Steve Dyer

From the Ninth Circuit, referring to governor “Butch” Otter of Idaho:

He also states, in conclusory fashion, that allowing same-sex marriage will lead opposite-sex couples to abuse alcohol and drugs, engage in extramarital affairs, take on demanding work schedules, and participate in time-consuming hobbies. We seriously doubt that allowing committed same-sex couples to settle down in legally recognized marriages will drive opposite-sex couples to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

It’s Footnote 12 on page 21, as several Dishheads have discovered.

unamusedsloth:

HURR DURR DURR I’M A DOG [Video / via] 

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 or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Browse all our previous window view contests here.

wilderness-lair-shatterdome:

jasminedarling:

He was a skater goat, he said see you later, goat.

HE WASN’T GOAT ENOUGH FOR HERD

A reader is aghast:

YOU PEOPLE ARE MONSTERS.

Another wonders, “Are you sure you didn’t mix up the daily VFYW and contest photo?” Another gave up in about 20 minutes:

Clearly you decided to put up an easy one this week. What with the Ents in the distance, I know I won’t be the only one to pin this down to the Fangorn Forest in Middle Earth. I think I see the mist of the river Earwash ahead, putting us at or close to the site where Gandalf the White met the hunters. Heck, it’s as good a guess as any other. A tree in the middle of the forest?????

Another goes for a “shot in the dark”:

Looks like deciduous trees, the coastal range, and a fog bank. That sounds like Walnut Creek, CA to me.

Or South America?

Ariau Towes, an eco-lodge outside Manaus, Brazil:

Another looks for clues:

There are a bunch of deciduous trees. That’s less than helpful. We seem to be on a mountain. I see nothing outside to help me other than that. Given that the paucity of detail outside, I chose to focus on what was inside. There’s more to work with but … yeah, not a lot. It looks like some recording equipment (headphones, cabling, something that might possibly be a sound meter), a water bottle, and a floor with interesting swirly markings. I’m sure someone will recognize the logo on the water bottle instantly, but I got nothin. Same with the floor.

Based on the trees and recording equipment, my husband guesses Tennessee. I don’t think you’d stay in North America four weeks in a row, but I don’t have a better alternative. So, we’re going with a recording studio in Tennessee. On a mountain.

It’s not recording equipment. Another reader figures out the key characteristic of this week’s view:

[I]t’s a treetop hotel, built around a tree. No doubt about it. You would think that would narrow it down – I mean, how many of those can there be? Lots, it turns out, but none that I can find with classy inlaid wooden floors. Our best guess is Dad’s: somewhere on the coast of Peru.

Which brings me to another point: this is superficially mind-bogglingly difficult. There are no landscape clues, except the unbroken vista of trees, which does little more than prove that we’re not in downtown Manhattan or Beijing. All clues have to come from the “window” itself and surrounding items. Despite this, because you posted the contest, it follows that it must be solvable in a reasonable amount of time by a reasonably-intelligent Dish reader. Therefore, I propose the View Anthropic Principle: no matter how hard a “view” is, the fact that it is posted at all means that it is solvable with the information on hand.

Maybe so. Just not necessarily by us, this time!

Most of this week’s guesses correctly got on the treehouse track:

This treehouse doesn’t look like the one I stayed in, but the view reminds me of some of the views while we we ziplining around in the Bokeo Reserve for three days is Laos almost four years ago. It was one of the only times I’ve seen a jungle view that just went on and on the way it looks like this view does. I can tell this is definitely a view from a tree house so its worth a shot, right?

Here’s a view of what one of the tree houses looked like as you were sailing towards it on the zipline:

Another reader is thinking Africa:

I just spent my Monday morning at work googling “African treehouse.” I looked at lots of images, but nothing fit, so I’m guessing Botswana, mostly because it’s fun to say.

Another suggested “Youvegoddabephukingkiddingme, Thailand”. But this guess gets pretty close:

Although the foreground view is a little more cluttered than I remember it, I am fairly sure this is taken from the platform of the Canopy Tower, Soberania Park, near Gamboa, Republic of Panama. That appears to be a Cecropia tree on the right (often sloths feed there), and the view is, I think, towards the North West, overlooking Soberania Park from what used to be a U.S. military-intelligence messaging center, that has been converted into a nature observatory / hotel.

A reader nails the right country:

Wow! I can only guess about where this is, but I really want to go. We’re in an octagonal (maybe hexagonal) observation platform-like structure that appears to be built around a tree overlooking a rain forest. Apart from the forest itself, there are no telling geographic features, and apart from the structure we are in, no architectural clues. So, we need to know something about the building we are in, rather than what we are looking out at.

The structure seems well-built and well-maintained. That, the bag on the floor to the left, the pile of rope (zip lining?) and the bottled water suggest “tourist destination”. That doesn’t narrow it down a great deal, but I’m going to go with Costa Rica. And since satellite views seem a lost cause here, I looked for treehouses in Costa Rica and found the Finca Bellavista community, which seems like the sort of place (some) Dishheads might find themselves on vacation. Plus they have a couple of structures that, while not being a dead-on match for the one here, share an awful lot of features. So even if we aren’t in Finca Bellavista, I bet we are someplace close by.

