Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Synagogue Don Isaac Abravanel in Paris, where angry protests over the war in Gaza took place. Last week’s contest was also the 300th, so the stats for contests 201 to 300 are down below this week’s image.

This week’s is another random location, good luck!

Wins between contests 201 and 300:
milwhcky – 37
wes.in.wa – 14
Geoduck – 11
Liberal Scientist – 8
Seventy2002 – 6
zzippy – 4
Theophrastus – 2
waguy – 2
Dan Robinson – 2
poster child – 2
Ted – 2
10 winners with 1 (Two dogs, Deathfrogg, ChefJoe, Brian, don, BA1959, Jay S, Ludicrus Maximus, Darryl, Clara)

Last week’s contest had two winners, who solved it nearly simultaneously – milwhcky and Theophrastus. The correct location was East St. Louis, IL.

This week’s contest location is related to something in the news in July, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002, who has won all three street view contests so far. It was Newark, NJ.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere in the state of Illinois, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002. It was Miami.

This week’s is another random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002. It was the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson, MS.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

As I explained last week, this contest is beginning anew. The Bird’s Eye View Contest is retired and this is the first Street View Contest, using the HERE mapping engine.

This week’s contest is a location that was in the news in June, good luck!

NOTE: I haven’t found a way to share an image via URL, so if someone figures it out, please post in the comments.

Last week’s Bird’s Eye View Contest was won by ChefJoe. It was Pocatello, ID.

As I mentioned last week, that was the final Bird’s Eye Contest. Last week, it was announced that my company is being acquired by the HERE group within Nokia. Up until now, this weekly contest was never about promoting a particular technology or mapping service, but since I’ll soon be working for one, that’s the one I’ll be using. HERE’s maps do not have the aerial views that I’ve used for this contest up until now, but it does have a large set of street views.

So starting next week, I’m planning to set up this contest as a ‘Street View’ contest, where instead of an aerial view, you’ll have to guess the location of a street view from HERE.

One aspect of the previous contest I’d like to continue is the rotation between random locations, single-state random locations, and locations related to news events. I may need to think through some other aspects of how this’ll work, so please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

As always, thanks for playing and making this a fun contest every week.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Chicago.

This week’s is a random location somewhere in Idaho. Good luck, and Happy Father’s Day!

NOTE: This will be the last Bird’s Eye View Contest in the current format. Some unexpected developments this week have thrown me an interesting curveball. Starting next week, this contest will either be on a short hiatus, or will be rebooted with some major changes. More details will be shared next Sunday.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Killeen, TX.

This week’s is a random location in the Google Maps 45 degree views, good luck!

Last week’s contest was unsolved as of Friday night. It was three locations where people recently blew up their homes making hash oil: 1. Puyallup 2. Reno, NV 3. W. Boca Raton, FL

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on Earth, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by zzippy. It was Kahului, HI.

This week’s is triple the fun, three locations that were in the news in May, good luck!

After the defeat of Prop 1, Eli Sanders wondered why suburban voters like light rail, but not buses.

Seattle is surrounded by a ring of voters who appear to hate the idea of funding buses. But in 2008, voters in that same suburban ring voted in favor of funding light rail. (Take the suburban city of Kent, for example. Only 27.2 percent of its voters wanted to save Metro bus service this year. But in 2008, returns showed 50.8 percent of Kent voters in favor of funding light rail.)

These were different measures, of course, but that’s very much the point. There was something in this year’s proposal — whether it be car tabs [to fix roads and fund bus service], the focus on bus transit, or Metro Transit itself — that alienated suburban voters. The result was a marked decline of support that cannot simply be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.

So what was it? The influence of the Prop-1-bashing Seattle Times on suburban voters? The weirdness of an April election? Something about the winsomeness of trains that buses just can’t match? Theories?

As a suburban voter (and a long-time Metro rider and supporter), I wish I had a better answer to this question. I was frustrated to see Prop 1 go down, but I wasn’t all that surprised. The roads near my house were littered with signs saying ‘No $60 car tabs’.

Part of the problem is certainly that trains are seen as a more efficient mode of transit than buses. But I also had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that Metro was bluffing about the need to cancel routes, and won’t actually cancel them. They cited the Seattle Times, but I’m not even sure the Times went quite that far down the rabbit hole (or maybe it did, I honestly don’t read their shit anymore). So maybe it’s not as much a negative view of buses as it is a negative view of Metro itself.

