Steve Dyer

Difficult contests often bring out the sci-fi guesses:

This wretched hive of scum and villainy is obviously Mos Eisley on Tatooine.

And the snark:

Judging from the lone stars on those minarets and generally dry looking environments, this is obviously Texas. I’ll pinpoint it to Laredo, Texas, though I’m comfortable to leave it at that.

A serious guess:

Burgas, Bulgaria. Thinking this due to red roofing tiles, and would have to be in the southern coastal region of the county for palm trees.

Or further east?

My wife, who is Han Chinese, is from Kashgar, Xinjiang. I’ve never visited there but it looks like a Uighur guy walking in the foreground. There appear to be Chinese license plates on the car. The mosque has what appear to be Chinese stars on it. And the buildings look like those in Kashgar. Anyway, a WAG for what it’s worth.

This reader goes wide:

Hmmm. Sub-Saharan Africa? That’s as good as I’m doing this week. Watch the answer be “not Africa.”

It’s Africa. A rookie contestant tries her luck there too:

I always follow but seldom play. I thought it had to be a mosque in Africa (like there are few of those). License plate white on black: the Gambia? No standing sign, so former English colony: the Gambia?

I have spent maybe two hours trying to track down mosques in the Gambia, with a detour to Sierra Leone on Open Street Map and Google Maps aerial view, but no dice finding this nice domed mosque with two brick minarets. Oh well. This is why I don’t play!!

Our contest poet is finally wrong:

If this can be guessed,
then I gave up too soon.
Alas! Minarets,
Of the star and the moon!

Well … maybe the web,
is suff’rin’ amnesia.
I only can venture:
….. some place in Tunisia?

Tunisia was the most popular incorrect country:

As Chini would say (while backpacking 200 miles to escape Hurricane Sandy), it’s all in the Clues:

A window. In dire need of washing.
Four late model cars produced by Suzuki and Toyota.
A license Plate, white on black.
A man dressed as if in an Arab country or as an Afghani Pashtun.
A domed mosque under construction with the star and crescent motif on its minarets that mimics the flag of Mauritania.
A wall split air conditioner that, based on the red logo was probably made by Chinese company Ningbo AKL Electric.
A round top orange door.
A European style “No Parking” sign.
Trash bins for regular pick up.

Ok, so the license plate says we are in Tunisia, but where in Tunisia? After seven hours of searching, I have no freaking idea. Only Chini and the person who took the picture know.

BUT… I’m counting in the facts that:
1. The mosque is still under construction so doesn’t show up on any Google search and …
2. A certain group of VFYW contestants who insist that everything they can’t figure out comes from “Tatooine” and you being JUST snarky enough to hoist them on their own petard because there IS a Tataouine, Tunisia.

So I’m stating that the picture was taken from the Hotel el Ghazel, Tataouine. I hate you all.

The most popular incorrect city was Nouakchott:

Way to wrap up the year, you clever bastards. The crescent/star on the minarets are distinctive in the way the moon faces up. This is pretty distinct and is used the flag of Mauritania. After plugging away online looking for mosques in that country I looked at the original again and saw that the second tower isn’t “different,” it’s unfinished. It won’t show up because, until recently, it hasn’t been there. The building behind the minarets is a mere skeleton. Clever bastards! I hope someone has more luck than I did looking up hotels and guest houses to find that street.

The license plate got this reader into the right country:

Mosque in the background. Man in Islamic garb, appears clearly African. Dry but tropical. Coastal vibe. Signage suggests British colonial history. Cars and garbage cans suggest relative wealth. Appearance of license plates resembles Senegal. Can’t find the specific towers shown, but I’m going with Saint Louis, Senegal.

And this globe-trotting reader was one of only ten to get the right city:

Since the building in the picture is clearly a mosque, and there is an African-looking man in a prayer cap walking in the street, I’m going to go with Dakar, Senegal. The buildings look like Dakar to me (I was there back in 1990) and Senegal has blue license plates. Looking closely, it seems like the front two letters of the plate are DK for Dakar. So that’s my guess. I can’t identify the neighborhood, I just know it doesn’t look like the Grand Mosque so presumably it’s a smaller local one.

Another:

A shot in the dark here. Looks very much like my home country of Senegal. There’s a few clues pointing towards Dakar the capital:

1. Blue license plate plate on the white SUV. Couldn’t focus in too much but I think I can make out the ‘DK’ for Dakar.
2. Reddish color of the sand.
3. Mosque in the background. Senegal is approximately 92% Muslim.
4. Dakar is often in a state of construction. Lots of unfinished home improvements and construction projects.

This could possibly in the Almadies neighborhood near my parents’ home.

That’s indeed the right neighborhood. One more:

Well, normally I don’t even try these contests, as I know I won’t be able to get very close. The only one I was able to recognize before this was the Alhambra, Granada, and I wasn’t able to discern the precise window. However, your announcement that this week’s contest was very difficult piqued my interest.

I teach Islamic Art, so was able to quickly identify the mosque as North African. After looking up license plates online, I was able to identify the country as Senegal. The soil color and vegetation support this conclusion. I spent much too much time today looking at fuzzy mosques in Senegal on Google Maps, but wasn’t able to firmly identify any as this mosque. There are an awful lot of mosques to look at! Dakar is a reasonable guess just due to its sheer size, and I wasn’t able to find anything at all similar in other towns. The closest mosque to the one in the picture (grey dome, two square minarets) is Grande Mosque Hann Maristes I, but I don’t think it is the same – that mosque is a bit larger and in a more built-up area. The street it is on does not have a name in Google Maps. Nevertheless, I can tell the view is from the south because of the mosque’s orientation.

In all, players guessed a whopping 38 different locations this week:

And a handful of our veterans really earned their stripes:

This week’s view comes from the La Demeure B&B in Dakar, Senegal. Rather than an address, the hotel website provides GPS coordinates: Latitude 14°44’07.74″ (North), Longitude -17°30’26.66″ (West). We are looking northeast out from the hotel’s Zanzibar room towards a mosque that is under construction. La Demeuere is located in the Ngor neighborhood of the Almadies Arrondissement on Cap-Vert (NASA Earth Observatory image of the day here), the western most point in Africa.

The picture looked like it was taken in Africa, particularly a coastal area in or near the Sahel. And the license plate seemed like it came from Senegal. Once in Senegal, it took a bit of time to find the mosque and hotel; mostly because the mosque is too new to appear on maps yet.

Another:

“Oh no!” I cried, when I realized what was in this week’s picture. Another still-in-construction mosque, as in contest #235. In other words, a mosque whose pictures are very hard to find, like that mosque in Antalya. This time, however, there weren’t other clues; yes, I could tell that the photo was shot somewhere in the Sahel region, in Africa (Islam, palms, sand, the gentleman’s outfit), but the decisive clue to guess the view was doubtless the mosque. And the prospect of spending the next few hours sifting through hundreds of photos of mosques, probably in vain, was very unpleasant, to say the least. What could I do? “What would Chini do?” I asked myself.

Here’s the answer I gave me. First of all, let’s cast a wide net and google “Africa ‘new mosque’”. The aim is not to directly find our mosque (unless we were very lucky), but to find a similar looking one, in order to nail the right country. As expected, the mosque in the picture is not among the results; but there is something almost as valuable…

This is a mosque which is being built in Dakar, Senegal. See the upper part? It’s exactly the same as our mosque’s. So let’s turn to Google Maps, looking for mosques in Dakar. Sixty mosques later, we come to the conclusion that our mosque is not labelled as such in the map – which was to be expected, if it really is still in construction – or that it is somewhere else. A quick search in the other major cities of Senegal gives no results, so we are soon back to Dakar. What comes next? Almost all of the contest pictures are taken from a hotel’s window. This time we are lucky: not only are there fewer hotels than mosques in Dakar, but the third hotel in the list is the one we were looking for.

This week’s picture was taken from the Zanzibar suite, on the second floor of La Demeure hotel, in the Almadies neighbourhood, Dakar, Senegal.

Don’t worry, Chini had a work for it too:

I hate ones like this. You track the location down, bit by bit. Then, at the end of a long hunt, just when you think you’ve got a real toughie on your hands, you discover that there was a dead simple, five minute way to find the location. It’s like running out of the tomb, idol in hand, only to find Belloq waiting for you outside. There goes my fortune and glory …

Another former winner who got the guesthouse and window:

At first glance, this one felt like North or West Africa. Looking more closely at the mosque architecture, it reminded me of some West African mosques I’d come across working on previous contests. (I think I may have learned more about regional Islamic architecture than anything else in the time I’ve been doing the contest.) Looking at the clothing on the man in the frame also made me think West Africa. The positioning of the crescent and star on the minarets is like that on Mauritania’s national flag, but the other aspects looked closest to images I’d found from neighboring Senegal. (Also the front license plate that is visible looks like it could be Senegalese but it’s too blurry to tell for sure.) I came across an in-progress mosque in Dakar that really similar. I Googled “new mosques under construction in Dakar Senegal” and found views like ours on TripAdvisor.

I am thinking this was taken from the La Demeure Hotel/Guest House in Dakar, Senegal. My guess is from this window, which I think might be the Zanzibar room:

Only one reader without a previous win was able to ID the right city, hotel and room this week. Bravo:

This week’s picture was taken from the Zanzibar Suite at the La Demeure Bed & Breakfast on Route de Ngor in Dakar, Senegal, looking north-northwest towards the mosque on the same street:

Here is an external photo of the window, in which you can see the vine hanging down from the terrace on the level above which appears in the foreground of this week’s photo:

Here is a shot of the window from another angle, which shows the palm tree which appears in the left of this week’s photo:

Here is are a couple of shots from inside the room showing which window the photo was taken from and the view of the mosque in the centre of the photo:

I found the location of this week’s photo in the traditional VFYWC manner – hours of fruitless searching combined with a few moments of luck. The photo appeared to be taken in a part of Africa with an Islamic population. The European-style street sign in this week’s photo resulted in a brief spell researching the African signatories to the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals (surely the UN has more pressing matters to address?!) and cross-referencing pictures of licence plates from those countries. Once I convinced myself that the first two letters on the licence plate of the car in the photo were “DK”, I then focused on Dakar in Senegal as the most likely candidate. After a searching through photos of mosques in Dakar for way too long, I changed course and stumbled across the above photo which shows the dome of the mosque. This lead me to Le Demeure, where it was easy to identify the correct room as the Zanzibar.

