The Silver Dollar in Ghent, Minnesota

Last night I read with the amazingly talented Kyle Minor at the Marshall Festival at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota, and after the reading the festival's organizer, my good pal Anthony Neil Smith, took Kyle and me and a grad student in creative writing (Dan Vierck, remember that name) over to the nearby town of Ghent to the Silver Dollar, the first bar in Minnesota--not the oldest, but somehow the first. The distinction apparently has to do with a long-ago change in the liquor laws of the state, but no one could quite explain the exact nature of the claim.

In any case, they have one of the best old bar signs I've ever seen. Here's Kyle, standing before it like a badass.

Obscene Hummel Figurine

This comes via filmmaker and all around good pal Mark Wade Stone. It belonged to his grandmother and dates back to circa 1939. All I can say about it is that it appears to me to be a little boy humping a flowerpot containing an anthropomorphic cactus. The mind reels at the Freudian implications.