Another pinpoints the location:

Ok, so I was a bit glib last week. I promise I’ll rein in disparaging comments about the difficulty of the contest because, damn, this one is pure evil. Trees. All we can see are trees. And floorboards. But wait, we’re IN a tree. And those floorboards are pretty unique with their painted viney patterns. Just fire up the Google machine. Somebody else has stayed in this treehouse and put a picture of it on the internet. An hour of searches along the lines of “jungle treehouse resort” later, and then, there it is. These guys stayed there. One click later and I’m on the web page of Nature Observatorio, located in Manzanillo, Costa Rica. Not too shabby for a picture of some trees.

Not shabby at all. Here’s how all the entries broke down:

Image searching was by far the most popular method for the dozens of correct guessers this week:

At first glance this appeared to be one of those impossible views that only the champ and one or two others would solve. When I realized it was a treehouse however, I at least had some search terms. After a few searches I was amazed at the sheer number of awesome treehouses that are out there. My fourth try on Google Images I used the terms “treehouse rainforest ocean” and found [the composite image to the right]. That led to this website that offers neat “glamping” places. Glamping is “glamorous camping” apparently (something I didn’t know – thanks VFYWC!).

The VFYW is the upper level of a two level treehouse in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Rain Forest of Costa Rica. You can stay there for $320.00 a night, and “all meals are hosted in the tree house and hoisted up by staff. Guests are supplied with harnesses, helmets, and gloves.”

Here’s a wonderfully specific entry:

The picture is taken from the Nature Observatorio (aka Amazing Treehouse), located in the Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge in Costa Rica (which is called the Refugio Nacional Gandoca-Manzanillo, 36, Costa Rica by Google Maps):

The closest town is Manzanillo, which is not visible, but would be on the right side, or northeast, out of frame of the picture roughly 3km to the city center. It is taken from a hammock on the first floor (observation level) of the treehouse, facing the Caribbean Sea to its (approximate) north. The deck is 79 feet (or 25 meters) above ground, and is reachable by rope or rope elevator. There aren’t exact GPS coordinates for the Observatorio — even the owner doesn’t have them — and the only ones I found were actually for the road and beach roughly 2 km to the north.

Visible on the left of the picture (west) is the “host” tree, which is amazingly supporting the treehouse without a single screw or nail driven into it. I hope your readers will research and watch the available interviews with the owner, Peter Garcar, and read up on the location itself. His efforts and passion are truly inspiring, and the treehouse is a wonder of both engineering and natural education. I only wish I could visit and climb to appreciate its views and all it offers. To whomever made the trip and took the picture, I am envious beyond description!!!!!

This reader only needed the floor:

Okay, I was searching in Australia before, but then an image search on Google for rainforest treehouses found me the distinctive floor of this treehouse in The Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge in Manzanillo, Costa Rica. Here is the floor:

Another key clue:

It was an Instafind, and shows up in first couple pages of Google image search for “treehouse winch remote”.

A regular player takes a shot at circling this week’s “window”:

A breakdown of the exact view:

I consider the window to be the space between the exterior vertical supports that, along with the major floor beams, create the octagonal framing of the structure. The contest photograph looks across the two sets of floor boards that are lifted to provide rope access to the tree house. These were identified by comparing the vine tendril pattern in the contest photograph with those next to people about to descend or just arrive through the open floor boards:

Photographs taken from beneath the tree house show which floor boards are opened. The contest window is that adjacent to the more westerly of the two openings.

A previous winner makes a connection:

A few weeks ago, we were in Manzanillo, Mexico and now we are high up in the trees of the Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Refuge south of Manzanillo, Costa Rica.

Probably the best entry we got this week:

“Haven’t they broken the rules?” asked my wife when I showed up at her elbow, having found the window this past Saturday in minutes and wanting to proclaim my triumph. She’d noted the absence of any distinguishing features in the landscape and it seemed wrong to her that I’d had to depend solely upon objects within the room to pinpoint the location.

“Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!” I might have said, evoking Ted Cassidy’s assertion to Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy just prior to his being kicked in the crotch. I knew that, apart from the one rule that requires at least part of the window frame to appear in the photo (to prove that it really is a view from a window), then nearly anything else is fair. And this week there was really nothing in view but a vast verdure framed by a distant sea. Great view but lacking in specificity.

So inside, then. We see climbing ropes and a winch controller, bamboo rails, a loopy painted design all over a wooden floor, a framework of cable and wire that surrounds a hole in that floor, a hole which itself appears to center on a TREE TRUNK. So we’re high up in a tree house gazing out over a jungle view.

The design on the floor proved to be the most valuable clue, because it appeared around 150 images deep in a simple google image search using the terms “tropical” and “treehouse.” It’s called Nature Observatorio and it’s in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Refuge in Costa Rica, suspended 25 meters up a tree in primary rainforest. The photo was taken looking north from the lower of its two floors. We’re told by the proprietors that guests fall asleep lulled by the exotic chatter of parrots (along with the Caribbean breezes), that they awaken in the morning to the roar of howler monkeys.