Thanks for an enjoyable way to pass some time at work during the first couple of days back at work after the Christmas/NYE break.

A very well-earned win. From the reader who submitted the view:

I’ve been visiting Dakar periodically for work and to visit friends since 1989. In earlier years I used to stay in or near downtown Dakar, including a couple of times at the funky Lagon II, which gives the impression of being on a cruise ship. However, as work and friends have moved out towards Fann, Mamelles, and Almadies, I now usually stay at La Demeure Guesthouse.

Don’t let the dirty window fool you. It is very charming and well maintained where you can easily feel at home during long stays. They seem to be replacing windows one by one, although I haven’t figured out their criteria for choosing windows to replace. The view is facing northwest and is taken from the Zanzibar room. Just before leaving Dakar I went to a Christmas party with friends at the house on the corner where the red vehicle is. As for the unfinished mosque, I don’t know the full, or possibly even accurate story, but apparently it was begun as a private project from the previous mayor of Dakar, but came to a halt at some point after he lost the last mayoral election.

Knowing that there are other Dish readers in or passing through Dakar and that this place isn’t really off the beaten track, I expect you will have several correct guesses. Hopefully someone else can fill in the details about the mosque.

Every year come early November, as the shops start setting up their seasonal displays and the constant cacophony of “Sleigh Ride” and “Silver Bells” are only briefly interrupted by your stepping from store to store, you do a deal in your head that is part goal, part promise: “If I can just make it through December, things will be alright.” And you gird yourself for the onslaught: the chronic anxiety surrounding Thanksgiving, the interminable slew of holiday parties at which the sore muscles in your forced rictus are barely soothed by the overindulgence in alcohol that even for you seems worryingly excessive, the dreaded days of Christmas itself and then the aggravation and inevitable disappointment that New Year’s Eve holds, all of which pales in comparison to the massive physical and psychic hangovers you experience on New Year’s Day as you reflect on the turning of the calendar and how it is now one year closer to your end. But at least you’ve done it. You’ve made it through. And then WHAMMO, that first Monday back smacks you in the face with the hard reality that your mind never lets you remember, probably for reasons of survival, until it’s too late: Making it through December is child’s play; now you’ve got to make it through actual winter. The bills come due, the cold comes in, all the people you shunted aside with promises to get together “after the holidays” are bugging you to meet up and even if you somehow manage to blow them off again it only adds to the heap of guilt that is just another piece of the terrible pile under which you’re buried as you sit sobbing on your couch watching bad TV in the permanent dark that descended months ago but is now so familiar that you just assume that it will never go away, that it will just become another part of the frozen tundra you trudge through to go to a job that is somehow both meaningless and demanding and an insistent reminder that even as slowly as the days go by you are still wasting all of them and when death finally comes you will have nothing to show for your time on this earth save for a picture or two that some of your “friends” liked on Instagram. Yes, that is what you have woken up to this morning. Your future full of dark, cold and sad starts now. But I will try to be optimistic for you and tell you this: They can’t keep it winter forever. No matter how bad it gets, how awful and hopeless and worthless everything seems, I promise you that at some point the sun is going to shine again. The middle of May at the latest. If we make it through let’s meet up for a drink.

Jeanne Marie Laskas profiles the former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, including details about the depression and difficulties he struggled with after his historic journey:

After the moon, Buzz cracked up. There was nothing left to do. The media frenzy was worldwide; twenty-four countries in forty-five days—and that was just the beginning. NASA clearly had no further use for him in space; now he was just supposed to be some kind of NASA PR flack. He resigned from NASA in 1971 and returned to the Air Force. It didn’t seem like the Air Force knew what to do with someone who had been to the moon. He was an outsider, the egghead from academia who’d just tumbled off the speakers’ circuit. He drank a lot. His marriage to the mother of his three children fell apart, and he retired from the Air Force. He went to rehab. He got married again, but that lasted a year. He drank a lot more, fell in love a lot more. His Air Force pension wasn’t much. That was when he started at the Cadillac dealership. He sucked at selling cars. Rehab was the first time he ever really talked about feelings. It turned out he had so many feelings. An emptiness so deep. He discovered the melancholy of all things done.

He was in his forties, a conqueror with nothing left to conquer but his own demons. The second man to walk on the moon. Number two.

His father never accepted the fact that Buzz was not number one. Grasping, his father waged an unsuccessful one-man campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to change its Neil Armstrong “First Man on the Moon” commemorative stamp to one that said “First Men on the Moon” so it could include Buzz. As for Buzz’s mental breakdown, his depression and alcoholism, his father never accepted that, either. Or if he did, he blamed the moon, the absence of gravity, the unknown physical properties of space. The moon must have ruined Buzz.

(Image of Aldrin’s photograph of his own bootprint on the moon via NASA)

More than five thousand readers have voted and the results are in. This year’s Malkin Award, given for noxious, divisive and hyperbolic commentary from the right, goes to Dinesh D’Souza offering his intemperate worst on the legacy of American slavery:

Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen? I think so, but that debt is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.

And when it comes to the year’s best window views, this shot from Eilean Donan, Scotland took top honors:

2014’s Yglesias Award, given for criticizing one’s own side and thus risking something for the sake of saying what one believes, goes to Charles Krauthammer for his statement on the notorious rancher and conservative cause célèbre Cliven Bundy:

It isn’t enough to say I don’t agree with what he said. This is a despicable statement. It’s not the statement, you have to disassociate yourself entirely from the man. It’s not like the words exist here and the man exists here. And why conservatives, or some conservatives end up in bed with people who, you know, he makes an anti-government statement, he takes an anti-government stand, he wears a nice big hat and he rides a horse, and all of a sudden he is a champion of democracy …

Look, do I have the right to go in to graze sheep in Central Park? I think not. You have to have some respect for the federal government, some respect for our system. And to say you don’t and you don’t recognize it and that makes you a conservative hero, to me, is completely contradictory, and rather appalling. And he has now proved it.

Camels can graze wherever they want if they keep stealing selfies like 2014’s Face Of The Year:

For the first-ever Beard Of The Year competition, this magnificent piece of work won in a landslide:

Meanwhile, Susan Elizabeth Shepard and Charlotte Shane have been crowned the year’s biggest poseurs for this pretentious mess:

69 confronts us with an unfortunate truth: it is a distinctly capitalistic, efficiency-emphasizing endeavor that erases the unique personhood of each participant by relying on a crude approximation of how human bodies fit together if human bodies are conceived of as identical, two-dimensional figures like the numbers of its name. … The position also echoes the service economy in its demand (mainly on women) of a convincing performance of pleasure. It’s not enough to simply be present and to competently do the job that’s asked of you by your lover, you must also appear to simultaneously enjoy said lover’s ministrations, regardless of the delicate balancing requiring to keep from suffocating him or breaking his nose. This is a form of emotional labor like that demanded from baristas, servers, and sex workers; not only do you have to do a good job, you have to like it.

Cattle weren’t the only ones to show up in support of 2014’s Mental Health Break Of The Year:

But a stoned Maureen Dowd might have considered that video a viral nightmare. She wins 2014’s top Hathos honors for her novel summary of what it was like to take too many edibles:

Then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy. I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me. And then I wrote a column on Hillary.

According to the polls, more than 30% of you thought this powerful New Zealand PSA was the year’s Coolest Ad:

And Pavlina Tcherneva’s bar graph tracking America’s income growth disparity is the Chart Of The Year:

Finally, we also added maps to this year’s awards, and Dishheads chose Nik Freeman’s overview of where Americans don’t live as 2014’s best:

Thanks to everyone who took the time to channel their Dishness and vote. For our newer readers, you can find out more about how and why we nominate award candidates here. To recommend a new nominee, email us here.

When the history of '90s sitcoms is told through televised romans à clef, it is, of course, the writers who get the last word. Tension between writers and stars is nothing new to television — ask any writer of Mork & Mindy what working with Robin Williams was like — but these tensions became more pronounced in the '90s, for two reasons: The syndication money was obscene, and the standup explosion of the '80s led to a demand in star-driven vehicles based on standup routines. This led to inevitable questions of authorship. Carsey-Werner became famous for creating sitcoms around standup performers (Bill Cosby, Roseanne Barr, and Brett Butler, for example), and just as famous for the volatility of their stars.

Certainly writers poking fun at their stars is nothing new (Cheers mocked Ted Danson's vanity decades before Community took a swing at Joel McHale's), but when relations were frosty, the narrative was: actors were hard to work with. It should come as no surprise that in a field as male-dominated as TV writing, male stars endure light ribbing even when the network had to hire a fixer to pay off their rape victims, while there’s a word we use to describe demanding women. It is for this reason, in part, that The Comeback is such a (hilarious) relief: Lisa Kudrow functions as a writer-performer (co-creating the series with Sex and the City’s Michael Patrick King) and can reframe stories of bad behavior on both the part of the actors and the writers. On one episode this season, Seth Rogen, playing himself, observes that “every writer” wants to shoot their actors, and “that’s why you gotta write your own stuff.” The Comeback, which just finished its second season on HBO, is far from the first series to make specific references to closet skeletons in Hollywood, but its point of view is decidedly rare.

As a comparative example, I'd like to touch on a similar project from a few years ago to point out the important differences. In 2008, the writing staffs of Two and a Half Men and CSI took on episodes of one another's shows, resulting in the episodes "Two and a Half Deaths" (CSI) and "Fish in a Drawer" (Two and a Half Men). "Fish in a Drawer" involves the investigation of the death of a character on Two and a Half Men. “Two and a Half Deaths” (co-written by Two and a Half Men creators Chuck Lorre and Lee Aronsohn), though, had the CSI gang investigating the murder of a sitcom star. This hour drew heavily from Chuck Lorre's own history working with women sitcom stars in the '90s (specifically Roseanne, Brett Butler, and Cybill Shepherd), and was clearly written to exorcise his own misogynist resentment of them.

