The first day went well. Crowds were good (not great, but first day is generally light). My impression is that people in Minot may not have homes, but they tend to have money to spend.

Flood damage is particularly evident in the area around the fairgrounds, where the festival is held. Lots of houses with dirty water lines on the outside walls, ruined household junk piled outside. Some have FEMA trailers parked in the yards, but most are abandoned for the moment.

A restaurant we always used to patronize is boarded up and dead. Some traffic lights are out, and others no longer have left turn signals working, for some reason.

But the festival soldiers on. One thing I appreciate particularly is that a new group has joined the rotation at the Copenhagen Hall stage, around the corner from our Viking World. It’s a very impressive family band (seven kids) that actually does some music I like. I didn’t think such a phenomenon existed in the world anymore.

Can’t make the WiFi work from the Viking camp at the moment, but I’m making this quick post from a booth sponsored by SRT Communications (credit where credit’s due, and all that).

If you’re looking for work, I might suggest Minot. Jobs are going begging around here. There are three caveats to that statement of fact, however:

1. Once you get here, you’ll find out there are better paying jobs further west, where the oil boom is booming in a booming way. Which is one reason so many jobs are unfilled here.

2. Housing is very limited, due to flood damage.

3. North Dakota winters.

Nevertheless, for those looking for jobs and a decent community to live in, you could do a lot worse than Minot, North Dakota.

It’s about time for Hostfest to begin, so I’ll sign off for now.

Well, not violence per se. Theater professor James Miller of the University of Wisconsin–Stout put a picture of Nathan Fillion with a quote from Firefly on his office door, and the chief of campus police, a woman, took issue with it. Read the details and see the office door poster from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “Colleges and universities are supposed to foster brave and bold environments of freewheeling intellectual inquiry and expression. If a quote from a network science fiction show is a bridge too far, something has gone seriously wrong,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said.

Though our readers in Hawaii may have seen a gorgeous sunrise a little earlier this morning, I offer a bit of calm in the form of several beautiful photos.

A couple nights every week, my renter plonks himself down in front of my desktop computer in the dining room, and dominates it for a few hours around suppertime. Although he has his own computer and is on my network, he claims this old, slow Dell handles certain streaming downloads better than his does. So I have to wait, because I’m passive.

Tonight was one of those nights. It’s also bill-paying night on my schedule. And since I’m going to be gone next Thursday, I had to pay two weeks’ worth of bills. So I overcame my OCD enough to do the bills before I blogged, rather than after, as is my custom.

And this is what I blogged. Just to show you how flexible I am.

What are some essential American novels?

“Hi! Where are you from?”



I hate the “Mystery Viking.”



The Mystery Viking is an ancient tradition at the annual Norsk Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota.

The idea is that when you’ve got a bunch of Scandinavians all together, there’s likely to be little or no actual social interaction going on, unless money is to be had.

So somebody is designated “the Mystery Viking.” This unidentified volunteer wanders the halls, waiting for someone to walk up to him (or her) and say, “Hi! Where are you from?” Those are the magic words. The Mystery Viking is authorized to award this person 100 dollars.

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

But in fact, of course, since you’re dealing with Scandinavians, comprehension comes slowly, if at all. People hear about the “Mystery Viking” and think, “I need to go up to someone dressed as a Viking, and ask him where he’s from.” So we Vikings get approached by scores of strangers every day, drawn to us solely by their keen love of… money.

This is only one of the soul-searing trials that face me as I venture out to Høstfest again this year. I’ll be gone all next week. I’ll be doing limited posts, if any, depending on how the WiFi’s working in Copenhagen Hall.

We don’t know how the festival will go this year, in the wake of the devastating flooding the city has seen. A friend who lives in Minot told me the people are pretty exhausted, but he also thinks they need some diversion. Accommodations look to be a challenge (though we Vikings are taken care of).

So if you’re in the area, stop in and say hello. Just remember not to ask where I’m from.

I’m generally armed when playing Viking at Høstfest.

Thabiti Anyabwile, a great pastor who is blogging with the Gospel Coalition, links to a story from a man who had a visit from a neighborhood Muslim family. “Muslims understand well that predominant and typically affluent cultures atrophy over small amounts of time due to decreased marriage and reproduction rates.”

He also points to another timely article on Islam, fear, and the Gospel’s demands. “It is easy for us to assume,like my friend did, that they are coming for us,” Ted Esler writes. “But we are not the reason for their anger.”

“Photographer behind 9/11 ‘Falling Man’ retraces steps”–Richard Drew says, “I don’t like coming down here,” but he went with a Yahoo News reporter to the site of the World Trade Center “to retrace his steps for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, when he had watched dozens die through the lens of a Nikon DCS620,” to quote reporter Joe Pompeo.