Wonderfully, its Airbnb listing says that, along with internet and breakfast, its amenities include “elevator in building,” which unavoidably raises a string of philosophical questions: what parts of an elevator can be stripped away and have it remain an elevator? If it lacks walls and floor, but consists rather of a harness, ropes, and a winch? If it dangles BELOW the building, suspended from it, is it indeed IN the building?

I’m picking at nits there, but the Observatorio comes equipped with mosquito netting, so that’s ok. Honestly, I’m ready to sign up. It look’s wonderful!

It’s hard to resist the charming enthusiasm of this happy guest, as he shows us around:

Chini felt challenged:

Well one thing’s for certain, we’re, uh, hell and gone from the Arctic. And we’re like totally in a tree-house. Now all we need to do is find the right one. Easy, no? No. Turns out, tree-houses are the new orange, and that made this hunt one of the wilder ones. India, Thailand, Brazil, Borneo, you name it, they all got in on the act. By the time I landed in the right spot, I knew more about tree-house construction than I’ll ever need to know. But that’s the VFYW contest for you; the obscure begetting the even more obscure.

This week’s view comes from the best damn hotel room any contest viewer’s ever stayed at, i.e. the Nature Observatorio in Manzanillo, Costa Rica. The picture was taken on the lowest, main platform of a multi-platform, non invasive tree house/observatory/hotel room built in 2012 and looks east-north-east on a heading of 62 degrees towards the Gulf of Mexico in the distance:

This reader has traveled in the area:

We spent a month in Costa Rica and thought the Atlantic coast was much better than the Pacific side. Less touristic and a bit more raw country, with much friendlier Ticos – it’s got that rasta-Caribbean vibe. Manzanillo is perfectly ramshackle and laid-back, with some great small beaches, waterfalls, and mellow roads for bike riding. And there is still plenty of tourist infrastructure. We ate most lunches at a great French bakery / deli (Bread and Chocolate Cafe) and stayed in a couple of mid-range places on the beaches (Banana Azul and Cabinas Yemanya). A week looking for turtles and sloths, building sand castles with the kids, or swimming in the turquoise ocean was too short – we wish we had stayed on the Atlantic side the whole month. I’ve included a picture from the tidepools and beach near Punta Cocles, about five miles toward Puerto Viejo from the Tree House. A great place to reread Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast (a favorite book of mine – made into a decent but not quite as good movie too).

Our winner this week describes himself as a “long-time correct guesser, long-time suffering loser”:

An interesting clue this week. My initial thought was that it was impossible: a nondescript view of a forest with not much else. Seeing as how it was a beautiful day, I was thisclose to abandoning my search this week for more productive endeavors. Before I did, I lightened the picture to bring out some of the features in the foreground. This is what I got:

A tree trunk to the left, a climbing rope, swirly designs on the floor, a backpack on a chair and what looks like the ocean on the horizon. Typing those elements into the google machine, I had to scroll through about a page of results until I spied this:

Large tree trunk, swirly floor, climbing rope, similar chair. I found the answer before my morning cup of coffee had gotten cold.

This week’s contest view actually came from the Dish’s own Chas Danner. He writes:

My wife and I took a belated honeymoon to Costa Rica over the winter, and our stay at the Observatorio was absolutely one of the highlights of our trip. It was an unforgettable night alone in the canopy of a lush primary rainforest.

And yes, you do wake up to the howler monkeys, a pack of which rolled by like a thunderstorm around 5:30am. Our only regret was that we didn’t spend more than one night. Also, Peter, the Czech engineer who dreamed up and built the treehouse, was a delightful guide and host as well as one of the coolest people I’ve ever met in any country. Here he is holding the rope as I ascended in my tree climbing harness:

intensional:

I feel so betrayed right now

assgod:

YOU CAN TELL HE’S SO PROUD OF HIMSELF AND SO AM I

requested by maybe-dead-cats-who-knows

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 or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Browse all our previous window view contests here.

After reading Charles Blow’s intense and fascinating account of his own childhood abuse and his particular experience of bisexuality, Rod Dreher actually comes out with this:

The thing that stands out to me about it is Blow’s (very modern) belief that his passions constitute an essential part of his identity as a person. That is, he seems to believe that his freedom consists in accepting his desires, and that he is “subject to the tide.”

But is this really true? Somehow, reason tamed his homicidal passion in the case of avenging his rape. Why is that passion restrainable, but sexual passion is not? He would say that the passion to kill someone is not the same thing as the passion to have sex with someone, and he would, of course, be right.

But he would be wrong in another sense. According to Dante (speaking from a position informed by both classical and medieval Catholic thought), all sin comes from disordered passion. To be truly free is to master our passions by making them subject to our reason. We cannot prevent our desires, but if we make ourselves “subject to the tide” of passion, we cannot be said to be free.