Spoiler alert: The sitcom's executive producer (Stephen Tobolowsky, as a Chuck Lorre avatar) has conspired with its costar (Rachael Harris, as an avatar for Cybill's Christine Baransky) to murder the star ("Annabelle," played by Katey Sagal), due to her bad behavior on set. Like Roseanne, Annabelle is constantly hiring and firing new writers, including her schmuck boyfriend (Diedrich Bader, as a Tom Arnold avatar). Like Brett Butler, Annabelle struggles with alcoholism and is inappropriately sexual with the actor playing her son on her sitcom. Like Cybill Shepherd, she cannot stand to see her costar get bigger laughs than her. The premise itself is a likely reference to the Feb 26, 1997 Viva Las Vegas crossover promotion ABC did with Grace Under Fire, The Drew Carey Show, Coach, and Ellen. Working with Brett Butler was supposedly so challenging that the Drew Carey Show crew made themselves "I Survived Brett" t-shirts. It's worth noting, of course, that Lorre was no longer running Grace Under Fire at the time.

In fact, his time on all three of those shows was relatively brief (not quite as brief as a colonoscopy, but…). He worked on Roseanne from 1990-1992, then created Grace Under Fire, but only stuck around for one season. He was then on Cybill for two seasons (through 1998).

Roseanne has written about her struggles with Matt Williams, her show's first EP — in short, while he was writing the show, stories were drawn from her life and standup act, and she felt she had to really fight to make sure she had a creative voice on the show. This doesn't necessarily justify this or this, but it goes a long way toward recognizing that she was a human being working hard to make the show great (and it truly was).

Brett Butler did some pretty inexcusable things on Grace Under Fire. She was also then, as now, struggling with serious addiction issues — issues that shut down production so she could possibly get clean (Hollywood’s great at giving performers the time they need to kick addiction). She's since made appearances on Anger Management, starring another performer Chuck Lorre battled against, Charlie Sheen.

Cybill Shepherd, rumor has it, fired Chuck Lorre after Christine Baranski won an Emmy for the show (Shepherd hadn't). While that's a stone cold Beyonce-in-Dreamgirls rumor, it also seems like a bit of a stretch. Here's where it becomes important to see who gets to tell the story. Chuck Lorre struggled with alcoholism during this time, once admitting to Entertainment Weekly, "I led a dissolute youth until 47" (this would be around 1999). Can it really be true that he committed no bad behavior during his "dissolute" middle-age? His work in the first few seasons of Two and a Half Men, in particular, doesn't point to a man comfortable around women (including its casting of Charlie Sheen). Cybill Shepherd described Lorre as "so angry, he couldn't function." But his CSI episode points to a man browbeaten by a demanding star, able to trust only his (all white-male) writing staff. Annabelle, the star, is revealed to have been getting drunk via vodka-dipped Tampons, and following her death had a rubber chicken stuffed down her throat. If Roseanne Barr, or Brett Butler, or Cybill Shepherd wrote an episode of CSI about a TV writer being murdered, what might we have the chance to learn?

We have an opportunity like that, in The Comeback. There's nothing to suggest that Lisa Kudrow is difficult to work with. Valerie Cherish, Kudrow's character and the lead of The Comeback, is a sitcom actor best known from a '90s sitcom called I'm It which just missed syndication by three episodes. In The Comeback's first season (2005), she's the subject of a reality series about her comeback on a new sitcom called Room & Bored. Like a lot of actors, Valerie’s determination not to be a Problem gives her trouble with sincerity. As Emily Nussbaum wrote, “Her job… is to be a good sport. Any hint of resistance might get her tagged as ‘difficult.’” She can’t control her image on her reality show, and the first season throws her into a tailspin.

The other source of agita for Valerie is Paulie G, one of Room & Bored's two creators. Paulie G won an Emmy for a Simpsons episode he wrote in his early 20s, and he thinks he's a genius. Paulie G is boorish and obnoxious, and hates that he's contractually obligated to write for Valerie (her reality show and the sitcom are a package deal). James Burrows, playing himself directing the first few episodes of Room & Bored, sees a "hate show" coming: the writers (all white men and one white woman who's terrified of standing out as a Problem) must write for Valerie, but what they write doesn't have to be good.

One night, Valerie shows up at the writers' room to bring them homemade cookies for their late night of rewriting — she finds the writers pantomiming a sex scene between themselves and her (in the form of a writer with a red t-shirt on his head, to mimic her red hair). She explains to the camera, “That was nothing, just writers blowing off steam… It’s a comedy show, part of the creative process.”

Valerie’s language here is deliberate. The Friends writers' room was notoriously miserable and sexist, resulting in a groundbreaking lawsuit that resolved that if a sitcom deals with sexual situations, its writers can discuss sex in the room with near-impunity. The lawsuit mentioned, among other things, that the Friends writers would make obscene jokes about the stars of the series, specifically the women. Writers insisted that this kind of thing was necessary banter for reaching stories. A writer (not on the show) explained, “[Friends] was so concentrated on sexual titillation … they’re practically obliged to explore that. They’re writing Friends, for God’s sake.” Many writers rallied around the Friends writers, Ken Levine even going so far as to say, “Had the writers’ assistant won this absurd lawsuit the result would not be more genteel writers rooms. It would be fewer woman writers and assistants being hired… And maybe some of the Courtney Cox genital jokes were true.” As the New York Times noted, “According to the Writers Guild of America, of the 1,576 writers who worked on network television programs in the 2002-2003 season, 425 were women.” In 2012, 3715 writers were employed in television; 1019 were women.

The assistant that the writers kept past midnight while tossing these jokes around, a black woman, has left the industry. The judge allowed, “The writers regularly discussed their preferences in women and sex in general. [Writer Adam] Chase spoke of his preferences for blond women, a certain bra cup size, 'get[ting] right to sex' and not 'mess[ing] around with too much foreplay." Rob Long, another writer (not on the show) insisted, “Writers make fun of the cast relentlessly. The cast of Friends is beautiful and talented and funny and they seem really nice and in fact they are really nice and they did a great show and they all got really rich — and if you're a writer, these are the people you despise." But according to the suit, no male cast members were insulted to the degree that Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston were.

It's accepted wisdom that Friends is one of the great sitcoms in television history, but how much are we supposed to tolerate in the name of "great" writing? Certainly Room & Bored is not a classic. Very few sitcoms are. Did Community's greatness justify Dan Harmon's behavior? Its contemporary, Parks & Recreation, seemed capable of making fantastic comedy without fostering a Community-like environment. Another (non-Friends) writer interviewed about the lawsuit suggested that TV writers rooms are “a very tough atmosphere and if you don’t love it it’s not going to work for you at all.” That writer was Dennis Klein, who the interview notes worked on Cosby — a show starring a rapist — and The Larry Sanders Show — a show that fired an actor when she stopped sleeping with star/EP Garry Shandling. It can be inferred that “tough atmosphere” is just another way of saying “women aren’t welcome.”

In the nine years since season 1 of The Comeback, all of its characters have been apparently dealing with its trauma. Season 2 gives us a quick recap of what they've been up to — Valerie was originally cast on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills but was so terrified of again being portrayed as a monster that she walked off filming. Jane, the field producer of The Comeback's reality show, retreated to serious documentary, and seems truly miserable over the woman she became making a reality show. Paulie G, notably, has kicked a heroin habit we didn't know he had during Room & Bored, and is now clean and making an HBO series about a recalcitrant TV writer working on an asinine sitcom starring a persnickety has-been actress. For a moment, we can hope that his addiction was what made him an asshole, and that his casting Valerie to play "Mallory Church" will be the first step toward a positive working relationship between the two of them.

That is unfortunately not the case — Paulie G is also directing his series (Seeing Red), and refuses to give his actors any direction, relying instead on Seth Rogen for hackneyed improv. Valerie comes to set with all her lines memorized, every time, and needs direction to function. Soon Paulie G is screaming at her that "you make me want to put a fucking needle in my arm!”

An early shoot day has them filming a fantasy scene where Mallory goes down on Mitch. Valerie is uncomfortable simulating oral sex on camera — her background is network sitcoms — and begs Paulie G to give her some kind of understanding about what the scene is about. She's worried especially that, since so much of the show is autobiographical, the crew will think that she actually did blow Paulie G while working on Room & Bored. As Kate Arthur notes, Valerie “would have read the sexual fantasy scene in the script, and still agreed to do it. If Paulie G. hasn’t evolved much, neither has the self-immolating Valerie.” Fed up with being asked, Paulie G tells her, in front of the entire crew, that when they were working on Room & Bored, and she would come to the writers with a question, he would think "Blow me. Blow me, Val." She pretends that this kind of sexist abuse works as a scene-motivator, and it takes Seth Rogen to come up with an alternate solution she's (slightly) more comfortable with.

Seeing Red is, unsurprisingly, sexist tripe, with great performances by Valerish Cherish and Seth Rogen. Even Juna, one of Valerie’s Room & Bored costars (played by Malin Åkerman), worries about the line between fact and fiction that Paulie G is blurring. She’s now a movie star (and was always more comfortable in her skin than Valerie) but indicates that the Seeing Red version of her slept her way to her role, something Juna doesn’t want viewers thinking is the truth. What really kills her, she tells Valerie, “is that Seth is charming. He makes it look like we were the problem [on Room & Bored]… Seth is so winning, it’s like you and I are these awful women who are just a body or an ego.” Valerie finally concedes, “That’s how he wrote himself.”

During a press junket in anticipation of Seeing Red's release, a blogger asks Valerie how she felt about the show's misogynist sexualization of all its women characters. We saw Valerie shoot a scene flanked by two naked, moaning women, so we know how she felt: "That was hell. That’s where I was,” she told Mickey in confidence. But Valerie is an actress, and it's not her job to publicly criticize bad writing or bad behavior by writers. She can just grit her teeth and bear it. Valerie isn't a writer. Luckily, Lisa Kudrow is.

Harry Waksberg is a writer and lazeabout based in Riverside, CA. He is the creator and writer of the webseries Doing Good.

I missed you.

