers in this developed area, I started searching for smaller cities in more conservative areas, and one of the first I found was Lafayette.

As a Minnesota native from the other end of the Mississippi River, I’ve only been to Louisiana once — Shreveport — so I don’t have any interesting tidbits to share about this area. But perhaps I will after I take a long-planned retirement roadtrip down the river in another eight-ish years.

CGI, for the record, is short for “Consultants to Government and Industry.” Another sleuth:

Searching the CGI building on Google brought me to Abu John Rahat Chowdury and the location:

Congrats on the job, Abu, and thanks for the assist!

A regular sleuth wonders:

Easiest contest ever? I thought CGI might take us down a rabbit hole, but it didn’t. The building appears in a 2020 article in Developing Lafayette, about CGI’s expansion and adding more jobs. Then it was a very short search to figure out which Lafayette we were developing … clearly not the one in California, home to a super-sleuth. (I keep an eye out for him/her in the contest results, as I’m an Orinda native, though I don’t live there now.) I’m predicting great things from your chef, mixologist, music buff, and zoologist, among others!

From the California super-sleuth in question:

Lafayette!!!!! OK, wrong Lafayette, but still, exciting!

Mostly what I know about Lafayette, Louisiana is that the Ragin Cajuns periodically make it into March Madness. When I was a senior in high school, they upset Oklahoma in the first round, and while they haven’t won a game in the NCAA tournament since then, I continue to believe in their potential and pick them in my bracket every time they make it in.

Another adds, “The adjacent Cajundome is not only home to the Ragin’ Cajuns, but it previously homed the IceGators and SwampCats. IceGators? Ok then.”

A longtime subscriber, but first-time sleuth, names the building where the view was captured:

I’ve been a loyal Dish reader for almost 15 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever taken part in the VFYW contest. This is also the first time I’ve had any clue where the photo might’ve been taken. Is it fair that I live in the city where it was taken? Or that this hotel is where many of the out-of-town guests at my wedding stayed? Probably not. Nevertheless, I’m excited to submit a VFYW answer for the first time.

Where: Hilton Garden Inn @ the Cajundome, Lafayette, Louisiana
When: April 24, 2024

The beagle probably obscures the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Center (LITE) logo on the side of what the locals call “The Egg” — the two-story glass section of the building that is lit up in varying colors at night. CGI has offices all over the world, but I’m sure at least a few sleuths will be able to narrow this down to Lafayette.

I know the photo was taken on the northwest side of the hotel, which faces CGI and LITE, likely on the 5th or 6th floor. I wasn’t able to find a map of the hotel rooms (how the hell do people do that?), so I will venture a random guess on the room number: 618. I will also venture a guess that the submitter was in Lafayette on a cloudy day in April visiting for the Big Towns conference, or perhaps an event at the University of Louisiana – Lafayette.

Image from the super-sleuth in College Park

Lafayette is a fun mid-sized city, especially if you come during the right time of year. March-April and October-November here in Acadiana are known as the two “festival seasons” — when big outdoor events like Festival International de Louisiana and the City of Scott’s Boudin Festival take place. My personal favorite, and by far the weirdest local festival you can attend, is the Giant Omelette Festival in the small town of Abbeville.

I encourage all Dishheads to pay us a visit in Cajun Country. Be sure to get a plate lunch at Laura’s II, stop by the tap room at Parish Brewing, and catch a zydeco performance while you’re here.

He was close with the photo’s date: April 21. Here’s another plug for the restaurant he mentioned:

If I were staying at this hotel and didn’t want to travel too far for dinner, I’d check out Laura’s 2, home of the apparently “world famous” stuffed baked turkey wing — intriguing! Served with shrimp and grits and green beans, of course.

Another notes, “The choice of Lafayette makes a nice followup to the Halifax contest in December, as Lafayette was the settling point for some of the Cajuns who were kicked out of Canada after being held on Georges Island in Halifax’s harbor.”

According to a previous winner, “Cajundome reminds me of two things”:

1. Mad Max: Thunderdome. I’m not sure if your film reviewer is going to go this left field, but the movie starred Mel Gibson and Tina Turner back in 1985. The structure was slightly less impressive than the Cajundome:
3. Paul Simon’s Graceland was a masterpiece album (back when albums were a thing), bringing a variety of world music to a broader audience. His song “That Was Your Mother” has a verse that I was instantly reminded of:

   Well, I’m standing on the corner of LafayetteHere’s a video of the song live in Hyde Park:

4. State of Louisiana
   Wondering where a city boy could go
   To get a little conversation
   Drink a little red wine
   Catch a little bit of those Cajun girls
   Dancing to Zydeco

And here’s someone who spent way too much time diving into the song’s lyrics. Perhaps coincidentally, Graceland was released in 1986, just a year after Mad Max … or perhaps there is no such thing as a coincidence when it comes to VFYW? (I’m still smirking about Nob Hill from the SF contest last month.) I’m especially looking forward to this week’s Cajun recipe, as we don’t get a lot of that here in Sydney!

From the super-sleuth in Alexandria:

I’m not smart enough, or industrious enough, to know which window, so I’ll leave that to the other amazing sleuths. I just googled random stuff until it landed on the Hilton Garden in Lafayette. You and Andrew are so great to keep this contest going. It’s so much fun and I learn so much, so thank you. Have fun!

The DC super-sleuth takes a stab at the window:

Another window guess comes from this Correct Guesser:

It’s nice to jump from France to Louisiana. Instantly the immense flatness and the live oaks screamed south Louisiana (my home). Many people don’t realize that much of the South was formed by sediment deposited from the Mississippi River over millions of years as it repeatedly changed course, like rain running down a window. This is why Louisiana has no naturally large rocks, fertile soil, and very, very flat land.