This is a very strange response to the essay. Rod insists that his point is not about bisexuality, but about “passions” in general and our modern sense that we should accommodate them, rather than “master” them with reason. But I didn’t find any evidence in the piece that Blow had somehow “surrendered” to his “passions”. What he did was simply come to terms with who he really was – to probe what his sexual orientation really was and is. This is an integral part to mastering any passion. If you are not fully aware of who you are, you can act out in all sorts of ways, or enter relationships you really shouldn’t, or make horrible mistakes, or suppress feelings without ever really confronting them. What Blow describes is very much an exercise of reason, of inquiry, of remarkable poise in the face of a troubled past (including sexual abuse). Surrendering to passion meant in this case a seven-year marriage to a woman, including kids. And Blow rather movingly explains how an actual homosexual relationship was not something he could pull off.

If Blow were heterosexual, I doubt Rod would have said anything about “disordered passion”. We all have unique and complex sexualities – and all Blow did was examine his own past and his own nature and channel both toward a constructive present. It has to be the element of homosexual attraction that provokes Rod’s splutter – as if anyone can simply master by reason who they actually are. We do not have control over that. But those who come to terms with their sexual identity, who face it squarely, are likely to have a much better chance of channeling such passions toward good ends.

One other note about Blow’s piece: it’s a very convincing and eye-opening explanation of a certain kind of bisexuality:

I had to accept a counterintuitive fact: my female attraction was fully formed—I could make love and fall in love—but my male attraction had no such terminus. To the degree that I felt male attraction, it was frustrated. In that arena, I possessed no desire to submit and little to conquer. For years I worried that the barrier was some version of self-loathing, a denial. But eventually I concluded that the continual questioning and my attempts to circumvent the barrier were their own form of loathing and self-flagellation. I would hold myself open to evolution on this point, but I would stop trying to force it. I would settle, over time, into the acceptance that my attractions, though fluid, were simply lopsided. Only with that acceptance would I truly feel free.

Dan Savage adds:

As Blow’s piece makes clear, writing “lopsided bisexuality” out of the bi experience, the constant and often smug framing of bisexuality as the capacity to be sexually and romantically attracted to both men and women equally, excludes men like Blow and makes it harder for men like him to accept themselves as bisexual. Men like Blow walk around believing that they’re either not really bi (like this guy who wrote me at “Savage Love”), or that they’re bi but defective or broken.

But bisexual guys like Blow aren’t broken.

They sure aren’t. Which is more than one can say, sadly, for many men who refuse to confront their identity, and construct lives based on fantasies about what they’d like to be rather than what they are.

For much more on the nuances of bisexuality, check out this Dish thread.

wtfisthinprivilege:

flyingcuttlefish:

carnivaldog:

gifak-net:

video

PUPPY NO

LAUNCH

The more I watch this, the funnier it gets. Look at the worried dog behind them. Ahahaha “son!”

Saturday Night Live updated the "About" section of their website this week to include newly hired writers Alison Rich, Jeremy Beiler, Natasha Rothwell, Streeter Seidell, and Nick Rutherford, but even more important are some of the names that are no longer credited as full-time writers this year. According to the SNL website, season 39 writers Leslie Jones, Paula Pell, Marika Sawyer, LaKendra Tookes, and Mike O'Brien will not be officially returning to the writing staff. Sawyer has moved on from SNL to work with John Mulaney on his new Fox sitcom, Paula Pell (who has been an SNL writer since 1995) is currently busy working on her Tina Fey/Amy Poehler-starring film The Nest, and Leslie Jones has several onscreen roles in the works including one in Chris Rock's critically acclaimed film Top Five, though it's a shame not to see her name on the list considering her breakout Weekend Update performance last season. As for O'Brien, it was first reported that he would return as a writer, but The New York Times' Bill Carter specified that he'll be "mostly doing separate films this season," which sounds more like a guest writer/pre-taped performer spot than full-time gig. SNL hasn't officially announced this news yet, but considering the cast and crew are back at 30 Rock this week to work on the season premiere we'll probably get confirmation in the coming weeks.

For more on Leslie Jones's SNL work, check out our breakdown of her unforgettable Weekend Update performance and resulting backlash here, then click through to see the current SNL writing staff lineup per the SNL website.

UPDATE: Leslie Jones said on Twitter today that the news of her leaving the SNL writing staff is "not true," though the website has still not been updated to include her name.

Head Writers: Colin Jost, Rob Klein and Bryan Tucker

Writers: James Anderson, Jeremy Beiler, Michael Che, Mikey Day, Steve Higgins, Colin Jost, Zach Kanin, Chris Kelly, Erik Kenward, Rob Klein, Lorne Michaels, Claire Mulaney, Josh Patten, Alison Rich, Katie Rich, Tim Robinson, Natasha Rothwell, Nick Rutherford, Sarah Schneider, Pete Schultz, Streeter Seidell, John Solomon, Kent Sublette, Bryan Tucker (via)

The most adorable fight ever:

Columbia professor and New Yorker contributor Samuel G. Freedman writing on the biker threat is a healthy exercise in empathy. For example: If you got hit by a bike—pretty hard—could you imagine formulating and remaining sympathetic to this series of arguments?

