Posts

Showing posts from March, 2026

Having a chat with Swedes in Minnesota about a missing head (of a statue)

Image
  A photo of a bust on a pedestal in a park.  I edited it so you can see what it would look like without the bust statue on top On the second Monday every month, there's this so-called "Pratstund" where a group of Minnesota Swedes and folks of Swedish descent have a Zoom where everyone speaks Swedish at wildly variant levels of fluency.  Somehow I got invited a year ago and I show up periodically. Meaning twice in total. The second time I made an appearance was last week. So I get on the video chat and the head Swede is talking about a BFD that recently transpired in their little town. It was front page news. It went down like this: The town had been founded by Swedish immigrants in the 1800s or whenever the Swedes were in the business of founding towns. There was one gentleman in particular who idk did a lot of founding-type work and so to honor him in the early 2000's, the town erected a bust of the guy and put it in the town square.  Five years later, someone stol...