Forensics

I totally feel like a detective! Wanna know why? Well, shut up I'm gonna tell you anyways.

So I was on the Ford website—because I've got a great offer from a really honest-looking gypsy on two slightly-used but sturdy little boys and was looking for a good way to blow the cash— and was checking out the 360º view of the 2013 Mustang (officially the hottest Mustang ever). This went from ogling the car to noticing the details in the background of the picture (the black guy's hand moves onto the table for one shot) to noticing all the other discernible cars in the background are Fords (an Expedition, an Escape, and an older Mustang, plus a couple pick-ups, and what could be a Taurus). Finally, I began wondering "where was this picture taken?"

Hmmm... this sounds like a problem for Forensic Investigation Man!

The derpier cousin of "doesn't-understand-the-world-around-him man".

Let's look for some clues in the pictures:

OK, brick crosswalks. Generic, but could be a useful detail.

Never heard of it, but a good place to start.

Might be useful for narrowing it down on Google maps.

Cross streets! Extremely useful. Does that say "State" or "Slate"? And is that "St", "Dr", or "Ave"?

So we're looking for a McCoffee restaurant on the corner of Elm and State (or Slate) with brick crosswalks near a blocky building. Check.

A Google search for "McCoffee" turns up nada. Google politely suggests that I might have meant "McCafé". Maybe the coffee shop is so hipster that they don't even have a website? "Yeah, the internet is too mainstream. We don't have WiFi here, either." They're probably too hipster for telephones too, and you can only reach them by telegraph or carrier pigeon. Whatevs.

Next, we look for cross streets. Not knowing the street type doesn't help but Google maps doesn't turn up anything useful for Elm and State or Slate.

Maybe if we could at least narrow it down to one state? Let's see if we can identify the license plates on the cars in the background.

The clearest car is the Expedition behind the Mustang, but it doesn't have a front plate. This, in itself, should be a clue, since only some states don't require cars to have front plates.

What's that on the older model Mustang? It almost looks like a New York plate, but that could just be a shadow.

The Escape doesn't give much more help. It's got the coloring of a California plate, but the spacing of the letters looks off. Maybe it's personalized

Either way "Elm and State California" and "Elm and State New York" don't turn up anything useful.

Time to look for more clues.

Aha! A flag next to the US flag. Same height, so it's probably a state flag. It's hard to see, but it looks like it's blue close to the flag pole, white on top, and red on bottom (some of you have already guessed it). I check  Wikipedia for a list of the US state flags. Georgia kinda fits the bill, but it's got another red strip above the white one. North Carolina is almost perfect, expect the red and white are reversed.

Eureka!

The Lone Star flag

The state flag consists of a rectangle with a width to length ratio of two to three containing: (1) a blue vertical stripe one-third the entire length of the flag wide, and two equal horizontal stripes, the upper stripe white, the lower red, each two-thirds the entire length of the flag long; and (2) a white, regular five-pointed star in the center of the blue stripe, oriented so that one point faces upward, and of such a size that the diameter of a circle passing through the five points of the star is equal to three-fourths the width of the blue stripe. The red and blue of the state flag are the same colors used in the United States flag.

So the picture was taken at some unidentified Texas intersection. Back to Google.

The first hit for "McCoffee Texas" is a foursquare check in at "MC Coffee shop" in Midland, TX (I assume the hipsters throw people out for checking in on Foursquare, because that's so last year). Although going to the map doesn't reveal any details like in the pictures. Plus, there's still no website for the too-hipster-for-the-internet coffee shop.

Let's try "Elm st and State st, Texas". That drops a pin on an Elm St in Dallas. Looking at the map, there are some shadows from tall buildings (like the ones in the Mustang pictures) in the Historic District. Following Elm St towards the shadows, we find this:

This is at the intersection of Elm St and S. Ervay St. in Dallas, Texas. Zooming in to street view we find this:

That looks like the place. However, there are some interesting differences between the Mustang marketing photos and the street view. The watermark at the bottom of street view says the pictures were taken in August 2011. Given that the Mustang pictures are of the 2013 Mustang, they must have been taken since then, even if it was just the prototype. That means that either that intersection has changed a lot in one year, or some serious photoshopping was going on. To wit:

The Hipster Coffee Shop is, apparently, so hipster that they aren't even a coffee shop. "We stopped selling coffee before it was cool." This one, I suppose, is not unexpected. Ford wouldn't want to have other companies' logos in their marketing material. This also explains why the Chase Bank logo which should be clearly visible on the building across Elm from the not-a-coffee shop isn't.

It's not actually State (or even Slate), but Ervay street. I wonder why they bothered to photoshop this change? Was Ervay too specific, and they wanted a more generically-named street in the background? Did they not want people to be able to figure out where the pictures were taken? Well, fail on you.

Both Ervay and Elm are one-way streets. The Mustang was going the wrong way on Elm, and turning the wrong way on Ervay. Oops.


So, how bored were you today?