There are the racers who careen along the park’s six-mile loop, treating it as their private velodrome. There are the tourists who blithely pedal the wrong way, or in the wrong lane, or both simultaneously, despite the clear markings on the roadway. There are the everyday bikers who ignore traffic signals, stop signs, and crosswalks. In the rare instances when I’ve seen a cop around, he or she has done nothing about any of it. Every time I have run these past few years, I have had the anxious sense of watching a game of Russian roulette in which the chamber with the bullet would eventually slip into place and a biker would maim or kill a pedestrian.

Russian roulette kills someone approximately one in six times a turn is played. It also kills the player. Which I guess actually works here, because bikers are vastly more likely to be smeared into the pavement by a car than they are to cause the death of a pedestrian. Not that bikers haven't killed people; Freedman describes two.

These tragedies lay bare two realities of what we might call bike culture in New York City. First, many bicyclists routinely ignore all traffic laws, signs, and signals. Second, the city has made inadequate efforts in recent years to enforce those laws, and thus to protect the rest of us.

Follow the law in a car in New York City and you're pretty well guarded against death. Or don't! You're still safer than anyone else on the road. Follow the law on a bike, however, and you're not necessarily safe at all: you will find your "bike lanes" full of cars, both stopped and moving; you'll notice quickly that people don't notice you; you'll realize that the cars around you either don't know you're there or, if they do, actively resent your presence, not because they're afraid of you but because they're annoyed that they might accidentally kill you. It is within this context that the biker is mindful of the law, the enforcement of which, regarding cars' interactions with bikes, suggests that it doesn't really matter; it is within this context, then, that the biker appears to flout it, or actually does. It is within this context that the biker is an asshole.

To put it statistically, New York City’s Department of Transportation recorded three hundred and nine crashes between bicyclists and pedestrians in 2013, an increase of more than twenty-five per cent from the two hundred and forty-three such collisions in 2012.

To put it statistically, there were three hundred and nine crashes between bicyclists and pedestrians in 2013, the same year that 286 people were killed by cars. A few blocks west of the park where Freeman no longer feels safe from bikers is a remarkably fatal stretch of West End Avenue near 95th, where, this year, two pedestrians were stuck and killed by four-wheel conveyances over the course of one hour. A week later, a few blocks away, another death.

Part of the current problem, I think, derives from bicyclists’ sense of themselves as victims.

Part of the current problem, I think, derives from bicyclists’ actual victimization, which produces a sense of victimhood.

If you feel aggrieved, if you have been injured, if you mourn at the ghost-bike shrines of bikers who have been killed by cars, then you may have a difficult time realizing that you can simultaneously be the aggressor.

The constant threat of death might cloud your awareness of all things that are not your death, that is possibly true.

And there is another element, I suspect, to bicyclists’ self-righteousness and the de Blasio administration’s inadequate response. To ride under your own power on two wheels is to be admirably green, to be on the sustainable side of the angels.

It is, and it is, as well as promoting the convenience and health of the entire city and all who live in it.

Four wheels fuelled by hydrocarbons are easier to see as a potential danger needing to be controlled. But there is no mandate of heaven for putting passersby at mortal risk. And there is no public-policy logic to giving a free pass on public safety to someone who is not polluting the air.

Here is an objective that doesn't align with what I imagine "public-policy logic" means: Obsessing over the equal enforcement of safety laws, the violation of which produces, for one party, drastically less severe personal results and drastically more severe external results.

One of the social compacts of living in a large city is sharing public space in a mindful way. That is why we listen to our music on headphones instead of boom boxes. It is why we stand on line for our morning coffee and bagel. It is why we give up our seat on the subway to the pregnant lady and apologize right away if we step on somebody’s shoe entering the elevator. Civility can be a fragile membrane, instantly replaced by confrontation or violence or death, even on a brightly lit afternoon, even in the park.

The social compact: That is why we listen to our music on headphones instead of boom boxes. It is why we stand on line for our morning coffee and bagel. It is why we give up our seat on the subway to the pregnant lady and apologize right away if we step on somebody’s shoe entering the elevator. It is why we ride bikes or subways or buses or our own feet instead of clumsy three-ton air conditioners, in this crowded and small place.

The post Man Struck By Bike appeared first on The Awl.

A reader throws up his hands:

We must congratulate you on lulling us in to a false sense of security. This is quite possibly the hardest “view” you’ve ever posted. Our best guess is my dad’s: Williams County, North Dakota. We base this on the mountains, and the look of the buildings, which seem to resemble an industrial mining or fracking operation.

Next time, perhaps something between “nondescript mountain range with weird building” and “stadium with identifiable flag”? Thank you as always for a fun contest!

Another anticipated a hard one after a few weeks of easy contests:

Well, we knew this was coming, didn’t we? We have what appear to be prefabricated buildings of recent vintage, on a rocky, barren, and otherwise undeveloped landscape, with snowy mountains off in the distance. Somewhere in the Arctic, during the summer. A woman and child walk in the foreground – Inuit, perhaps? So let’s say Alaska, somewhere along the North Slope, and for sake of specificity call it Barrow, even thought I cannot pin down these buildings on maps of the town.