Anyway, here’s the window:

I bet a lot of crawfish boils and tailgating parties happen on the other side of this Hilton.

So does this previous winner:

I’m going to go with the following window in the Hilton Garden Inn Lafayette/Cajundome (I had to include the actual Cajundome in the image because, well, there appears to be a circus going on):

I’ve never been to Lafayette, but I’ve been to New Orleans several times, including once with my young kids, and I was lectured by a stripper standing out front of a strip club on Bourbon street that “children don’t belong on Bourbon Street!” While it was like 2:00 pm on a Sunday afternoon, on the balance she was probably right.

I and the rest of my fraternity also once received a police escort to the Arkansas state line after a few of my fraternity brothers got into a little drunken trouble in Shreveport, but that’s a story for another day.

The Berkeley champ has a suggestion:

A couple of weeks ago, when a “recent winner ‘way out west’” asked about criteria for photo submissions, your response included all the good stuff like: part of frame, ideally horizontal, ideally accompanied by a photo of the building shot from outside with the window circled, and preferably the full address. I’d like to suggest a possible addition to the “ideallies.” Every hotel room I’ve been in in my adult life has had an emergency evacuation plan posted on the inside of the door. This notice always includes a fairly accurate floor plan with the room’s location designated on it. It’d be the easiest thing in the world to snap a picture of the evac plan right after snapping the window view. Just a thought.

Having the same thought is “the a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor:

A longtime sleuth on the Correct Guesser list is so so close to the right window, but names the right address:

This week’s view is from the Hilton Garden Inn Cajundome (spicy!) at 2350 W Congress, Lafayette, Louisiana. Who knows the room number. I don’t understand how others get there besides by calling the front desk and seriously doing some stalking. But we’re saying the 5th floor, and here’s our best guess:

Another super-close stab at the right window comes from a sleuth in Grand Ledge, MI:

Here is my somewhat-educated-but-still-wild guess:

I had a different window circled, but as I was about to hit send, my gut made me change to this one. Was that divine interference, or is this going to be like picking the wrong line at the grocery store?

And interesting to probably me only, the Google Earth images of this view were done on my birthday. Another sign that this is my time?

Sadly not. A first-time sleuth gets to the right floor:

I have been checking out this contest for a couple of years, after starting my subscription to your Substack. It’s always very fun to read how people find these windows, but this is my first-time entry. I got to the strapping six-story Hilton Garden Inn in Lafayette, LA, but by far the hardest part was angling the windows on the building. My best guess:

Just a little to the right! The winner this week is the only sleuth on the Correct Guesser list to circle the right window:

Well, this was a quick one for me — as it should be, given the fact that I was just on the University of Louisiana at Lafayette campus last week. (I live in Baton Rouge, an easy drive.) In fact, my office has a branch in Abdullah Hall, which is smack dab in the center of the photo — identifiable by its brick facade and thin, white exhaust chimneys.

As to which exact window, I always find that to be a bit of a crapshoot. But given the line-of-sight and the height of the cypress tree in Street View, I am reasonably confident that we are on the top two floors of the hotel. I think there is a reasonable chance it’s any of the windows in the yellow trapezoid in the second image below, but I will put my chips down on the one outlined in red:

As far as interesting tidbits of trivia? Well, as you will likely be made aware, the ULL mascot is the Ragin’ Cajun (one of the all-time great mascot names). But instead of sharing trivia around the mascot, or ULL in general, let’s talk about the even more famous Ragin’ Cajun: one James Carville.

Carville attends an MTV “Choose or Lose” event at the House of Blues in Los Angeles in February 1996. (Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images)

I think my favorite factoid about him is that his family hails from Carville, LA, which is a small village on the east bank of the Mississippi River just downriver of us here in Baton Rouge. There are two reasons the town is of interest. The first is that James Carville is from there. The second is that it is the location of the National Hansen’s Disease Museum. Why, you may ask, is there a museum dedicated to leprosy in essentially the middle of nowhere? Well, because Carville was the home of America’s sole leper colony, of course. It apparently started as the Louisiana Leper Home, before becoming the National Leprosarium. That’s got quite a ring to it.

From the submitter of this week’s view:

Here’s the last entry from our Great River Road trip: Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country, at the Hilton Garden Inn, room 622:

Here’s how we wound up in the Hilton in Lafayette. My wife and I took the train from Seattle, where we live, to Minneapolis and rented a car. For over six weeks we drove from the headwaters of the Mississippi to its mouth, taking many side trips along the way to see things like Talesin in rural Wisconsin; Galena and Cahokia Mounds in Illinois; Mammoth Cave in Kentucky: Nashville; the Natchez Trace Parkway; the Shiloh battlefield; Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues; Oxford, Mississippi; and Little Rock and Hot Springs. It was one interesting place after another the whole way, all set against that magnificent river.

As we approached New Orleans, we veered west — having already visited that city numerous times over the years — to Lafayette, which was undiscovered country for us. Lafayette is the heart of Cajun Country. We used the Hilton as a base for doing day trips. It’s right next to Louisiana University-Lafayette and within easy reach of Avery Island, numerous small historic towns, and the Atchafalaya Swamp — home to two million alligators. The sights were good; the food was better.

