In my ongoing campaign to raise the intellectual level of the blogosphere, and indeed of the world at large, I ever strive to draw your attention away from the trivial, the evanescent, and the superficial, to matters of universal relevance and substance.

Today, the subject is my face.

The spark for this meditation was a couple conversations I had in Minot (I expect I’ll be milking Minot for months in this space, since I don’t actually interact with my fellow man much in ordinary life, and that plays hob with a guy’s stock of anecdotes).

An older gentleman approached me in the Viking village on (I think) the first day. He asked me if I was Icelandic.

I told him I wasn’t, but that I’d once spent a couple days in that delightful country.

He said, “You’re a fine looking man. Handsome enough to be an Icelander. In fact you look like you could be a member of my family.”

At that point I realized I’d had this exact conversation two years ago, on my last visit to Høstfest. The same man had approached me then, and said the same thing.

I figured he was about the only Icelander at the festival, and was desperately trying to connect with someone. In his loneliness he felt compelled to go around and confer Icelandicity on random Norwegians like me.

Poignant, no?

That in itself wouldn’t have led to this post, but later on I was approached by two middle-aged ladies. They said, “We recently lost our dearly beloved brother, and you are his spitting image.”

At that point I thought, “Oh no. My old face is coming back.”

As a visual aid at this point (and against the advice of counsel), I shall re-post a picture of myself in high school which I used a while back:

I looked pretty much like this through my college years too, except that I changed to wire-rimmed glasses as a junior.

You’ll note the utter lack of distinction in this face. Ordinary brown hair. No particular bone structure to speak of. The nose, though large, is not of any identifiable shape. Is it a long face or a round face? Somewhere in the middle. Could go either way. It’s a blank slate face.

Back in those days people used to tell me all the time, “You look just like my cousin So-and-so.” Or their nephew. Or some guy they went to school with. I remember walking through Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis one afternoon while a drunken Native American yelled at me for minutes from across the grass, trying to get the attention of some buddy he’d mistaken me for.

As I grew older, and especially after I grew my beard, that sort of thing stopped. Stopped completely. I figured that the wrinkles and spots installed by Time’s little Mr. Potatohead game had finally given me an aspect that was also an artifact (Lincoln once said, “Any man over forty is responsible for his own face”).

But now I seem to be losing it. As we age, it’s well known, we start reverting to our baby faces, and it looks like my short run as a figure of distinction is coming to an end.

On the other hand, if I can get these people who think they’re related to me to co-sign a loan or two…

Somehow I seem to have been transported, all unbeknownst to me, to Seattle, Washington. Or Bergen, Norway (not that that’s a bad thing). It was raining when I left for Minot, and it was raining when I got back, and it’s raining still. We’re sopping around here. I keep flashing back to the Marx Brothers movie, “The Coconuts.” This was one of the first sound movies, and (I believe) the first fully sound-equipped musical ever filmed. They discovered paper was a problem. Paper crinkled loudly in the mikes whenever anybody picked it up, and the sound technicians (whose experience had generally begun that morning) couldn’t figure out what to do about it. So they just soaked all the paper in water. Every piece of paper in the movie looks like something lifted out of a washing machine, mid-cycle.

That’s how pretty much everything feels in Minnesota today. I heard on the radio this morning that we’re about 1/8” away from the record for the rainiest fall in history, the previous champ being 1902 or something.

This, we are sure to be told, is the fault of anthropogenic global warming.

This summer it was dry. That, apparently, was global warming too.

My question to global warming alarmists is this: “Is there any possible weather pattern that could conceivably occur that wouldn’t prove global warming to you?”

Of course not. If the weather every day next year were identical to the weather every day this year, that would be taken as proof of global warming too.

This reinforces my belief that global warming theory is, in essence, a religion. Just as there is no possible event, pleasant or unpleasant, that Christians can’t work into a general theory of the Providence of God, so there’s no conceivable weather cycle that the GW believer can’t harmonize with his doctrine.

The difference, I think, is that I admit my belief system is a religion.

And I don’t accuse people who disagree about it of being paid stooges of greedy corporations, who apparently think a planet laid waste and depopulated will present excellent marketing prospects.