Another gets fictional:

Taken from the office of Gustavo Fring at the Los Pollos Hermanos Compound, just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Another heads much farther south:

After spending a disconcertingly long time on Google Maps in Satellite View, I’m going to go with Potosí, Bolivia. It actually might be any other city in the Bolivian Altiplano, but I’m tired of satellite view and Potosí looks about the right amount of brown. Plus, it’s an important mining city, and the edge of that pit looks like a mine.

But for all I know, that’s a tar-sands operation in Alberta and I’ve just spent two hours in the wrong hemisphere. This might be the most challenging contest you all have done! I opened the photo today and said, “Ugh.”

Wrong hemisphere. Another gets the wrong planet:

Mars? There was a story on This American Life / Love + Radio last week about a Mars station to host 4 humans is 2023. This may be the terrestrial training ground. Looking in the arid, iron rich soils of greater Mongolia I worked my way to some disputed lands between China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. Is this an homage to Chini or a nose-thumbing after two easy weeks? I’m not sure what Aksai Chin is, but it showed up on my Google map, and one can only assume the people who live there would be the Chini. There don’t appear to be any roofs in the area, but just by name association alone, I hope this is close, and I hope Doug found it.

To the right country:

To me the picture said Northern Canada, or possibly Alaska. But I’m guessing it wouldn’t be the US three weeks in a row. So after some half-hearted googling, I guess somewhere in Yukon, Northwest Territories, Canada. A vague guess, because it was a gorgeous weekend and I went apple picking on Saturday and then simply had to make pies and crisp on Sunday. I’d send you one, but Internet.

Another reader nails the province and town:

I got lucky on this one. I zoomed in to see the people walking down the dirt road, and thought they looked Inuit. I then thought of Nuuk, Greenland, which is at least pretty small and unique. When it wasn’t Nuuk, I looked at the Chevy van in the photo thought “oh, maybe it’s Alaska” – in which case, game over, because Alaska is huge and has dozens of tiny little settlements. But then I remembered Nunavut, Canada’s newest territory. I hopped on over to Iqaluit, and lo and behold, there was the crazy modular spaceship form of the high school. (By the way, kudos for making sure the flag was illegible.)

Another wasn’t impressed with our promise to make this week more difficult:

I haven’t submitted to the contest in some time. But I was excited when you said this week would be harder than than recent contests, so I thought I’d go for the challenge. Some challenge. The landscape was unmistakably Arctic. Nunavut was my first guess. I was in Iqualit, Nunavut before my coffee was cool enough to drink.

Reality TV helped out this reader:

Got it in a flash thanks to the wonderful BBC program “A Cabbie Abroad”. In it, London cab driver Mason McQueen visits remote places – Mumbai, Bangkok, Fiji and Iqaluit, to ply his trade:

Whilst the set up is about learning to be able to drive there, the really interesting part is how he gets to appreciate the plight of the locals. In the case of Iqaluit it was the dispossession of the land of the indigenous people and the poverty, health and alcohol problems in the community. He approaches it with an open mind and a real honesty and humanity.

A funny footnote though. In the program he has to master the house numbering system of Iqaluit, where there is one set of house numbers for the whole town, and by the end he has it mastered.

I actually contacted Mason on Twitter about the contest … and his guess was Colorado!

One reader has a fantastic visual walkthrough to nail the right apartment building:

Not a single legible sign. No automobile license plates. No distinctively styled lampposts or street signs. Now we’re talking!

First, I identified the key landmarks in the window’s view:

Then I located those landmarks in the aerial image of Iqaluit:

Here’s an alternative view of the apartment tower, seen from the east (rather than from the north):

Given the line of sight, our window must be in the westernmost of 3 buildings on Qulliq Court, overlooking the Arctic College head office. (The qulliq, sometimes translated as kudlik, is a type of oil lamp used by the original Inuit inhabitants of Baffin Island.) Thanks to Street View, this building can be identified as 508 Qulliq Court.

But which window? Given how much of the Arctic College’s roof that is visible in the VFYW, I believe that the photographer was on the second floor rather than the ground floor (even though the ground floor is itself higher than the roof). We also know that the photographer’s window opens. I surmise that it is one of the flanks of the building’s bay windows. Finally, given the angles from the landmarks to the window, I believe that the picture was taken from the westernmost bay of 508 Qulliq Court:

Based on what I’ve read today, I believe that 508 Qulliq Court and its neighbors are housing belonging to Nunavut Arctic College. If I’ve identified the correct bay window, the VFYW picture was taken from Unit No. 27.

Another notes:

I’m actually rather impressed that there’s Google Street View for this city, given that it’s accessible only by plane and is the smallest and most remote of the Canadian provincial/territorial capitals. And this was the first time that Street View wasn’t actually a lot of help since the snow banks are so high that it’s hard to get a good view in any direction.

The Street View story is pretty cool, as this reader discovered:

Having been to Alaska for work a few times, my gut reaction was somewhere in the North American Arctic. The signs are:

• A lack of any foliage suggesting it gets very snowy and cold.
• Large metal buildings which are fast to construct during summer, cheap to transport their raw materials, and big enough for the community to spend all winter inside
• Lots of chimneys on roofs, curved over to prevent snow falling in.