Speaking of gators, here’s your favorite biologist:

Choosing the animal was easy as soon as I found out that there is a Louisiana Alligator Advisory Council. I had to find out what kind of advice they give. I’ve been charmed by alligators ever since I met a whole mess of hatchlings in a lab and heard them peep as they raced toward their keeper. Take a listen:

Alligators also brought on some angst back in the day when cladistic analysis showed that there was no way to group all reptiles together in a single clade, and that crocodiles and alligators were more closely related to birds than to other “reptiles” (I guess they come by the peeping honestly):

But SERIOUSLY? Who in their right mind would class these together:

… instead of these:

Two sorts of people did this: paleontologists and physiologists. Paleontologists place both birds and alligators, along with a lot of the dinosaurs, in a group called Archosauromorpha. It’s based on skeletal characteristics, which is basically all they have to work with, poor folks.

But to the physiologist, alligators and birds share way more exciting traits. To start off with, they breathe alike. Sleuths might remember the bird breathing system from a few months ago — well, alligators have it too:

Just like birds, alligators inhale into air sacs at the rear end of the lungs, and exhale that clean air through the lung. This was reported back in 2010, and it looked like a unifying characteristic for birds and crocodilians. Since then, the same trait has been found in several lizards, suggesting that the common ancestor of all these creatures — a dinosaur — probably had this super efficient breathing pattern. No wonder they became the ruling reptiles!

Moving on, alligators and birds have another super efficient structure in common: a four-chambered heart. The structure at issue is the ventricular septum, which separates the left and right circulation:

With this useful system, the animal sends oxygenated blood out to the body and deoxygenated blood to the lungs, not wasting any of its effort on recirculating blood to where it has already been. Many humans can attest to what a nuisance it is if this septum isn’t completely developed, and how important it is for us to repair any large defects in it — but non-crocodilian reptiles have to live with that situation their whole lives.

With these adaptations, I’d expect alligators to be more energetic than they are. But I suppose living as a super-successful aquatic predator lets them grow a little large and dignified for sustained sprinting, which is probably a good thing for all of us.

Back to the Louisiana Alligator Advisory Council to remind you that May is alligator mating season, so no matter how enticing you find their mating calls and splashing displays, keep your distance:

And after May is still a good time to avoid them, since the females will be guarding their nests. This trail cam shows a mom gently helping her hatchlings into the water, complete with peeping.

And what sex are those babies? It depends on temperature. The video above looks like a wet marsh nest, so I’d be betting lots of little girls:

Levee nests were hot (34°C) and hatched approximately 100% males. Wet marsh nests were cool (30°C) and hatched approximately 100% females. Dry marsh nests had an intermediate temperature profile, the hottest location (34°C) being the top centre of the nest. Males developed from eggs in this location and females from eggs around the periphery and base of the nest.

It’s anybody’s bet how global warming will mess with the alligator sex ratio.

Here’s the collage from Berkeley:

A previous winner notes:

Thank you for the weekly chance to explore somewhere different in the world. This week brings us to the “Happiest City in America,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

From the super-sleuth in Lafayette, CA:

Lucinda Williams probably has the best musical reference to Lafayette, in her break-up masterpiece “Jackson” that ends her album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road:

Once I get to Lafayette
I’m not gonna mind one bit
Once I get to Lafayette
I’m not gonna mind one little bit

She also has a song called “Lafayette,” as the CO/NJ champ notes:

Allons bonjou, Chris! From the south of France to the French South of the US. Here is Lucinda Williams signing about this week’s location:

Keeping in the vein of Cajun music, our notable person this week is Michael Doucet. For more than two decades, the Cajun fiddler has been a leader in the renaissance of Cajun music. With his band, Beausoleil, he has given a new sound to the genre and has become one of the best-known Cajun musicians in the world.

Doucet was born in Scott, Louisiana — a suburb of Lafayette, about a mile from this week’s view. He grew up with a variety of musical influences. The first one he recalls is his uncle, Will Knight, who played Cajun music on the fiddle, banjo, and bass. Inspired by Knight, Doucet began playing the banjo at the age of six and the guitar at eight. Doucet says he learned from cousins, aunts, uncles, and from classical musicians to rock-and-roll musicians to Cajun musicians. Famous artists who influenced him include Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. “I heard a gamut of sounds back then and went with the flow.”

His first band was formed with friend Zachery Richard when they were 12 years old. They played mostly folk rock. However, traditional French music was always around, especially at family gatherings. He rediscovered the value of Cajun music during a 1974 trip with Richard to France, where they met young musicians playing traditional Cajun music. Doucet remarked, “Here were serious musicians in their twenties playing and relating to Cajun music in terms of what it could be. I began to understand what we had and what we stood for.”

He returned to Louisiana, found an old Acadian house in Lafayette to restore, and began to play the fiddle. He says he “wanted to understand the guts of the music. If I was going to play Cajun music, I wanted to play Cajun music. And if I was going to change Cajun music, I had to be sure of the directions.” Although he did not originally intend to pursue Cajun music as a career, a turning point came when he was awarded a Folk Arts Apprenticeship by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). “I had planned to go to graduate school in New Mexico to study the Romantic poets,” he recalled on the Vanguard Records website. “Instead I traded William Blake for Dewey Balfa.”

Doucet sought out every surviving Cajun musician, including Balfa, Dennis McGee, Sady Courville, Luderin Darbone, Varise Conner, Canray Fontenot, Freeman Fontenot, Hector Duhon and others. He studied their techniques and songs and encouraged some to resume public performances. With friends, Doucet formed an innovative band, Coteau, which played a synthesis of country, Cajun, blues, and rock. During the same period, he performed with friends Kenneth and Sterling Richard in a group they named Beausoleil. The group had a strong traditional base with a wide range of influences like classical, jazz, and bluegrass.