Tonight when I got home from work I noticed one of my credit cards was missing. After looking in the likely places, I called the service number to replace it.

When the female person I’d been talking to had canceled it and promised me a new one, she said, “I see that your payment record with us is wonderful, and I wonder if you’d be interested in…” and then she tried to sell me a credit protection plan.

I said no thank you, but my heart was strangely warmed by her praise of my payment record. When you’re me, you have to take your strokes where you can get them.

A few minutes later I found the card, and I called back to see if I could cancel the cancellation.

They don’t let you do that.

I suppose it’s best, all considered. Now I feel like a doofus again, and the universe is back in balance.

Kevin Holtsberry at Collected Miscellany has moved his blog back to its earlier address, and is rather sad that he isn’t getting more traffic as a result. Check it out. It’s an excellent blog, mostly about books.

Via Mirabilis: A site called Library Thing which allows you to list the books you own and make contact with people who enjoy the same books. What a great concept! I’d use it myself if I didn’t hate everyone in the world, except Sissel and you.

Today was my first day back at work. Since my vacation time was more stressful and strenuous than my job is, I was not any better for the time off. But that’s my own fault. Someday I should take some vacation and just rest.

No, that would be degenerate and un-Haugean (see the link in my previous post).

Nevertheless I shall blog about Høstfest and the Sissel concert. Separate posts, I think. Keep things orderly.

This was the 30th anniversary of the Høstfest (which means Harvest Festival) in Minot. Here you may see the backside of the big “30” in the entryway.

The fellow in the tall hat is Rolf Stang, professional Hans Christian Andersen impersonator. (Also professional Edvard Grieg, Henrik Ibsen and Leif Eriksson impersonator. He only actually resembles one of these characters [Grieg], but he gets away with it, and who am I to criticize?. He’s a friend of the Viking Age Club & Society, so he can impersonate Jenny Lind if he likes, as far as I’m concerned).

Here’s one of the halls, at lunchtime. People are chowing down on rømmegrøt, lefse and Swedish pancakes, but also fried chicken, hamburgers and tacos. Man does not live on traditional Scandinavian fare alone, especially if man is as old as most of the attendees at Høstfest.

Not that there weren’t some young people there. I fell in love (temporarily) several times, with various women young enough to be my daughters. Did not speak to any of them, of course, and didn’t even get any pictures.

The ladies below, in case you’re wondering, are not young enough to be my daughters, but they did have a handsome display of Norwegian rosemaling.

And here’s a nice booth where a violin maker is displaying Hardangerfeler (Hardanger fiddles) for sale. The Hardangerfele is a distinctive Norwegian instrument. It’s double-stringed, with the lower set tuned to produce harmonics. The result is a weird, evocative bagpipe-like sound. My Haugean ancestors believed the Hardangerfele to be an instrument of the devil.

And here’s part of our Viking encampment. The red chest in the middle, as well as the workbench and red shield, is (are) mine.

And yes, I noticed that after all my jokes about people in Norwegian sweaters and cowboy hats, I didn’t come away with a single picture of one of those. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Haugeans never lie.

I am back, safe and sound and functioning in all my working parts. Roy Jacobsen told you in Comments about my little emergency, which he helped to resolve. In essence, when I was checking my oil just prior to setting out, I found that my car hood wouldn’t latch. So I tied it down with a nylon tie-down strap, and set out.

A short time on the freeway convinced me I ought to have a second strap. So I had to get off the highway and find an auto parts store (Target didn’t stock them. They have almost nothing automotive anymore, I discovered). I found a NAPA at last, bought a strap, and I set out again, but the hood was still shivering in the wind, especially when a semi truck passed, and the air scoop was diminishing my gas mileage radically.

I met Roy for lunch in Fargo, as arranged, and he offered to call a guy he knows who can usually fix these things. The guy agreed to see the car, and we drove over. He spent a minute looking at it and thirty seconds bending the latch with a screwdriver, and then it worked as if it had been engineered by a German.

Many thanks, Roy.

The guy wouldn’t let me pay him, but I gave him a signed copy of The Year of the Warrior, which doubtless confused him greatly.