Andrew Marantz has a fascinating profile of Emerson Spartz, a 27-year-old who runs Dose.com (formerly Brainwreck.com). For those of us who care about real journalism, it makes for depressing reading:

Spartz thinks that pathbreaking ideas are overvalued. “If you want to build a successful virus, you can start by trying to engineer the DNA from scratch—or, much more efficient, you take a virus that you already know is potent, mutate it a tiny bit, and expose it to a new cluster of people.” Brainwreck’s early posts “leaned more toward originality,” Spartz said—they featured novel combinations of images, with text that reflected at least a few minutes of online research—but with Dose “we’ve stopped doing that as much because more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.”

Marantz sees Spartz as something akin to “a day trader, investing in pieces of content that seem poised to go viral”:

He and his engineers have developed algorithms that scan the Internet for memes with momentum. The content team then acts as arbitrageurs, cosmetically altering the source material and reposting it under what they hope will be a catchier headline. A meme’s success on Imgur, Topsy, or “certain niche subreddits” might indicate a potential viral hit. He added, “The sources and the rules sound simple, but it takes a lot of experimentation to make it actually useful. It’s a lot of indicators weighed against each other, and they’re always changing.” If an image is popular on Reddit but relatively stagnant on Pinterest, for example, Spartz’s algorithm might pass it up in favor of something more likely to appeal to Dose’s audience.

Apparently, Spartz “does not distinguish between quality and virality”:

He uses “effective,” “successful,” and “good” interchangeably. At one point, he told me, “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”

According to the polls, nearly 20% of Dish readers think this Yezidi child, who narrowly escaped ISIS in August, should be our Face Of The Year:

And almost 14% of readers have chosen this young Ferguson protester instead:

But veering away from this year’s big news stories, more than 25% of you seem to agree that the year’s best face is this scene-stealing camel:

Disagree? Cast your vote for any of the above or the other seven candidates here. Then, continue on to our other polls for the 2014 Malkin Award, Hathos Alert, Poseur Alert, and Yglesias Award. Voting also remains open for the year’s best Chart, Mental Health Break and View From Your Window, as well as the 2014’s Coolest Ad, and for the first time ever, Map Of The Year and Beard Of The Year! Our polls will close Wednesday at midnight, so have at it:

• Click here to vote for the Beard Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the Chart Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the Cool Ad Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the Face Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the Hathos Alert Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the 2014 Malkin Award!
• Click here to vote for the Map Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the Mental Health Break Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the Poseur Alert Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the Window View Of The Year!
• Click here to vote for the 2014 Yglesias Award!

Please note: due to there not being enough nominees this year, we will not be issuing a 2014 Hewitt Award, Moore Award, or Dick Morris Award. Learn more about all our awards here. The top two photos in this post are from Getty.

A red-faced macaque baby monkey plays in its box at a zoo in Hangzhou, in eastern China’s Hangzhou province on December 28, 2014. The baby monkey, born two months ago, quickly became popular for its restless movements that resembled a gymnast, local media reported. By STR/AFP/Getty Images.

femputations:

eyqu:

laughing-treees:

so glad I found this
it’s
evolution
follow one cell from the middle outwards

Holy shit

When it gets to the end it exhales a soul

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.

We’ve come to expect a certain level of quality and self-awareness from The Learning Channel, which has brought us such chronicles of the human condition as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 90-Day Fiancee, and Sarah Palin’s Alaska. From this august tradition comes their new one-hour special, My Husband’s Not Gay, in which Mormon guys who like other guys show us how fun it is for them to be married to women.

The show focuses on three married couples: Jeff and Tanya, Pret and Megan, and Curtis and Tera. Joining the cast is 35-year-old Tom, the bachelor of the group who enjoys fishing and baseball and served as a missionary in Long Beach. All cast members are devout Mormons belonging to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The special will follow the cast as they navigate life while explaining to outsiders their unique marriages. “I get a little defensive when somebody calls my husband gay,” one wife says in the debut trailer.

And maybe he isn’t! Wonkette’s social science research bureau has confirmed to us that there is such a thing as bisexuality, and that there are bisexual men in America who are married to women, monogamously even! Being attracted to men doesn’t preclude being attracted to women or being in exclusive relationships with them. To those of the Mormon faith, however, this doesn’t appear to be enough: even in the trailer, they reinforce the idea that  non-straight urges need to be battled and defeated since they can never lead to anything that’s not a sin. “The whole act [of man-on-man action] is against the teaching of the gospel.”

The official LDS website mormonsandgays.org has boiled down the church’s position on gayness down to a box at the top of the page:

The experience of same-sex attraction is a complex reality for many people. The attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is. Even though individuals do not choose to have such attractions, they do choose how to respond to them. With love and understanding, the Church reaches out to all God’s children, including our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

The church doesn’t think you can help thinking about doing those things with men, but those things are sins. These guys are commanded to love one another, and that love should take the form of pickup basketball games before going home to the wife.

The trailer gives what we assume is a representative sample of the show: couples ice-skating wholesomely together, uncomfortable conversations about sexuality and faith, and the struggle of Tom, the Long Beach Missionary, to successfully court straight ladies: “I want to marry a woman, but I don’t know how to work out these feelings.”

Tom also says, “I like to say I’ve chosen an alternative to an alternative lifestyle.” Taken together with the title of the show, which emphasizes the role of the wives in this struggle, this makes us wonder: what is it really like for the women who are living this alternative-alternative lifestyle along with these men? We’ll find out when the show airs in January. The Wonkette Washington Bureau is already busily planning our viewing party (it’s so exciting learning about different cultures!) and suggestions on appropriate straight Mormon cuisine and decor are appreciated.

[ The Wrap via JoeMyGod ]

You can follow Beth on Twitter.

Dig in!

A reader thinks we’re being topical:

Cuba, of course.

Another gets topical himself:

In honor of Andrew’s final appearance on The Colbert Report, here’s my truthiness answer for this week’s VFYW – Portugal, because it feels like it – and no amount of facts can change my mind.

Another appreciates the “seasonal appropriate Dickensian feel” of the scene, while another, after surveying many hotel windows in coastal England, finally settles on Dover:

Somewhere in the general proximity of the White Cliffs of. I hope I’m completely wrong. Somehow I would feel better if I were barking up the wrong tree, rather than simply being incapable of climbing the right one.

The most popular incorrect guess this week gets us, at least, to the right part of Europe:

We Alaskans always feel a kind of kinship for these arctic locales. I haven’t been to Bergen, Norway in 30 years, but it reminds me of what beautiful human-scale architecture can make of these cool rainy climates and steep terrain. A few towns in SE Alaska have some similar elements (Juneau and Sitka), but we are far behind the Norwegians in building livable cities as aesthetic as these.

Our Scandinavian readers really came out of the woodwork for this week’s contest. Here’s one who recognized the right country immediately:

This made me so homesick I had to put in a guess. It looks like Denmark. Could be any small fishing village I guess, so I’ll try Nordby on Fanø where my patents live and where I wish I’d be for Christmas.

Another Dane guesses Svaneke:

No interest in hunting down the actual coordinates. But thanks for the memories. It was 1980 … expensive cigarettes … cheap herring … Soviet warships … skinny dipping … youth … Jutta …

A longtime reader seizes his moment:

I’ve been following VFYW for years, quietly, patiently waiting in the dark for an easy prey suitable for my skills would show up. And by skills I mean random coincidence and luck, because at some point some window would be from a place I could recognise. And finally. This was that one window.

The city is Ærøskøbing, which is the main city on the small island of Ærø in the southern part of Denmark. In what we Danes call the Sydfynske Øhav (the southern Funen archipelago). The photo is taken from the small hotel Pension in Vestergade 44. It’s taken from the narrow window facing north from the room called Karnappen (it does not have a number).

My process: My parents having unprotected sex could be seen as the first step in figuring this out. However, I do think it would be more correct to say that my being born into a family of sailors in another small coastal town in Denmark was the first and very important step in guessing the window. Second step was immediately recognising the view as an old Danish coastal town. Since they all pretty much look the same, I was very happy to notice the top of the ferry in the background, which narrowed it down quite a bit. The first place I thought of was Ærøskøbing. I looked at google maps and Vestergade is the only street leading to the ferry. I randomly clicked streetview on Vestergade and ended up in front of the yellow house from 1749. And that was pretty much it. Also, there’s a photo of the window on the hotel website.

I’ve sailed quite a bit in those waters, but only been on land in Æreskøbing, sailing as a teenager many years ago. It rained and we only stayed long enough to have lunch and supplies.

Another first-time correct guesser adds:

I actually stayed at this B&B many years ago. It’s one of the cosiest places I’ve ever been. If my recollection serves me right it is run by a nice English lady who serves tea at 5pm sharp with scones and her own jams and marmalades. If you ever want to step into a real life H.C. Andersen fairy tale town, Aeroskobing is the place.

Via a former winner, here are the precise windows:

Another veteran runs through the clues:

The architecture, apparent weather and license plates immediately pointed to Northern Europe. There’s a car park at the end of the road and the smokestacks of a ferry just visible above the roofs. So, small town with ferry port somewhere in the British Isles, perhaps northern France, Holland, or Scandinavia.

My first inclination was the British Isles, so I spent a while searching Google images of ferry lines around England and Ireland but none of the ships seemed to have the right yellow paint job. “Yellow ferry” wasn’t that helpful really; it turned up page after page of Corsican ferries. I then moved through the Netherlands before eventually hitting Denmark, and lo and behold, the Ærøskøbing ferry:

From there it was a hop skip and a jump to use Street View up from the harbor to the Pension Vestergade 44. The distinctive 1749 building across the street and “EL” of the “HOTEL” sign a few doors down made it easy to pinpoint the window, the half-width one in the middle of the linked streetview, on the thin face of the building perpendicular to the front.

Ærøskøbing looks like a really lovely place. I’m sure many contestants this week will point out that it’s famous as a well preserved middle-ages town, and is apparently only accessible by that ferry. I’ll also throw in that their local specialty is apparently Ærøpandekager, “very thick pancakes”, which I now want.