Over the years, membership in the band has changed, but Beausoleil is now perhaps the most popular Cajun band in the world. Six of their many albums have been nominated for Grammy Awards, and Doucet was named a master folk musician by the Louisiana Folklife Center as well. In 2005, he received a National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the NEA, which is the highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. As an adjunct professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Doucet designed and taught the first course on Cajun music.

Cajun music, thanks to artists such as Michael Doucet, is known the world over, and young people of the region are following in his footsteps. He says, “To me, Cajun music really is the heart of our culture. It’s not the stomach — we know that’s the food. It’s music that’s the heart. Everybody sings in their own way down here, and that’s what keeps us going.”

The musical sleuth in Indy had a ball this week:

Buckwheat Zydeco! I love when I get to tell you about a band/artist I’ve actually seen live!

Buckwheat Zydeco is really Stanley Dural Jr., born in Lafayette, Louisiana on November 14, 1947. He was one of 13 kids. His first interests in music were Rhythm and Blues. His father was an accomplished accordion player, but Stanley first became an organ player. When he was barely a teenager, he was backing for Joe Tex and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, who the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album about 25 years later.

Stanley, still in his teens, played piano for Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles. In 1971, he formed Buckwheat and the Hitchhikers. He had been called Buckwheat since he was a kid because his braids reminded people of Buckwheat from the show “The Little Rascals.” Buckwheat and the Hitchhikers was a funk band for five years before switching to zydeco. They were a huge hit, locally.

(Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns via Getty Images)

In 1976, Stanley joined Clifton Chenier, a legendary zydeco performer, even though he wasn’t a huge zydeco fan. But that quickly changed. “Everywhere, people young and old just loved zydeco music,” he said. “I had so much fun playing that first night with Clifton. We played for four hours and I wasn’t ready to quit.” Through his relationship with Chenier, Stanley took up the accordion. In 1979, he was ready to form his own zydeco band, and Buckwheat Zydeco was born.

His debut album was titled One for the Road (1979). He has five albums that were nominated for Grammys: 100% Fortified Zydeco, Turning Point, Waiting for My Ya Ya, and On a Night Like This, and Lay Your Burden Down. Those first four were all from mid to late-’80s. The last one was in 2010.

On a Night Like This is the album I know best, and the title song is his most popular song on Spotify:

However, my favorite song from that album is “Hot Tamale Baby.” It moves!

I saw Buckwheat Zydeco live at Summerfest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the early ‘90s. Summerfest used to have only a couple of big stages, and the rest of the bands played in large tents — where we saw Buckwheat Zydeco. It was a hot and humid night, so I’m sure it was a little reminiscent of Louisiana nights. He had an enormous amount of energy, and the tent was hopping.

Buckwheat Zydeco appeared in the 1987 movie The Big Easy, and it brought newfound fame to zydeco music. In 1988, Eric Clapton invited the band to open his North American tour, and Buckwheat went on to open and/or record with Keith Richards, Robert Plant, Willie Nelson, Mavis Staples, Dwight Yoakam, Paul Simon, and Ry Cooder. He also won an Emmy for his music in the TV movie about “Pistol” Pete Maravich, who played for LSU.

Stanley Dural Jr. died of lung cancer at the age of 68 on September 24, 2016 in Lafayette, Louisiana.

From a previous winner:

The cute beagle only partially covers the venue that is sometimes affectionately called The Egg. Interestingly, it can be rented for private events, and can be illuminated in various colors. Here is a photo of it looking quite showy:

Another sleuth has a cool connection to the egg:

I’m currently on vacation (Ohrid, N. Macedonia), so I’m not able to pinpoint the window, but it’s facing the Louisiana Immersive Technology Enterprise (or LITE Center) and the CGI building, a computer technology company. The construction company I used to work for built both.

The LITE center’s “egg” contains a six-sided box where computer simulations are projected onto all six sides while someone is “immersed” in the experience. Both the LITE center and the CGI building were built by the state in an effort to create jobs. I don’t think the LITE center’s technology was ever used, and when Covid came around, all the CGI workers went home, so it’s an empty building with a handful of jobs created.

As a libertarian, I have a problem with the state undertaking these endeavors, but I’m reminded of something Phil Gramm once said:

If the Senate voted this afternoon on building a cheese factory on the Moon, I would no doubt vote against it. But if the Senate decided, in its collective lack of wisdom, to build a cheese factory on the Moon, I would want engineers from Texas to design that cheese factory. I would want a construction company from Texas, since we have the best construction companies in the world, to build that cheese factory. If we were going to use milk from earthly cows, I would want milk from Texas cows to be used to make the cheese in the factory on the Moon, and I would want the celestial headquarters for it in Texas. But am I for a cheese factory on the Moon? No.

In other words, I wish both hadn’t been built, but as someone was going to build them, I’m glad it was our company.

From a sleuth in Tahoe:

We are looking across the street at the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, whose motto is “build crass architecture and they will come”; and across the parking lot we see the Canadian multinational company Consultants to Government and Industry Incorporated (CGI), who achieved a micro dose of infamy via the HealthCare.gov debacle. It was one of a few digital medical system examples of CGI over-budgeting and under-engineering; they should stick with non-tangible consulting.

Here’s Team Bellevue:

Sorry again for short writeup. We’re videogame guys, and we launched Ghost of Tsushima for PC on the 16th and it’s gone awesome, but the side effect is it’s been nearly all-consuming for us. So here’s our cursory guess at the window:

Nailed it! Team Bellevue will appreciate this gaming connection:

Googling shows that the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise building houses one of those private colleges (AIE, with a four-semester advanced diploma at ~$54K) offering courses on videogame development, animation, and … CGI (computer-generated imagery). Stiff competition for the nearby local college, University of Louisiana – Lafayette (yearly tuition of ~$11K + room and board) offering courses in boring stuff like Philosophy or Accounting.