That didn’t give me much to go on but searching for “Arctic Towns in Canada” I got lucky and came across a video by Christopher Kalluk – who took Google Street View images by walking around town carrying something like R2D2 on his back:

From that video I quickly found the three buildings shown, and the apartment complex.

Finding that was great fun.. even better was finding this Google Street View image of Christopher on a sled being pulled by dogs. Amazing!

Don’t forget the donuts:

To show just how thoroughly the Canadians have conquered the Arctic, consider this local establishment (notice the slogan written in Inuktitut syllabics):

As always, a reader informs us about the town:

Founded in 1942 as an American air base, accessible mainly by air (by boat in the summer, and dogsled and snowmobile in the winter), Iqaluit grew in the 1950s due to a NORAD radar station project. In 1958, there was a proposed plan to build the city under a giant concrete dome. Seriously! It was to be artificially lit, heated to -6°C (21°F) in the winter, and powered by nuclear energy. Thankfully the dome did not come to pass (Iqaluit is apparently a great place to see the Northern Lights), although it would have made for an excellent reality show today.

Notable Iqaluit current events include the opening of the first beer and wine store in 38 years (an attempt to quell the alcoholism made worse by prohibition), the extinguishing of a 4 month long town dump fire, and the ouster by the city council of the chief administrative officer. These incidents are supposedly unrelated.

Another reader connects the view to last week’s big story:

Iqaluit is an interesting choice just a week after Scotland’s vote for independence. Nunavut is in its 15th year of territorial quasi-self rule. The split from the Northwest Territories was a major victory for Native sovereignty and self-government, even though it is still governed by Canada. That fight continues in Canada and around the world. Here in the US, we have Native Hawaiians toying with taking the illegal overthrow of its monarchy to the UN, Akwesasne Mohawk insists it is sovereign territory straddling the US-Canada border (they issue their own passports), and the Navajo Nation is stretching its legs with the idea of becoming a “state” for Medicaid and Medicare purposes.

A previous winner provides a soundtrack:

This VFYW contest has a tenuous connection to the Dish’s new and sporadic cover song contest. The White Stripes played Iqaluit (pop. 6,699) on there final tour in 2007. The tour was a long trek across Canada. Their movie about the adventure Under Great White Northern Lights contained footage of the Iqaluit stop and the accompanying album’s cover is a doctored picture of Jack and Meg walking near the shore in Iqaluit (about here; the old location for a Hudson Bay Company post). The set list for their show at Iqaluit’s Arctic Winter Games Arena included their covers of Dolly Parton’s Jolene, Blind Willie Johnson’s John the Revelator, and Son House’s Death Letter, among others. Although not a cover, I prefer Gillian Welch’s retort Time (the Revelator).

Another regular reader offers a dissent:

Could you please stop quoting from Chini’s responses every week? It’s like the guy in class who always raises his hand. Nobody wants to hear from him every time.

Perhaps, but plenty of other readers look forward to his little blockquote column every week, as do we:

Bare dirt, tiny windows, thin grass; yep, we’re hell and gone from the equator. At first blush that might seem to make this one crazy hard but it’s actually helpful; there simply aren’t that many people living at these latitudes. Not to mention the dead giveaway at center left; once you saw it, this one became an insta-find (for myself and presumably quite a few others). Chini kuviasungitok!

This week’s view comes from Iqaluit, the capital of Canada’s Nunavut province. The picture was taken from a second floor window in residence building #508 on the campus of Nunavut Arctic College and looks almost due south along a heading of 170.21 degrees.

Here’s the location of two Iqaluit views that the Dish featured back in 2008/2010 alongside this week’s shot:

And here’s this week’s winner, who also gives us a colorful architecture tour:

I’m not a world traveller, so each week I hope for a familiar view of Canada or the US. This time I identified the scene immediately: Iqaluit, capital of the territory of Nunavut, Canada. I was there a year and a half ago; you actually published my view from my sister-in-law’s window in the suburb of Apex.

The giveaway is the two-tone blue Inuksuk High School, with its distinctive porthole windows and fibreglass panels, pictured here, behind an arch of bowhead whale bones:

Behind it is the brown and tan Frobisher Inn. Anyone who has visited the city (population 7250) will recognize these landmarks. The architecture of Iqaluit can be quite striking, such as Nakasuk Elementary School, which could pass as a lunar research station:

And the igloo-shaped St. Jude’s Anglican Cathedral:

It’s also very colourful, which helps break up the white of winter. Bold colours are popular for residential buildings:

And the bright yellow of the Iqaluit Airport is easily spotted from a distance:

I’m pretty confident the photo was taken from an apartment in the building I’ve indicated on the map below, based on the angle of the window opening to the hotel and high school, and the angle of the roof hip of the Nunavut Arctic College in the foreground.

I’m less certain about the exact window, but I believe it’s the left window of the second bay window unit from the left, on the southwest side of the building, on the second story. I chose this one because the perspective of the view appears to correspond roughly to the middle of the building, and since I assume the hinge of this swinging window would be on the wall side of the frame, not the side protruding from the building:

We confirmed the above image with the reader who submitted this week’s view:

That’s absolutely the window! Facing out the right. I opened the right side of the bay window to get the shot. The Dish sleuths do it again.