So on I went across the plains, westward toward the land of sunset. There was harvest activity in the wide fields, and great clouds of birds, including seagulls, were flocking to do the final gleaning.

I arrived in Minot at about 7:00 p.m., called Ragnar on my cell phone, and learned that the group was at the fairgrounds (where Høstfest lives), still at work on setup.

I found that we had been given a section of Touchstone Energy’s Copenhagen Hall, a sort of large alcove which used to house a small stage for minor musical acts. This was a bad venue for that sort of thing, since it was just around the corner from the top secondary stage (where the Oak Ridge Boys would be performing twice daily this year). But it worked very well for our purposes. We had four of our Viking tents set up, along with several of the informational signs from the Smithsonian Viking exhibition in St. Paul, which had been given to us when the exhibit moved on. We’ve been storing the things for a few years now, and have never had a place to use them before.

The downside is that they’re very big and very heavy. Sadly, I was too late to help set the stuff up (So sad. So sad).

Then followed four days of doing my leather tooling, selling my books (I made a little money. Did OK), and doing sets of three combat bouts, three times a day, with Ragnar, in a sort of huge sandbox that had been set up in one corner.

The combats, of course, were a big success, especially with the kids. Ragnar and I worked up an educational patter to introduce and punctuate the fights, which gave us a little chance to get our breath between bouts. Unfortunately, the one combat I missed, which Ragnar did as a training session with a couple of our guys, was the one the local TV filmed. But the trainee beat Ragnar, and I’m told his broad smile played very well for the cameras. (I think the final score between Ragnar and me was about 50/50, draws included.)

Speaking of cameras, I was interviewed (or at least questioned briefly) by a film crew from Norway doing some sort of documentary. So I may be seen on NRK or something, in mail, somewhere down the line. What I mostly recall is that the interviewer was a spectacularly gorgeous woman.

I’m probably forgetting things, but I’ll blog more about Høstfest tomorrow. I’ll probably tell you about Sissel’s concert then, too. Yes, she did arrive, and yes, I did enjoy the show very much.

Saturday night it took us four hours to tear the display down. We got done around 11:00. I went home to my host’s house, slept in a bit, then drove to Dale Nelson’s place in Mayville. He and his lovely wife Dorothea, and their lovely daughter Lynnea (they have other lovely daughters, but I didn’t see much of them) and their dog and numerous cats made me very welcome (well, the dog was a little ambivalent, but you know how perceptive dogs are). Dale treated me to a viewing of the DVD of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which I’d never seen before.

Much thanks to the Nelsons.

And now I’m home. And I’m tired.

So I’ll end this post here.

Final day of Høstfest. Yesterday the place was packed, meaning that the most efficient way to get from one location to another was to put on a jacket (or a cloak) and go around the outside (the weather’s chilly in Minot. This morning I had to scrape frost off my car windows). Especially if you’re wearing edged weapons, making you likely to poke people as you thread your way through the crowded walkways.

Today looks to be even more of a madhouse. The rumor is that Sissel’s two concerts today (apparently she is coming) failed to sell out, so the festival donated free tickets to personnel at the Air Force base. That means that today, when it’s a weekend too, ought to resemble the Black Hole of Calcutta around here. Assuming the occupants of the Black Hole had been wearing Norwegian sweaters and ten gallon hats, and burping rømmegrøt.

My batting average against Ragnar has sagged. As I had suspected, my winning season had been largely due to his suffering a flare-up of his arthritis. Now, he tells me, he’s feeling better, and I’m spending more time on my back in the sand.

During our final bout of the day, we are always serenaded by the Oak Ridge Boys, who are doing two shows a day just around the corner. For the rest of my life I expect I’ll associate “Elvira” with the weight of a mail shirt on my back and lecturing a crowd on the fine points of the holmgang duel.

I went to check out my seat for the concert, and it’s a much better one than the one I had the last time. High in the upper deck and to the side, but quite close to the stage. Very good. 1:00 this afternoon is the big hour.

Now if I just don’t die or sustain an injury requiring emergency medical attention in my morning duel.