Here’s how another contestant also ferried to the right spot:

The clues in the picture pointed to a port in northern Europe, perhaps Germany, Scandinavia or a Baltic state. Yet as with the Halifax contest, the ship seemed to be the most important clue. I started in East Frisia working east along the coast, then around the Danish coastline before recrossing the German border into Schleswig-Holstein. When back in Germany searching ferry companies near Eckernförde, this picture of an Ærøfærgerne car ferry popped up. The ship is the M/F Ærøskøbing (Wikipedia shows the ship displaying an older livery) and it is the very same ferry docked in this week’s contest picture. Somehow I missed the company’s ferries while poking around ports in Denmark. With the M/F Ærøskøbing identified, it was easy to find the Pension Vestergade 44 in Ærøskøbing on Ærø island in Region Syddanmark, Denmark.

And this player led a small team of Facebook friends in the hunt:

Another adds:

The Pension’s website notes: “The house was built in 1784 by a sea captain as a dowry for his daughter. Much later, a well known sculptor – Gunnar Hammerich – lived here.” According to the Danish Heritage Agency it was, originally, a pharmacy.

It was the “1749” house down the street that led many to Ærøskøbing:

This week’s photo takes me back to my last semester at university, which I spent on exchange in Denmark. Great country, with an inordinate number of extremely attractive people. Once I realised the photo was taken in Denmark, a couple of quick searches on the usual photo sharing sites later and I was able to identify the building on the right hand side of the photo as this building on Vestergade in Ærøskøbing on the island of Ærø.

Also: Thæ ådditionål lættærs in the Dånish ålphåbæt are åwæsomæ ånd I løvæ åny øppørtunity tø bust thæm øut.

But readers didn’t miss much else this week, either:

The main clue that helped me determine the country was actually the manhole cover. The radial pattern with the double division on the outer rings is a design specific to Denmark. They are made by the Norwegian foundry Ulefos Jernværk which was started in 1657:

The license plates also helped. Even though the closest one was blurry, the colors on it match a form of plate used by Danish vehicles that are for both commercial and personal use:

There’s some Dishhead heritage in the town as well:

I was so excited to see the window for this week’s contest because I recognized it immediately as the city that my family is from: Aeroskobing, Denmark. I love Aeroskobing because it is charmingly called the “Fairytale City of Denmark” due to its charming little houses. I also love the fact that most of the houses have the names of cities on the back of the houses. Because Aeroskobing is a shipping town, these towns signify the sailor’s favorite port/sailing location. The two houses that my family have are the Pacific and Alameda houses. I have attached photos of them and of the charming pension courtyard and their lovely dog, Hector:

Meanwhile, our contest warrior-poet returns:

I’m makin’ this short, I won’t pander, son,
Not on the turf of Hans C. Anderson.
And this near to Elsinore… it’s just too damn hard,
Evoking a hamlet as well as The Bard.

Houses with build dates make great Google snoopin’,
Can’t read the Danish? Just say “Aye-roosh-koopin”.

There were a lot of correct entries this week. One player tries to stand out:

Since everyone is going to guess this one, I will refine my guess by speculating that the photographer is 37 years old, male, approximately 6’1″ tall with a moustache, who prefers wearing berets and owns an extensive collection of antique glass insulators from the early 20th century.

Chini always stands apart:

When I found last week’s view it brought back miserable memories of trudging uptown for supplies, bedraggled and sleep deprived after Sandy hit. Finding this week’s location, on the other hand, initially evoked no memories at all, but it should have. Two years ago the Dish featured one of the hardest contests of all time in VFYWC #134. It was so hard that only one person found the right country despite our having a whole extra week during Christmas to hunt for it. I remember being so lost that I briefly searched the Texas coastline. But that’s the beauty of the contest; this week’s location is only 25 miles away from that one but it’s a thousand times easier to find. Why? As always, the clues…

Another hard-core regular is equally compelled to keep playing:

There’s a singular feeling that Dish contest veterans get when you find that one image or street view and you know you’ve nailed it. It’s a rush of adrenaline and pride, like finding that lost earring that your wife dropped under the couch. It’s what keeps me coming back, even after winning the contest.

And this reader finally takes the plunge:

I think this is the first time I have actually really TRIED to solve a VFYW. This despite having followed the Dish for many, many years, and enjoying reading the entries to the contest. But this time I was sitting with my girlfriend, pointing out interesting articles on the Dish, as I often do. I had mentioned the VFYW contest to her before, and now I thought I’d demonstrate what the fuss was all about. I already had an idea that this picture might be from Denmark (where I live), since the architecture and the ferry in the background was very reminiscent of old Danish fisher villages. Details that immediately stuck out were the lamp post, the sewer cover, the cobblestones, and the license plates on the cars. So, what remained to be determined was what city…

This ended up being a fun conclusion to a browsing session that started with a discussion of depictions of the Madonna – my girlfriend has a Master’s in Art History and her thesis was on depictions of the Madonna in the Renaissance. Like many others have said, this is what I love about the Dish – you never know what you are going to encounter – art, politics, sexual mores, or a sudden trip down memory lane (I grew up near Ærø, but have only been to Ærøskøbing once, almost 35 years ago, to visit a cinema that was showing Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein…).

And the Dish absolutely depends on word of mouth like the above to reach new readers, so if you need a last-minute gift idea, consider sharing the Dish. Meanwhile, the last prize of 2014 goes to a 17-contest veteran:

This week’s view is from the Pension Vertergade 44 in AErøskøbing, Denmark. Based on a picture on the pension’s website this is a view from the room named Karnappen looking down Vestergade to the ferry, which is visible in the picture.My first thought on seeing the picture was Iceland – perhaps Reykjavik – but that didn’t pan out. Then I focused on that ferry, and the markings on the funnels. That led me to the AErofaergne which run between the island of Funen and AErø in Denmark. Didn’t take long after that to figure out the rest. This is one of those contests that has revealed someplace new and interesting that I now want to visit. So, thanks for that.

When combing our inbox for contest candidates, this week’s view really stood out, as it was taken on a very special day by one of our most accomplished regular players. She explains:

Coolest second anniversary ever!!! I don’t know how intentional it was to post that picture on that date but you made my year, especially because my husband has been working overseas and got home for the holidays just the day before.

I took that picture on the morning of our wedding day, December 20, 2012, in Ærøskøbing, Denmark, on the island of Ærø. The view is from the Pension Vestergade 44 in the Karnappen room. I cannot say enough about Pension 44 and its owner Susanna. We went back just this summer (my husband purchased tickets as a 1st anniversary present) and stayed there again, and we hope to return many more times.

When Danes would find out that we were both American and getting married in Denmark—in the winter, no less—the response was always, “WHY?!” My husband and I met in Spain but for two Americans getting legally married in a lot of European countries is possible but a hassle. Recalling a Rick Steves episode covering Ærø, I Googled “get married in Denmark” and discovered two things: First, that getting married is a relatively smooth process there even for non-nationals. It’s a popular destination for not only Danes marrying non-Danes, but EU citizens marrying non-EU citizens or partners from other EU countries. Second, we found Louise, who runs Danish Island Weddings in Ærøskøbing (also notice she owns the domain “getmarriedindenmark”—smart gal). In the two years since our wedding the island has become increasingly popular as a wedding destination and Louise’s business has grown with it, deservedly so. Ours was a sort of planned elopement—the only people there were us, the officiant, and our two witnesses were Louise and our photographer Camilla, who lives and does much of her fantastic work on the island.

All this is not meant to sound like an ad, but our wedding and our stay in Ærøskøbing was everything we could have possibly asked for. We made friends there that we saw again this summer. We can’t wait for our next trip back.

Thank you so much for an extra chance to re-live this day on our second wedding anniversary! I’m including a picture taken at the same time looking the other way down the street and, because I can’t help myself, one of our wedding pictures taken in the town (the latter c/o Camilla Jørvad Photography).

Thanks so much for sharing. We’ll start off 2015 with a much harder view, so come back on Saturday if you crave a good puzzle amidst the eggnog and revelry. Until next year …

Olaf ?

by Chas Danner

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.

cheeks

In the first chapter of his book, After Photography, digital photography theorist Fred Ritchin explains the central selling point of digital over analog:

Digital is based on an architecture of infinitely repeatable abstractions in which the original and its copy are the same; analog ages and rots, diminishing over generations, changing its sound, its look, its smell. In the analog world the photograph of the photograph is always one generation removed, fuzzier, not the same; the digital copy of the digital photograph is indistinguishable so that “original” loses its meaning.

Put differently, the common perception is that digital files can’t decay. The grooves in a record are eventually worn down by the needle, while an MP3 file retains its data structure. If you open a JPEG today and then again 20 years down the line, the photo will not have changed at all; it won’t have yellowed or faded or have developed frayed edges. This guarantee of digital preservation is why I spent hours scanning family photos at high resolutions and transferring home movies from 8mm magnetic tape onto a hard drive for my parents. When you transmute something into digital, the assumption is that you preserve its fidelity forever.

Ritchin first published After Photography in 1999. Digital photography was becoming more popular, but we hadn’t yet started to put all of our photographs online. Since then, as files are put through a myriad of compression algorithms and Instagram filters, a new aesthetic of digital decay has started to emerge.

Let’s call them Shitpics. Because they look like shit.

Shitpics happen when an image is put through some diabolical combination of uploading, screencapping, filtering, cropping, and reuploading. They are particularly popular on Instagram.

For instance, consider this post by the very famous celebrity Ludacris.

There’s a lot going on here. Let’s try and figure out how this image ended up in its current state.

The image was probably created by the joke account @blackgirlproblems_official, where it looked like this:

There are a few clues that this is probably the original. The text is centered and sharper, and the emoji is more than a smudge of dirty yellow gibberish. The picture of the monkey is clear (and cute!!!). All of the text in the watermark is legible.

Then this meme went through hell.

It was saved and cropped numerous times. There are a few signifiers of this: The text is cut off on the left side and there are slight black bars at the top and bottom of the frame. The greenish cloud around the text also indicates an absurd amount of (re)compression.

Maybe the most baffling part of this is the appearance of the rule-of-thirds grid, which likely came from Instagram’s upload screen. Which means that someone screencapped their upload process and then uploaded that? And the grid somehow doesn’t even reach the top and bottom edges.

The version of this image from @msrjstlf indicates that it was probably not run through a filter at any point, since the whitespace seems to have stayed mostly that. The lower left corner of the picture does show, however, just how many times it has been reconfigured: the “black” in “blackgirlproblems_official” has been absorbed by section of blanket that has been widening and darkening as the macro travels through the wringer.