From a previous winner in NYC:

That egg structure looks like a Zelda shrine:

But this week we’re in Louisiana — far from the enchanted, regularly monster-plagued kingdom of Hyrule.

From the Park Avenue sleuth again:

Well, this one will reveal who the gamers are in the VFYW readership. The AIE building (with the egg structure) sounds pretty interesting, and it’s the sort of vocational school that we probably need more of. (We don’t need more video games, just vocational schools.)

I haven’t been to Lafayette but have had several trips to New Orleans, which have been memorable — the tourist ones for the right reasons, the work ones (sitting in for days of the BP Macondo litigation) for the wrong reasons. Attached, for the hell of it, is a picture of the best Bloody Mary ever, courtesy of a Commanders Palace brunch:

Coming up with a cocktail for Louisiana that hasn’t been done before is a challenge I’m looking forward to.

Here’s the mixologist in Austin:

I’ve driven through/by Lafayette a dozen times on my way from Austin to New Orleans. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped there. From the little research I did, it seems like a nice enough place. Apparently it has more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US, so that’s something.

For this week, I went backwards from how I typically do it and started with a name. I wondered if there was a cocktail called “The Swampwater” — it was just too good a name not to use, given the location. Turns out there are quite a few Swampwater cocktails, but the one that seemed the most fascinating was one invented by the US distributors of Chartreuse, the world-renowned French herbal liqueur. Apparently, in the late 1970s, American’s weren’t buying much Chartreuse, so they came up with an ad campaign for a party drink called Swampwater, which mixed green Chartreuse, lime, and pineapple juice. Here’s an ad from that era, featuring tipsy alligators drinking the stuff through a straw:

It’s ironic that they had to work this hard to get us to buy Chartruese, and now you can’t even find it in the stores because it’s so popular for cocktails, and the company that makes it basically refuses to up their production. I don’t have any green Chartreuse, and I haven’t been able to find any locally for quite a while, but I did pick up a bottle of yellow Chartreuse last year when I spied a bottle in my local store. I have about 4-5 ounces left of that precious liqueur.

So my drink this week is an upscaled Swampwater that I’m calling “The Swamptini.” It uses yellow Chartreuse instead of green and adds some Suze. Both Suze and Chartreuse are bitter, but they have different flavor profiles, with Chartreuse more anise-forward and Suze more floral. They both pair really well with pineapple and lime. Here’s how the drink turned out:

And the recipe:

• Add some ice to a cocktail shaker
• Add 1.5 oz yellow Chartreuse
• Add .75 oz Suze
• Add 4 oz pineapple juice
• Add .5 oz lime (about 1/2 lime)
• Shake vigorously and strain into a martini glass
• Garnish with a lime wheel
• Sip on the banks of the Atchafalaya River, staring out at the swamp

This turned out great. Since I’ve never had an actual Swampwater and don’t have the stuff to make one, I can only judge this on its own merits. I found it delightful, with the pineapple juice having just enough sweetness to counter the bitterness of the liqueurs. I made one for my wife, who also really liked it, leaving me with but a scrap of yellow Chartreuse until I can locate some more. It was totally worth it.

Another sleuth is getting hungry:

Louisiana is yet another VFYW place I’ve never been, but would like to. We even have tentative plans to go in the coming year, so I’m especially looking forward to the write-up this week. I also hope the chef has some Cajun cuisine on the menu!

Indeed:

Well, that was a pretty violent transition — from a cottage in Provence to a Hilton Garden Inn in everywheresville, US; and from the transcendent art of Vincent van Gogh to the “actionable insights for ROI-led digital transformation” of CGI. But last week we had bouillabaisse, and this week we have similar cuisine: Cajun shrimp étouffée (since we are in the home of the Ragin’ Cajuns, the baseball team of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette).

I used this recipe from Daniel Gritzer, the same writer at Serious Eats who gave us the bouillabaisse last week. He explains that étouffée means “smothered,” and that shrimp étouffée should not be thought of as a stew so much as rich sauce smothering rice. The recipe is meticulous, building up layers of flavor, starting with the dark roux, adding the Cajun holy trinity of onions, celery, and peppers, mixing in Cajun spices, ladling in a rich stock made from the shrimp shells, and then adding the shrimp at the last minute so they are plump and juicy. It was a second winner from Gritzer — utterly delicious:

Since we are still in Asheville, I don’t have access to our usual bar supplies, so catching up on the cocktails will have to wait. But I have been enjoying reading about them. And the Milwaukee biologist outdid herself last week — what an amazing story of parasites within parasites. I also enjoyed the movie clip of Ronin in Arles. I have such fond memories of that part of the world.

A recent winner also touches on cinema:

I’m much more relaxed with my guesses for the contest, now that I’m an official winner : )

This shot was definitely taken from the Hilton Garden Inn in Lafayette, LA. Which window? Well, let’s put it this way? I’m not going to spend hours using my compass and protractor trying to figure this out now that I’m an official winner. ; )

No good stories about Lafayette, but reading about that Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise building was pretty interesting! If I had the time, I could write a nice little post about the damage that state film incentives have done to truly regional cinema. Now Manitoba stands in for Texas, Tennessee for Indiana, and so on. Movies aren’t real, but the places should be.

Here is an uncharacteristically brief report from Berkeley:

The time I’m usually able to give to cinema was curtailed this week by life (also by its opposite: much of Sunday was devoted to a memorial service for an old college friend). So this one’s gonna be short.