Either way, as a suburbanite who relies on the 102 bus to get to my job downtown, I have one thing to say to Seattle with respect to preserving the regional character of the Metro system.

Save your routes and don’t worry about us.

I know that I might be fucked if things continue in that direction and Metro starts to de-emphasize suburban routes, but seriously, it would be hilarious to watch traffic go to levels of shit previous thought unimaginable as all of us bus commuters get back in our cars. Let’s bring it on! Carmageddon!

Last week’s contest was a tough one, it went unsolved as of Saturday morning. It was Rosario, Argentina.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere in the state of Hawaii, good luck!

This July, five Washington medical marijuana patients will be tried in federal court in Spokane. The plight of these defendants, known as the Kettle Falls Five, has started to gain national attention. Despite the passage of I-502 and the overwhelming popular support across the nation for allowing the use of medical marijuana, the ugliest aspects of the drug war continue in this state, if only in the parts where fewer people live.

The facts of the case are relatively simple. On August 9, 2012, police came to the home of 70-year-old Larry Harvey and his 55-year-old wife Rhonda Firestack-Harvey in Kettle Falls, WA. The Harveys had a collective garden of marijuana plants used to provide relief for themselves and three others patients – their son, his wife, and a family friend – all with valid doctor’s authorizations. Here in Washington state, where an attempt to create a fully regulated medical marijuana distribution system failed in 2011, this was still the only proper legal avenue for medical marijuana patients to provide for themselves.

During this initial visit by police, Harvey was in violation of state law in only one way. He had too many plants in his garden. Collective gardens are limited to 15 plants per patient with a maximum of 45. Many gardens have tried to get around the maximum limit by establishing multiple plots on a single property, but officials generally don’t allow that when they come across it. As a result, police confiscated the 29 plants over the limit and left them with 45.

In most parts of the state, that would be the end of it. Here in very rural Stevens County, it wasn’t. A week later, another group of law enforcement officials showed up. These were federal officials, and federal law still maintains that any amount of marijuana is illegal. During this raid, they took all the plants and confiscated their car, motorcycle, ATV, computers, cash, and several legally owned firearms. The U.S. Attorney’s office for Eastern Washington is charging all five as drug traffickers, using the confiscated firearms as justification for the harsh charges. Because of federal mandatory minimums, all five are facing minimums of a decade or more behind bars.

Ever since Obama came into office, there have been assurances that the federal government will respect state marijuana laws. But the memos issued by the DOJ to provide guidance have given individual U.S. Attorneys enough leeway to bring about these types of senseless prosecutions. In Washington, the more liberal western half of the state has been more lenient. In the more conservative eastern half, under U.S. Attorney Mike Ormsby, we’ve seen several prosecutions of individuals who were attempting to comply with state law.

In the end, five individuals who pose no threat whatsoever to society will be sitting in a Spokane courtroom this summer fighting to stay out of jail for decades. None of these individuals were doing anything different from what thousands of other Washington residents have been doing. And yet, because of the way federal trials are stacked against defendants, none of the five will be able to present evidence that they were medical marijuana patients or that they were attempting to comply with state law. None of those facts are relevant in a federal trial so federal judges routinely bar those defenses from being made.

Even worse, the seriousness of the charges being thrown at these defendants comes from the fact that they were also legal gun owners. Even putting aside the fact that gun ownership in rural Stevens County isn’t unusual, folks who maintain medical marijuana gardens across the state are at a higher risk of having armed intruders trying to rob them. It makes sense for them to be armed. They’d be crazy not to have guns for their own protection. Yet this fact has allowed Ormsby’s office to charge these five innocent people as if they were operating as some kind of dangerous drug cartel. This is completely insane.

It’s hard to accept that this level of bullshit still happens in Washington in 2014. When this trial begins in July, adult residents of Spokane will be able to walk into newly-opened state-licensed retail stores and buy marijuana for recreational use. Yet this trial will continue in that same city, within a giant bubble of bullshit carefully crafted to blindfold the reality that the Harveys are the real victims here. Hopefully, the pleas to Attorney General Holder will be heard and this outrageous abuse of power will be ended before then.

Last week’s contest was won by Theophrastus. It was Bonn, Germany.

This week’s a random location from the Google Maps views, good luck! (you may have noticed that the redesign allows for larger images in these posts from now on, thanks Goldy!)

And Happy Mother’s Day!