Then Ludacris puts the cherry on top: a translucent gray regram banner crediting the account that he got it from (though not, of course, the original photographer or even macro author).

The Shitpic aesthetic has arisen from two separate though equally influential factors, both of which necessitate screencapping instead of direct downloading. The first is that Instagram, which has no built-in reposting function, doesn’t let users save images directly. This means that the quickest way to save an image on a phone is to screencap it, technically creating a new image.

The second, more important shift is the new macro format that divorces text from image. Classic memes (jfc “classic memes” what are we doing) had text directly on the image, written in Impact font in a particular style—white with a black border. That changed with the rise of the text setup/image punchline format on Tumblr, particularly on the blog What Should We Call Me, which spawned and continues to spawn imitators. Twitter began to imitate this when it changed tweet formatting to hide image URLs (pic.twitter.com) from tweets, easing the transition from text to image, from setup to punchline.

It’s difficult to send someone a technically exact copy of these types of jokes, because they can’t be bundled into a single file such an image. Sending the URL where the joke is hosted requires someone to load an entire webpage, which is relatively laborious on mobile, and so they necessitate being screencapped.

In general, directly saving images on mobile is a function that, even when available, most people don’t bother to use or even learn (saving files locally—in any kind of file system—is generally discouraged in smartphone operating systems). Screencapping is just easier—it’s the quickest way to get something from the internet to your camera roll. That’s why even classic-format memes have fallen victim to the Shitpic process.

People have an excuse for everything #gymratprobs pic.twitter.com/2mjnYBNvz5

— Gym Rat Problems (@Gymratprobs) November 15, 2014

When you pair the format’s inherent need to be screencapped in order to attain virality with Instagram’s prevention of downloading images, you get an endless cycle of screencapping and compression through uploading. Throw in the occasional filter, or watermark, or regram tag, and let the process carry itself out for a while, and eventually you get a Shitpic. The layers pile up, burying and distorting the original.

The rise of the Shitpic demonstrates just how little ownership there is on the internet: Shoddy workarounds and subpar image quality are a small sacrifice to make, so long as your version of a joke goes viral instead of someone else’s. That the image is a muddled cacophony of compression artifacts and blurry emoji matters little, so long as your screenname is above it.

Perhaps most importantly, the Shitpic aesthetic could very well be the first non-numeric indicator of viral dissemination. Metrics such as pageviews, impressions, Facebook referrals, YouTube view counts, and BuzzFeed viral lift all attempt to quantify virality in some way. To the layman (and, let’s be frank, some industry experts too) all of this is gibberish.

But if you look at a Shitpic, you can instantly tell the level of virality by how worn it looks, how legible its text is, how many watermarks adorn it. You can count them much like you would rings on a tree. A pristine-looking meme engenders skepticism—“This can’t be that funny, it hasn’t been imperfectly replicated enough.” But when you see that blurry text, partially cut off by the top of the frame, and a heavily compressed picture of Kermit below… that’s when you know:

This is gonna be a good-ass meme.

by Will Wilkinson

The hacking of Sony and the studio’s subsequent decision to halt the release of The Interview is incredibly weird and it’s left me pretty well stumped. First of all, I’m not 100% positive North Korea is the culprit. I’m not aware of dispositive evidence (maybe the government has it) and it’s more than a little surprising that the North Koreans could do anything so competently. I guess they could pay somebody to do it. In any event, the idea that the North Korean dictator gets to decide what Americans are allowed to watch is outrageous. What leaves me baffled and vexed is what to do about it.

Jonathan Chait wants to the feds to step in and backstop the studios:

The federal government should take financial responsibility. Either Washington should guarantee Sony’s financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should directly reimburse the studio’s projected losses so it can release the movie online for free. The latter solution has the attractive benefit of ensuring a far wider audience for the film than it would otherwise have attracted.

I don’t think this is a bad idea at all, but it’s not clear to me that it gets us far toward solving the problem of the hacker’s veto. What if the Guardians of Peace threaten to blow up Amazon or Netflix server farms, or Comcast HQ, and once again the studio, or the distributors, with perfectly understandable myopic capitalist prudence, capitulate? I mean, when several theaters resolved to show Team America: World Police in the place of The Interview, Paramount said “Nope, shut it down” – a move, in the words of Peter Suderman, that “can really only be described as next-level cowardly bullshit.”

It would seem to me that, in the end, the only real answer is spine. It’s hard not to agree with George Clooney:

We should be in the position right now of going on offense with this. I just talked to Amy an hour ago. She wants to put that movie out. What do I do? My partner Grant Heslov and I had the conversation with her this morning. Bryan and I had the conversation with her last night. Stick it online. Do whatever you can to get this movie out. Not because everybody has to see the movie, but because I’m not going to be told we can’t see the movie. That’s the most important part. We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong-un, of all f*cking people.

Quite so. But, again, how do you ensure that all the players down the distribution chain don’t get the jitters? As Jonah Golberg notes:

The only problem: At least one cable company preemptively surrendered to North Korean intimidation, too, reportedly saying it would not air the film. Now, even if Sony had a backbone transplant, it couldn’t release the movie.

Sony could still dump it on the Internet and let it spread virally. It would lose ticket sales, but the company would strike a defiant blow nonetheless.

Don’t hold your breath. Sony would rather go the way of appeasement. And so would everyone else, it seems.

Clooney worries, and I think he’s right to worry, that our lack of spine is going to lead to insipid, bland, inoffensive, a political film-making. Freddie de Boer observes that we’ve got that problem already:

What I wonder is why people aren’t a little more put off by a form of censorship that is more insidious, and will likely affect far more movies in the long run: the soft censorship of appealing to the Chinese government in order to reap the Chinese box office. There have been widespread claims that recent blockbuster movies like the latest Transformers have been written so as to appease Chinese censors. There’s nothing wrong with writing movies to reach out to a particularly huge foreign box office– why wouldn’t you want your movie to play to Chinese moviegoers?– but appealing to the Chinese government is a whole other ball of wax. That’s where you can see genuine self-censorship coming in. And while I imagine that this whole thing will blow over before long, without a great deal of long-term damage, I think the urge to play in China -and for the Chinese government — will only grow over time.

The problem of willingly selling out to the Chinese reminded me of Ayn Rand, whose bracing moral lessons I’m sure Freddie had in the back of his mind. Rand’s finest novel, The Fountainhead, is an anti-capitalist screed about the spiritual and cultural evil of catering to market demand. Forget the problem of giving the commie censors what they want. It’s wrong to give the free market what it wants, when what it wants is aesthetically debased, which it always is. The architect hero of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is the ultimate in spine, the patron saint of never selling out. When one of his perfect, austere modernist buildings is bowdlerized the better to suit the public taste, he blows it up. That’s right, Howard Roark is a terrorist, a jihadi for artistic integrity. Maybe Howard Roark is the answer. Maybe can show us the way. Maybe Sony needs to feel that it is unsafe not to release The Interview. Maybe Seth Rogen needs to blow something up! Or maybe Brian Beutler is on to something, and the best we can do is call on Anonymous to steal the movie and make sure that, in this case at least, market-based American spinelessness can’t put a gag on our precious stoner auteurs.

It's a sad day for comedy, free speech, and people who hate losing against terrorists. According to THR, all five major movie theater chains — Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas, and Cineplex Entertainment — have announced that they've decided to not release Seth Rogen and James Franco's new film The Interview, which was scheduled to premiere in theaters on Christmas Day. "Due to the wavering support of the film The Interview by Sony Pictures, as well as the ambiguous nature of any real or perceived security threats, Regal Entertainment Group has decided to delay the opening of the film in our theatres," Regal said to THR in a statement.

This decision comes after the most menacing threat to Sony yet when the anonymous hackers warned theaters and moviegoers yesterday of a potential 9/11-type attack at locations that choose to screen the movie: "Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.) Whatever comes in the coming days is called by the greed of Sony Pictures Entertainment." North Korea has denied any involvement in the hack, stating earlier this month that they "do not know where in America the Sony Pictures is situated and for what wrongdoings it became the target of the attack nor [do] we feel the need to know about it," though they did call it a "righteous deed." Variety reports that Sony is currently considering a premium VOD release of the film, though they have yet to make an official announcement.

UPDATE: Sony has now decided to cancel the December 25th release of The Interview entirely. Read their full statement below:

In light of the decision by the majority of our exhibitors not to show the film The Interview, we have decided not to move forward with the planned December 25 theatrical release. We respect and understand our partners’ decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theater-goers.

Sony Pictures has been the victim of an unprecedented criminal assault against our employees, our customers, and our business. Those who attacked us stole our intellectual property, private emails, and sensitive and proprietary material, and sought to destroy our spirit and our morale – all apparently to thwart the release of a movie they did not like. We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public. We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.

by Chas Danner

A reader is thinking Central America:

Only a guess, but I went to Guatemala years ago and it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been. This has the same feel.

Another argues that “palm trees and high mountains suggest an equatorial highland location such as Bogotá, Colombia, where the McDonald’s (near right edge) would not be out of place”. Then again, maybe it’s Bosnia:

Some of the architecture looks like old Soviet-style buildings … there are some fir trees … city has a vague Eastern European feel to it … and there is a mosque on the far right of the picture …the multi-variate correlation that fits is Sarajevo. Here’s to hoping I’m right. BTW, these contests alone are worth the $20 subscription.

Another shares a vivid memory:

I remember standing on the parapet of Chapultepec Castle on a remarkably clear day in Mexico, DF and seeing the spectacular view of the mountains Iztaccihuatl (Sleeping Woman) and Popocatepetl (Smoking Man). This was in the ’90s and the air was rarely clear enough to afford such an opportunity. I asked a gentlemen in my poor Spanish how often you could see the mountains and he replied maybe two days a year. It’s a much more frequent sight now, but only the Mexican calendar artists can give you this [seen above].