One thing I really love about this cinema beat is how sometimes I get tricked into renting, watching, and liking something that I otherwise wouldn’t have watched on a bet. The Apostle (1998), starring Robert Duvall, is one of those. It’s an indie film that was 13 years in the making — written, directed, and financed by Duvall himself because it was a labor of love and it couldn’t attract financing from the usual Hollywood sources. The smart money may not have expected a small, nuanced, sympathetic treatment of a Pentecostal preacher to sell enough popcorn, let alone to score Duvall his third Oscar nomination for lead actor (he should have won).

Funny thing about movies. They can suck you in to where you have sympathy for, and are willing to spend 90 minutes in the company of, someone who IRL you’d cross the street and go around the block to avoid. (Or I would anyway.) The filming of The Apostle took seven weeks, mostly in Lafayette and a dozen miles to the north, in the village of Sunset. Many of the supporting roles were filled by real people and real preachers because, as Duvall put it, “True faith is something that’s hard to duplicate.”

But evangelicalism is a foreign country to me, so if I may, I’ll let A.O. Scott’s video review take things from here:

Among the new movies I saw in 2022, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener — with Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver — may have been my favorite. (Of course it came out in the middle of Covid, so it was probably the only movie I saw on a big screen that year.) Master Gardener was filmed in scattered places throughout southern Louisiana, but the movie’s primary filming locations are 50 miles northeast of our window in the village of Saint Francisville on the Mississippi River. Scenes that were shot there on two plantations (Greenwood and Rosedown) have been combined in the movie to become Gracewood Gardens (an estate owned by Weaver’s character) with botanical gardens that are tended by Edgerton’s character — the titular master gardener — along with his small crew of students.

Weaver’s smug and to-the-manor-born character is a woman of leisure. She knows something of Edgerton’s secret past, about which the audience is only offered hints at first, but which has something to do with the shocking tattoos that he keeps hidden beneath long-sleeve shirts. A somewhat kinky relationship has developed over time between patrician and employee because of this knowledge she has of his past.

By the end of the movie you may feel you’ve learned a lot about gardening, much of the instruction given in dry voiceovers by the master gardener: “Nandina is a species of flowering plant native to Eastern Asia. The smell at certain times of the year is minty, with a hint of almond. It gives you a real buzz. Like the buzz you get just before pulling the trigger.” Now from that quote, and in a movie written and directed by the man who created the screenplay for Taxi Driver, you might expect Master Gardener to end in a bloodbath. But no. Like The Apostle, which also has some violence, this is a film about redemption.

Master Gardener is currently streaming on Hulu, with three commercial breaks in the first half. Here’s the trailer:

Here’s some history via the super-champ in Warrensburg:

So I’ve never been to Lafayette, LA, but I’ve lived in Fayetteville, AR, and also near Lafayette County, MO, and Fayetteville, NC. In fact, Wikipedia tells me there are at least 74 towns and cities and 17 counties in the US named after the Marquis de Lafayette, and it’s easy to see why given his role in the American Revolution. But Lafayette, LA was actually called Vermillionville until 1884 — a half century after the death of “America’s favorite fighting Frenchman”:

So why did it take so long for the city to change its moniker?

Interestingly, Vermillionvillers had been pushing for the change since almost the town’s founding. The spark here was a year-long tour that Lafayette — by then an elderly aristocrat — undertook across the US in 1824-25. America’s first 50 years of independence had not been easy, raising many difficult questions for the young nation. In this context, especially with mounting regional tensions, Lafayette’s visit was universally celebrated. The last of Washington’s generals, he was greeted as a reminder of the ideals that had animated the revolutionary struggle and of the fabled unity that had propelled the colonies to victory. As “Lafayette mania” swept the nation, old parks, buildings, and streets were renamed in his honor while new counties and towns adopted his name as their own.

swag.

Lafayette’s visit held special meaning for Louisiana given its French heritage, so it is no surprise that the naming fad was widely embraced there as well. Even in 1823, just before the dignitary’s American tour, the state legislature created “Lafayette Parish” by splitting an older parish in half.  And when Vermillionville was founded as the seat of the new parish the following year, residents quickly clamored to rename their town after the Frenchman.

There was only one problem: a town just outside of New Orleans had beaten them to it.

At that time, the state rule was that each town name had to be unique, meaning there couldn’t be two Lafayettes in Louisiana! It would take another 60 years before Vermillionvillers could get their wish, but their patience would eventually pay off.  The key development here was the growth of New Orleans, which eventually absorbed the original Lafayette (it is now part of the Garden District). And with this shift, Vermillionville finally became Lafayette in 1884, a belated recognition of the Revolutionary War hero.

In the book I wrote during my three-year Airstream walkabout, about a famous farming family tied to Lincoln’s rise in Illinois, the name “Lafayette” loomed large. The family’s founding patriarch in Illinois, Isaac Funk — a friend of Lincoln who faced down the treacherous Copperheads while serving in the state Senate during the Civil War — had emigrated from Fayette County, Ohio. He named one of his sons Marquis De LaFayette Funk, who became one the great cattlemen of the 19th century and a leader of the Chicago World’s Fair. Lafayette Funk, in turn, had a grandson named after the famous French general as well.

Here’s your weekly dose of public art via Bethlum:

After our sojourn in Provence, did we land in Lafayette — named after the Marquis de Lafayette — with intention or by accident? The Marquis is a fascinating figure, successful both in France and the US, and worthy of some attention. An entire Wikipedia page is devoted to places named after him, and the list includes Fayette as well as Lafayette. The impact he had on this country is something I hadn’t really thought about before.