The view is from an apartment (Apartment Q-26, QI Complex) that was made available to short term researchers associated with the Arctic College, part of which is seen in the foreground with the pink roof. The distinctive blue building with the portholes is the Inuksuk High School. The taller brown building beyond is a hotel with cafe and theatre, the tallest building in Nunavut and part of the Astro Hill complex.

Thanks to all for the many great entries this week. Many of them come to you in this collage:

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

meatbicyclevevo:

constable-frozen:

olaf mark7

what the fuck is going on

requested by 0n-your-knees

itslarsyouguys:

YOU’RE a baby

I’M a baby

WE CAN BE BABIES TOGETHER

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 or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Also, check out this extra-credit guess for last week’s contest, in which a reader didn’t just ID the city and hotel, but dug even deeper to determine the day, time and exact moment of the live baseball game being played in the background:

Turns out full replays of all minor league games are on MiLB.com. The view photo was taken during the Indianapolis Indians’ June 17th game against the Gwinnett Braves, in the bottom of the 1st inning. Indians player Chris Dickerson had just been hit by a pitch. Two Indianapolis coaches and a trainer are escorting him down the 1st base line to check on his injuries. In the view photo, Dickerson and the trainer are just behind the flag pole, but the two coaches (long white pants) are clearly visible. The above picture is taken from the game video at 19m:13s, (a few seconds after the view photo) when the coaches, trainer (in black) and Dickerson arrive at first base. Notice the shadows and position of first basemen and umpire are exactly as in the view. Sure enough in the background is the window of the JW Marriott — our photographer of the view is no doubt in the window in the upper right. The video cameraman is also visible in the view photo — he is in red, behind 1st base in the visitors dugout. My best guess is that the view photo was taken at video mark 19m:05s. I’ll bet the video is trimmed to start at the nominal game time of 7:05. Aligning the video time with that start time, the view was taken at 7:24:05 pm. Cool.

After checking the original image’s EXIF data, our reader was within seconds of the exact time the photo was taken. Incredible.

Browse all our previous window view contests here.

Here's a clip from last night's episode of Last Week Tonight, in which John Oliver breaks down the Miss America Pageant — or as they prefer to be known, "the world's largest provider of scholarships for women." Oliver decided to investigate the pageant's claims of providing $45 million in scholarship money each year then decided to host his very own beauty pageant with a little help from Kathy Griffin.

algebratwo:

The asymptote of Nicki Minaj’s booty on the Anaconda cover is y = -20x

After the travesty of Jo Becker’s alleged history of the marriage equality movement, and after Chad Griffin’s PR attempt to portray himself as Rosa Parks, and after Ted Olson and David Boies’ grandiloquent credit-hogging in their recent book, it comes as something of a massive relief to see one of the true architects of marriage equality finally getting her due. Mary Bonauto was fighting for gay marriage rights as a lawyer and organizer when very few others were. She started at the state level – because that’s where civil marriage is rooted in American politics and law. And she critically understood that it was vital to get a foothold somewhere, to prove we were not just fringe weirdos, and she saw Massachusetts and New England as the most favorable terrain.

And they were. One aspect of marriage equality in America that is sometimes missed is the role New England played. The gay and lesbian community in Boston in the 1980s and 1990s was remarkably advanced and organized. It was a community I was immensely lucky to grow up in. The self-confidence and self-esteem that this community helped spawn in its members broke through the fear and doubt and squabbling that cursed us elsewhere. It was a gay community big enough to make a splash, but small enough not to splinter. And Mary was a central component of that with her remarkably successful group, Gay And Lesbian Advocates And Defenders.

Let’s be clear: there would be no national surge in support of marriage equality without ten years of civil marriage equality in one state, and then several others. There would be none without Mary Bonauto.

Federalism was essential in helping us prove that, with this reform, the sky wouldn’t fall, that lives would actually be immensely improved, that families would be strengthened, and that all the scare tactics of the reactionary right were unfounded. Bonauto – along with Evan Wolfson – was absolutely integral to that strategy.

Both of them also understood that one state would not be enough, that if this issue rose up to the federal courts, it was vital that we would not merely be talking about one lone and allegedly rogue state. Bonauto made that happen. You can see her mild-mannered affect in the above video, but don’t be fooled. She was extraordinarily persistent and a ruthlessly methodical lawyer. She also helped dispel the myth that somehow marriage equality was a function of white male elitists (a charge so often leveled at me in the community at large). Of course it wasn’t. Lesbians had a huge amount at stake – especially in the safety and custody of their children and families – in ensuring that civil marriage could protect them. And lesbians – from Edie Windsor to Robbie Kaplan to Bonauto herself – were absolutely indispensable and central in this fight.

I’m in awe of Mary and the work she did. While some of us were busy writing and speaking and debating the issues, she gave us the actual empirical and legal progress that kept our arguments alive and relevant. Without her, we would be in an utterly different and darker world.