The most popular incorrect guess ended up being Rio, with other readers throwing their darts at Tehran, Lima, Scottsdale, Bogota, Taipei, Barcelona, Jakarta and Yavin IV (again). And this reader has hobbits on the brain:

This is clearly taken from the Galadriel Suite (Room 407) of the Sheraton Minas Ithil and Suites (formerly the Trump Morgul). That modernist geometrical building is the Osgiliath Convention Centre, designed by Daniel Liebeskind. The post-war (of the Ring) Gondor official plan called for low density housing and parkland in much of the Anduin Valley lands, but a succession of Wardens of the White Tower allowed for the condominium developments that now dominate the view of most Minas Tirith residents (small mountain at rear on left).

Either that or Santiago, Chile.

Another explains:

At first I thought this might be an untypical view of Rio – that iconic mountain from some other angle. But with my limited ability to manipulate Google Earth, I couldn’t make it work. And what really bothered me were what appeared to be Italian cypress trees. They grow in a Mediterranean climate, of which there are several outside the Mediterranean itself. (I went down the Sicily path for a while, but to no avail.) I know from my environmental scientist sister that Brazil does not have a Mediterranean climate, but Chile does. AND it has the Andes! So on that flimsy evidence, I’m going with Santiago de Chile. With my luck, this is really in Southeast Asia …

Southwest Asia, actually, where this reader arrives, nailing the right country:

There is no useful Street View in Ankara, Turkey but I’m pretty convinced that’s where we’re looking. I’d love to spend more time on it, but I’m at a conference with terrible WiFi. Hope I’m not a hemisphere off!

Another sets the city straight:

I see you threw in some Rio-esque mountains in the background just to trick us. I started my search with pyramid buildings in Rio — there actually is one! But it’s nothing like this one. So I moved on to searching for pyramid buildings around the world, and spent about 5 minutes before finding one that looked a hell of a lot like this one. Antalya, Turkey! A beautiful place I’d never heard of … I’ll put it on my “places to go some day” list. Then I just lined up the view with objects from Google Maps satellite view.. the pool… the green structure … the gazebo. It’s gotta be the Falez Hotel. But I can’t find any matching balcony photos or anything like that — the railing and the overhang don’t seem to look like anything I can find. So I’m just saying the 6th floor to say something.

I wouldn’t recommend staying in this hotel. All the pics submitted to TripAdvisor are of broken things, dirty things, and a Russian woman with her hands on her hips.

The pyramid was of course the key breadcrumb for most correct guessers this week:

Pretty easy one after last week’s stumper. I’m sure the ratio of mud brick houses to glass pyramids (not in Paris or Las Vegas) is a million to one or better.

Lots of readers flagged the right building but named the wrong hotel (the Ozkaymak Falez), and this former winner explains why:

Much easier this week. The contest picture contained so many clues that Turkey’s southern coast became the only place to search. Antalya, Turkey popped up right away with this beautiful image. Once in Antalya, the position of the beach, the McDonald’s and the hills of the Beydağları Coastal National Park to Antalya’s west led to a particular hotel. Google Maps incorrectly identifies the hotel as the Ozkaymak Falez Hotel, a rundown establishment popular with both male and female Russian tourists and garners scathing reviews on TripAdvisor. Luckily for the person that submitted the contest picture, he or she stated next door to the Falez Hotel at the Rixos Downtown Antalya (a former Sheraton).

As for the window, massive hotels are always difficult. The window is on the hotel’s west side on a fairly low floor. Because the tennis court lights are visible but the trees block us from seeing the courts’ surface, I’ll guess the 5th floor. The hotel contains a few curves on its west side. Because the hanging lattice shows the building curves right where the contest window is positioned and because the balcony railing goes only a short distance before curving away to the north, I’m guessing that the contest window is in a room right at the southernmost curve on the hotel’s west side. My window guess is highlighted:

Another veteran took a different route:

A tricky contest. The clue that eventually gives the country away could also get you bogged down. The mosque at the right end of the picture tells you that this is (probably) an Islamic country; but another photo of that same mosque is nowhere to be found. After a fruitless (and very boring) search, you give up and begin simply looking for a city at the foot of a mountain range; since those minarets have their closest counterparts in Turkey, this is the country to start with (well, actually I started with Indonesia and Malaysia: all those palms got me a little off track). And in fact, this week’s picture was taken from the Rixos Downtown Hotel (Sakıp Sabancı Boulevard, Konyaaltı Beach) in Antalya, Turkey. As for the mysterious mosque, it belongs to the Faculty of Theology of the nearby Akdeniz University. There are not many photos of the mosque because it isn’t there yet — at least not entirely — it’s still in construction:

For you new players out there, this is how it’s done:

Good thing there was a McDonalds in the picture. That was the big giveaway.

My first thought was “Great. Deciduous, conifer AND palm trees.” But the tall, dark, narrow conifers appeared to be Mediterranean Cypress, so that narrowed the search area. Then there was the mosque in the far right background. That narrowed it further. Of course, it was the “Cam Piramit”, that determined the correct city. This picture shows another view of the Can Pirimit with that uniquely shaped hill behind it:

Flying video tour of the Cam Piramit here, complete with resounding music:

The picture you posted was taken from what is now the Rixos Downtown Antalya but used to be the Sheraton Voyager Hotel. Here is another picture from that hotel, but one taken from before the trees grew up to mask the tennis courts of the “Antalya Tenis İhtisas ve Spor Kulübü” next door. The picture also clearly shows the yellow ball topped sculpture:

OK. So correct building. What about the window? It is on an inside curve, so my best guess as to which window is this one. At least I’m closer that I was last week in Morocco:

Another reader laments the changes the city has undergone:

I am not going to look for the exact hotel room, because this gets depressing. Many of your readers share wonderful memories of those hotels from where the picture comes. I have not been to the hotel, but the contest does bring up memories of the location. Growing up as an expat in Istanbul, I have been on vacation on those beaches west of Antalya in the late seventies. There was a little country road running parallel to the beach, towards Kemer, and there were a few primitive campgrounds tucked away under the pine trees, where you’d set up the tent in the sand (or you didn’t, because it wouldn’t rain anyway), and a crazy guy called Arap Mustafa would cook wonderful village food for dinner, on a gas stove set up on a concrete slab under a makeshift roof. Sandy beach, crystal-clear clean water, pine trees. Nothing else.

Seeing how today the entire stretch of beach between old Antalya and the mountains, a good 10 km, is occupied by urban sprawl, unregulated industry, freeways, ugly cheap hotels, and ugly expensive hotels, I want to cry. Or puke. There are many places in Turkey I want to go back to. But Antalya I am not going to visit before the next massive earthquake or tsunami.

It is one of the most egregious instances, where one of the most beautiful regions of one of the most beautiful countries in the world has been mindlessly sacrificed to global tourism. And, of course, the push to open the next pristine beaches or nature preserves for tourism development continues full throttle, so that the buddies of the Erdoğan administration can make more money.

Apologies to the reader who is probably enjoying their vacation there. I hope you had a great time. But to me, it was a reminder how deeply ambivalent modern tourism is in third- and second-world countries.

Another master class:

I was pleased to see minarets on the left side of the photograph as they are among my favorite architectural elements. The style was reminiscent of those in Istanbul and other major cities of Turkey and the vegetation was also consistent with landscaped sections of these cities. None, however, had the distinct and dramatic mountains of the contest photograph. Eventually I found them in a photograph of Antalya. Once there, the hotel, its ample grounds, the tennis courts, swimming pool, and the glass pyramid in the contest view were fairly obvious.

The photograph was taken from a balcony where a major turn occurs in the hotel’s curving exterior. This change in angle is clear in the railing and sun shade alignments in the foreground of the contest photograph. The line-of-sight along the balcony railing appears to extend along this entire section of the hotel’s façade, including railings for five or six rooms, until the railing turns out-of-sight around the next bend. This is the only location I could find that explains these bends while also avoiding views of other sections of the hotel’s façade (see illustration). The floor chosen was based roughly on the height of the trees seen in the contest photograph and their relative heights in photographs of the grounds.

Chini reminds us:

It’s been two years since we last visited this country in VFYWC #126, a contest which I remember only because it was the same weekend Hurricane Sandy arrived. This one takes place under far less hellish circumstances and, given the wealth of clues, I suspect someone is gonna have to nail the right room number to win their VFYW book.

This week’s view comes from the Rixos Downtown Hotel in Antalya, Turkey. The picture was taken on roughly the fourth floor (room #443, perhaps?) and looks west-south-west along a heading of 257.85 degrees.

Wow that’s a close guess, as this week’s photographer explains:

It is from the Rixos Hotel, Room 445, Sakip Sabanci Bulvari, Konyaalti Sahili, in Antalya, Turkey. We had a great time there. There was a film festival happening when we were there at the pyramid-shaped building seen in the photo.

This week’s winner got pretty close too:

I must say, I thought this week’s contest was going to be hard, but all the clues, as Chini says are right there: Mountains, palm trees, sports (tennis anyone or swimming?), minarets in the background, etc all point to Turkey. The pyramid building was the big fat clue and that place, the Sabanci Congress and Exhibition Center just puts everything into place.

The shot was from the Sheraton Voyager Otel hotel. Now the room, without a map, and a good photo, I’m going to guess that it’s on the 4th floor, and room 455.

In perusing the various websites (Tripadvisor, Hotels, etc.) I can’t believe how cheap the resort hotels are in Antalya are. I also found out that Antalya is ranked third behind London and Paris for international arrivals. There’s Greek, Ottoman, Byzantine and Turkish history all over this town with ruins, clock towers, etc. As of the 2010 census there are over a million people living there. Another interesting place in the world!

Well, I know I’ll lose to a better room finder than I, but just in case this week’s contest is too damn hard and I won’t enter – I want to wish everyone at the Dish a Happy Holidays – you guys often make my day. Here’s to a great 2015!

Same to you, though be advised our final contest for 2014 arrives this Saturday. Until then, here are some more of the images you submitted this week:

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

My heart was broken 13 times during my senior year of high school. The first time was when my boyfriend of a year and a half cheated on me with my best friend. The next 12 times occurred within the space of two weeks as I received my college decision letters.

Some of them began with, “Congratulations,” and others began with, “We regret to inform you,” but none of them came with the financial aid packages my parents and I had been expecting. My Ivy League dreams were suddenly and abruptly dashed; I could go to one of my East Coast dream schools, but only if I wanted to graduate $200,000 in debt.