I have a side note on Lafayette — the college, that is, which has been in my local news feed these last few days. The VP debate has been scheduled to take place at Lafayette College, which is just next door to Bethlum, in Easton, PA. However, because Biden et al. have forsaken the Debate Commission, the VP format and therefore the entire debate is now in doubt, whomever turns out to be the former guy’s selection as running mate. Which led me to think about how Kristi Noem screwed the pooch, and likely her VP chances, by shooting the pooch (and the goat), which then led me down the rabbit hole of the origins of the phrase “screw the pooch.” I may have to work the phrase into conversation more often now. See how the VFYW enriches us!

Now on to public art in downtown Lafayette, aka the Hub City. I’ll start in Parc Sans Souci in downtown Lafayette, where you can have your picture taken as part of the ever-changing Lafayette sign. It’s repainted monthly with different color themes:

And then see the memorial to fallen firefighters; and relatedly, in the back of the park, there is a 9/11 memorial with two of the salvaged beams from the towers:

And don’t forget to look around the park for fun metal sculptures:

Next, walking around the city you will see many murals. There is a commission which provides grants for public art, so there is an abundance. The mural below celebrates the Atchafalaya Basin, with its bald cypress and the fiddle — both parts of South Louisiana culture. It’s titled “Horizon” by Robert Dafford:

Also by Robert Dafford, who is a Lafayette resident, in conjunction with several artists, the mural below is “Stereo Prairie,” located on the side of the Children’s Museum of Acadiana, and it’s considered one of the few three-dimensional murals in the world. As you view all four images, the eyes merge them and create the 3-D effect of floating stars and shapes:

Another Dafford mural, “Escape from the Postcards” or “’Til All That’s Left Is a Postcard,” is another depiction of the Atchafalaya Basin, and a quiet protest against habitat destruction:

On the side of City Hall there is a long Dafford homage to local food and music — two parts here, because of the length of the mural:

I wish okra was in season, so I could make okra and shrimp beignets. Just the ticket after this tour!

A sleuth in Denver serves up more art, in an unexpected way:

This week’s photo was taken from the Hilton Garden Inn on Cajundome Boulevard. I have highlighted what I believe to be the correct room window on this photo grab from Google Maps:

I was intrigued to see that the Google Maps rendering unexpectedly took on an impasto appearance reminiscent of Van Gogh’s famed “Starry Night” (the artist at the heart of last week’s contest). And that leads us to our key artistic reference this week! How is this VFYW related to one of the Musee du Louvre’s premier works, Poussin’s enigmatic “Et In Arcadia Ego”?

Cajundome Boulevard bears witness to the lasting name for the French settlers who were driven out of Acadia (now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada) and eventually settled in and around New Orleans. “Acadian” was subsequently bastardized into “Cajun” to refer to this distinct ethnic group. Despite the shared name, Poussin’s romantic masterpiece refers not those maritime Canada settlements, but to the central Greek highlands of Arcadia, which were commonly referenced as an ideal representation of pastoral beauty.

I love all the creative connections made by sleuths. Here’s the slopes report:

The nearest outdoor skiing to Lafayette is Mt. Aggie on the Texas A&M campus, a 130′ long slope with an artificial surface, 258 miles to the west, described in contest #393, “Don’t Mess With Assassins.” The nearest outdoor skiing on snow used to be the equally tiny Cloudmont Ski and Golf Resort, 478 miles northeast in Alabama, but it closed during Covid-19 and never reopened (Cloudmont was described in contest #368, “Home To Hooters and Cultists.”

The nearest snow skiing is now the Hidden Valley Ski Resort, a Vail Resorts (Epic Pass) ski area 580 miles to the north, just 29 miles west of downtown St. Louis. Hidden Valley claims it’s the largest ski area in Missouri (there are only two). It’s got five chairs, two surface lifts, two tube tows, 320′ vertical, and 100% coverage of snowmaking and night skiing:

Speaking of skiing, I’ve been meaning to follow up on my latest adventure in Oregon that I said I’d mention. Last month I landed in Portland, after a delayed connection in Atlanta, at about 11pm on Saturday. I went straight to my brother’s house and got about two hours of sleep before he, my 14-year-old niece and I lumbered into the car at 2am to drive up to a trailhead at Mt. St. Helens:

It was the first time I’d been on the volcano, or used skins on skis — to shimmy up the mountain. (Ditto for my niece, who kicked ass — more than I did.) After many slow miles and a faster descent, I hadn’t been that exhausted in years, especially with the sleep deprivation and altitude sensitivity. But the challenge was gratifying, and the views were amazing, and it was a great bonding experience with Freya and Ralph, who has a ton of experience with backcountry skiing.

Less gratifying was receiving texts on my phone — just as we were leaving the mountain back into cell service — that a fire had erupted in the unit directly next to mine back in DC. Thankfully no one was hurt, and the fire didn’t spread to other units, but firefighters had to bust down my door:

Not the best way to start a week-long Dishcation.

Fortunately I avoided the water damage that plagued other units, but there’s been a ton of remediation on the building over the past month, along with a thief who raiding one of the units in the aftermath of the fire. Thankfully I had been able to get a locksmith to come straight to my place after hearing news of the fire, to install a temporary deadbolt. And thankfully my door-cam documented the thief, so a detective is pursuing the case. But yeah, ugh, what a week.

I was able to get some relaxing time with family in Portland, though, and squeeze in another ski day — this time at my favorite resort, Timberline, which has the best lunch buffet ever:

Back to the contest, a sleuth has a fun fact:

I have no stories about Lafayette, but there’s an extended passage in Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways about his visit there in the 1970s or early 1980s. Apparently the food and music are (or were) top-notch, and the locals pronounced the city’s name “Laugh-yet.” I definitely want to get there sometime when I’m in Louisiana.