Instead I enrolled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which my parents said they’d pay for. (They did for the first year; now I’m the one paying all of my bills.) Cal Poly has a great reputation—mostly for its engineering and architecture programs. I’m an English major.

It was definitely hard the first couple months as my friends posted pictures of Williams’s beautiful campus, or the Columbia library, or the Stanford football games. My biggest concerns were that A) everyone was pitying me, B) I’d have a way harder time getting a job, and C) my education would suffer.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe some people did feel bad for me, but if so, that was their problem, not mine. Every class I’ve taken has been challenging, thought-provoking, and interesting. Every person I’ve met has had an awesome and unexpected background. I’ve had no problem getting internships and writing jobs, so I’m not worried about my career prospects.

I thought I was over all of my resentment and feelings of inferiority, but then my brother and sister, who are both seniors in high school, started applying to colleges. All of the petty emotions came rushing back, but worse. Because apparently, there’s a part of me that’s awful and small enough that wants their dreams to suffer too.

I keep imagining that all of the schools they apply to are going to woo them with lots and lots of money, all the money that I needed, but didn’t get. Then they’re going to waltz off to the kind of college I’ve always drooled over, never understanding what I had to give up.

My family is super close and loving. We’re all also ambitious, smart, hard-working, and competitive people. How could I not compare my siblings’ college decision letters with my own?

Twenty-four percent of me—it’s much less than half, as if that will save my soul—is hoping that they don’t receive enough financial aid and will have to settle just like I did. I know, it’s terrible, and I can’t actually believe I’m admitting this on the internet. But that 24 percent is asking why I should be the only one forced to face the facts, hear the music, and get real. I had to learn it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you won’t always get what you want. Shouldn’t they have to learn that too?

And then the other 76 percent of me, the part that loves my brother and sister desperately and sees how their faces light up when they talk about Tuft’s experimental college or MIT’s hack tradition or Wesleyan’s student clubs, is ready to storm any campus that doesn’t accept them and/or give them enough money so they can attend.

I tried to talk about my complicated emotions with my mom, but was pretty unsuccessful.

“It’s not that I don’t want them to be able to go to their dream schools…” I began cautiously (and somewhat falsely).

“Well, good, because this isn’t about you,” she said kindly but firmly.

She’s right. I’m being doubly selfish: First, by inserting myself into a situation that’s totally unrelated to me, and second, by being petty enough to want my brother and sister to share my pain. A better person than me would be crossing her fingers for that financial aid so her siblings didn’t have to go through the same painful process she did.

Writing this out, I feel better. I’m giving myself a mental shake and vowing to never let my family know I entertained these kinds of thoughts. (Unless, of course, they Google me—as they are wont to do—and find this column.) In March, when my brother and sister start opening their letters, I’m going to be on the phone with them, and I’ll be rooting for them. When my sister says, “I got into Barnard! And my aid package is $40,000 a year!” I’ll respond, “HECK YEAH! New York City, here you come!” When my brother says, “CalTech wants me!” I’ll say, “You better share the profits from your tech start-up with me!”

Afterwards, 24% of me might have to cry a little bit. But that will be my secret. And I guess, yours. And I guess, my moms. Mom? I hope you’re not reading this.

This is the fifth column in a multi-part series.

Aja Frost is a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who loves writing… and dessert. Follow her on Twitter @ajavuu.

Photo: Justin

by Michelle Dean

I can wax rather sentimental when it comes to protests. While I didn’t get out to the Millions March on Saturday for personal reasons, I’d meant to. I like marches. Even the best ones have a slight air of chaos, and the dominating atmosphere is usually angry despair. But there’s something about just the act of walking together that can restore your faith in the usefulness of civic engagement. And given the news of the last few weeks – which to me has felt like a relentless chant of police brutality, rape and state-sponsored torture, rinsed and repeated endlessly – I’ve been feeling the need to have my faith restored in the usefulness of civic engagement. I suspect I’m not alone.

So my heart soared when I saw those pictures of clogged streets come up in my Twitter feed. Here were people doing what they could to challenge injustice. I felt a faint flickering of hope.

And then along came Deadspin last night to post the above video of a bunch of drunken louts in Santa suits heckling the protesters.

These men are participants in a weird New York tradition known as “SantaCon.” After nearly ten years of living here I can’t figure out if SantaCon has a point. The idea, to the extent that any kind of “idea” animates SantaCon, seems to simply be that it is enjoyable to get drunk on cheap alcohol while wearing even cheaper velour. So I know it mostly as that time of year when a truly inexplicable number of Americans descend on Manhattan to get drunk in bad Irish bars and yell loudly outside them. (Granted, you people also do that on the Fourth of July.) The people who live here the rest of the year generally stay in and/or pretend it isn’t happening. The mentions I hear of it usually have the sound of gallows humor, i.e. “Ugh. SantaCon.”

But the very fact that the people of SantaCon expect to be able to be such a nuisance without reprisal seems so telling.

You can see, for example, that these men are too drunk to be particularly effective hecklers. Mostly the protesters ignore them and march on. But the tableau sticks with you. Although outnumbered in the frame these idiots in Santa hats feel representative of some larger apathy of the American public. The fact that they happen to be white guys of the “bro” varietal, as Deadspin calls them, makes the image even more depressing. They’re more interested in “having fun” than in worrying about the growing authoritarianism of this country or about the militarization of the police.

And they seem unconcerned, you can’t help but notice, that their public drunkenness and belligerence might get them arrested. I bet they were right. I bet they didn’t get arrested. I bet they spent their Sunday in a peaceful and uninterrupted hangover. The distance between their expectations, and those of black men, is exactly what these protests have been about. But I still bet they don’t know that, and probably never will.

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.

Last week, the internet found the Ugly Christmas Suit, a polyester three-piece that made the ghosts of ugly Christmas sweaters past look like tasteful cardigans. Among the numerous write-ups was a two-fists-up review from Total Frat Move, the website responsible for the #TFM hashtag (used 108,000 times on Instagram). “This suit is for getting drunk and hitting on your boss’s daughter when he’s right in front of you. This suit is for attempting to snowboard in an urban area. This suit is for falling into the eggnog bowl,” it advised.

The Ugly Christmas Suit was designed by a company in the Netherlands, but it’s clearly appealing to an American niche. That’s the crowd who, for the past few years, have turned Ugly Christmas Sweaters into $80 purchases and the streets of NYC into debauched mosh pits of drunk Santas: bros who love to dress up.

Yes, bros who love to dress up. Once known for khaki pants and New Balances, bros are becoming increasingly experimental with their fashion choices. Look through hashtags and blogs linked to Greek culture and you’ll see it: rushers in head-to-toe ’80s leopard prints, muscled ravers at EDM concerts, college football players with retro facial hair. At the very moment when “normal” is trending on net-art Tumblrs, loud self-expression via clothing is dominating frat parties from USC (Trojans) to USC (Gamecocks).

Let’s call them the Williamsbros.

The Williamsbro is king at Christmastime, and Santa Con is his throne. This Saturday, more than 1,000 people, mostly young white men, will gather in New York in outfits no one else but paid mall Santas wear. The most creative will get high-fives for their light-up sweaters or extra-fluffy beards. The event brands itself as countercultural: in a recent statement, organizers called it “culture-jamming” that “pokes fun at society and the overly-commercialized aspects of the holiday.” Yet there’s something about Santa Con that’s in line with patriarchal power structures, from the binge drinking to the sexual harassment to the in-your-face celebration of the world’s most traditional holiday.

The Williamsbro’s clothes are weird, but his message is not. The fun of them lies in eliciting reactions from the outside world that don’t trip up conventional power dynamics. Dressing for shock originated in movements like punk, where weird clothing signified radical thought. When a fraternity throws a Tight-n-bright party and all the guys wear Spandex neon, though, they’re just being funny. If anything, the pseudo-gay clothing only illuminates the hetero-ness of its wearer.

The bro of yore dressed up for toga parties. The Williamsbro brings the toga party, ‘80s party, and Christmas party to wherever he is by virtue of his clothing. “Whereas most people will spend one night in an ugly Christmas sweater, I make them my entire seasonal wardrobe,” a TFM writer wrote in a 2011 post, “Aggressively Celebrating Christmas.” “I also put wreaths on everything, and I mean fucking everything. Police Car? Wreath. Sad hobo? Double wreath and tinsel.” This is satire/fratire. The Williamsbro’s favorite joke is that the ridiculous thing he’s doing isn’t actually a joke. His costume isn’t a costume. His convention mocking Christmas is about celebrating Christmas.

Shinesty, the Boulder, CO, company that’s the top US vendor of the Ugly Christmas Suit, first marketed its collection of “rare and outlandish clothing” for theme parties. But according to Chris White, the founder, people are wearing the clothes on a regular basis. “You might buy something because it’s ironic and funny, but the line is blurred. If you wear it five times in a row, is it ironic? Or do you just think it’s cool?”

Shinesty didn’t set out to cater to a specific demographic. “People have called us both hipster and bro, which I think is indicative of a larger trend,” White said. “No one wants to wear a plain black Northface from the early 2000s. They want something unique.” In addition to this suit, Shinesty stocks all manner of Aztec print hats, ’80s ski-suits, Bill-Cosby sweaters, fanny packs, and windbreakers, a mix of vintage and new. It’s a collection of items that could be spotted anywhere from an East London club night to a Sigma Phi ’80s party, but basically no where in between.

Are we approaching the young white male singularity? Several new types pose the question. The modern “alt bro” is a privileged male whose surface-level intellectualism masks immaturity and misogyny. The tech bro, meanwhile, pursues conventional career success while appropriating hippie and burner aesthetics. The hypebeast, too, sits in the crosshairs of hip-hop, fashion, and bro cultures.

Are any of these really different? Or are they just part of one all-inclusive expanding bro universe, united by privilege? If so, we’re not quite there. This year, one area where Santa Con will not be headed is Williamsburg-adjacent Bushwick. Organizers had plans to congregate there for the first time, but backed off after a local public outcry.* Protesting the Williamsbro, it seems, is the last best way to distinguish yourself from the Williamsbro.

*And, just yesterday: “Due to the planned protests on Saturday, Santacon is scaling back this weekend’s festivities in order to create the lowest possible impact on the city we love.”