From a previous winner:

Fun fact: Lafayette is the birthplace of Ron Guidry, the “Louisiana Lightning.” Guidry played for the New York Yankees and was a four-time All-Star. He was also the 1978 American League Cy Young Award winner.

More sports from the super-sleuth in Clinton, CT:

The sport of trampoline was developed at the University of Louisiana – Lafayette, where the coach, Jim Hennessy, popularized the sport and produced more world champions — including his daughter, Leigh Hennessy — than any other facility. Hennessy was also successful in getting trampoline contested in the Summer Olympic Games, where several of his students went on to represent the United States.

From a humanitarian sleuth:

As for Louisiana memories, I have never been to Lafayette, but I’ve been to NOLA many times. My best memories are from two post-Katrina service trips to work on homes with a group called Youth Rebuilding New Orleans. It was a great experience for my daughters and the adult chaperones. Performing home repairs on tight budgets in the New Orleans heat left a major impression — as did sleeping on church floors and in bunk houses.

NOLA provides an eclectic background to really confront personal excess, poverty, wealth, destruction, addiction and renewal. It’s everything in a big swampy stew.  We learned lessons from the hard work, the speakers who shared their experiences in the evenings, the work crews we embedded with, and the city itself. Truly a crossroads of the country and the world. I have such mixed feelings about the city. It’s the boisterous relative you truly love but can’t stop worrying about. Why does it have to be below sea level?

Going in 2012 and then again in 2017, we got to see the work started by my older daughters completed when my younger daughter went. In the bunkhouse we worked on in 2012, and then again completed in 2017, these are the stairs when we were gutting the house of ruined drywall and termite-infested wood:

To get an idea of what the house went through here you can see the water line inside the house before we started demolition. And as they told us, it was sewer water that backed up into the city and the houses.

We stayed in the Church of the Annunciation both times. In the back, there was a mural painted on the fence with a Bible verse that has stuck with me to this day: “Do not withhold good from those who deserve it when it is in your power to act.” I took this picture so I would always have it to refer to:

It’s a simple message, but it reminds me to get off my ass when someone needs help!

Another memory of NOLA comes from the “Finnish-American expat couple”:

I couldn’t resist a good American parking lot sprawl! I don’t have many stories about Louisiana, but in 2017, I went for a conference and had some time to kill, so I checked out the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans. They had a memorable giant snake, of which I found a photo online from back then:

Unfortunately, Annie the Anaconda has since passed away.

Thanks for the wonderful contest — it’s always the highlight of my week.

The Alaskan globetrotter has trips for traveling to Cajun country:

Neither of us has been to Lafayette; the gravity of New Orleans has been too strong to resist when I’ve been in the region. But this appears to have been a tactical error, since Lafayette abounds with more laid-back culture and nature, which attract me as a tourist far more than the bustle and sights two hours east.

On the outdoor recreation side, there are hiking and biking options, but when you are surrounded by swamps, it seems like you ought to get in a boat. There are motorized choices, but these work against the area’s slow-paced vibe and kill your chances to see incredible birdlife and an occasional reptile up close. If you don’t want to wear ear muffs on air boats, paddling your own canoe, kayak, or SUP seems like the best way to see the local waters. (Make sure to bring your birding guide.) Here’s a couple of places to rent boats (one offers demo kayaks on Saturdays), and here’s a shout-out to the conservation and access folks that help manage paddling use.

The closest paddling route to our View is a downstream run from Acadiana Park to Vermillionville, just under ten miles (see map below), but there are a half dozen other easy day routes on nearby rivers, lakes, or bayous.

By ending the day at Vermillionville, you can tour the historic village and grab a bite. Add a 3.5 mile side trip into Lake Chalro via Bayou Tortue, where you might catch a flock of roseate spoon bills during a morning feed:

From the super-sleuth on the UWS:

Just for fun, I’m including a view from a window I looked out this past weekend — on the aerial tram in Palm Springs. Serious views!

Another nature view of the Southwest comes from this sleuth:

It’s from Tonto National Forest in Gila County, Arizona:

The return of the super-sleuth in Seville:

Please pardon my long silence in the VFYW. It’s been a busy year. I do try most weeks. But over the last year or so, I’ve only been giving myself about 10 to 15 minutes to make some meaningful progress, inevitably giving up after getting nowhere in that self-imposed time limit. As I’ve stated in almost every contest, triangulating the correct window is far too difficult for me. (I think I’ve gotten the right window maybe two or three times.) My best guess this week is a window on the fifth floor, circled here:

I hope you’ve been well. Just want you to know that, despite my silence, I continue to follow the contest every week and continue to enjoy it. I hope to not take as long for my next contribution. All the best, good sir!

From a newcomer to the contest:

Well, I’ve never been to Louisiana, but my mother-in-law was born and raised in Tickfaw, a mere 107 miles from this week’s location — the only fun fact I can muster! I’m so impressed by the really far-ranging places your sleuths can identify. Thanks for a thought-provoking, fun and engaging Substack feed!

The final word goes to this sleuth:

Rather than come up with some contrived story about Louisiana (I’ve never been and I know little about it!), I just want to say that the Dish over the past few weeks has been top notch. Andrew is absolutely at the top of his game right now, and I genuinely feel bad for those who are not reading his work. The podcast has been excellent too. Everything feels quite elevated at the moment. Long may it continue!

This week: Lafayette, Louisiana. Next week:

Where do you think? (The beagle was added to obscure a key clue.) 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 Wednesday at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

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