For those keeping count, I found exactly 30 license plates in Rogers to add to my collection: Ten for the birthyear run, eighteen for the marriage run, and two that didn't fall into any particular category: A rare '73-stickered Virginia that I fished out of someone's dollar box, and a Manitoba '74 acquired purely for aesthetic value.

Absolutely nothing I found for my collection was from Wisconsin. I may have created the leading website for that topic, but I rarely find myself motivated to update it any more as the state quite frankly disgusts me these days and I no longer consider myself a Wisconsin collector.

The attendance figure for the year's convention was 339: High enough to make money, but a far cry from the late '90s and early noughts when ALPCA conventions broke the 500 mark with regularity. A lot of northeastern collectors were conspicuous in Rogers by their absence. Diversity was depressing: The crowd was one hundred percent cis, overwhelmingly male and white (no thanks to this), and with a median age that felt as if it was at least 55 or more.

One of the advantages of license plates as a field of interest is that there are multiple ways to appreciate them: You don't need to physically collect them; you can photograph them, document them, and get geeky about the data. Whether that's enough to indefinitely sustain a demographically-challenged collecting organization with annual conventions, however, remains to be seen. Collecting itself seems to be a pastime in decline, even in popular and well-established disciplines such as stamps. Can—or should—this trend be reversed? I wish I knew the answer.

With that said, here are a few more random snapshots from Rogers:

Some people collect the fake cardboard license plates used as props in film and television productions. I don't understand it, but it doesn't hurt anyone.

Michael Wiener, a public figure with a reputation. I kept my distance; near as I could tell, he was delivering some incoherent rant about "socialism" as though it were a pox on the world.

The Neo-Confederacy is the Bible Belt, and this mega-church dominated several acres of scenery near the convention center...all of it totally unaccounted and tax-exempt, natch. It's a small comfort that these eyesores represent the consolidation and isolation of these virulent sects, and not expansion.

Quoted verbatim from their website: "If you or someone you love struggles with unwanted Same Sex Attraction, please reach out to us. We have resources to help." For obvious reasons, I'm not linking to it.

Since the early 1990s, Arkansas has replaced license plates on an eight-year "rolling replate" schedule. Almost all cars now bear the graphic diamond design introduced in 2006...but here's one of the few remaining older-style plates that are still currently registered. I spotted no more than two or three of them on the road.

The motorcycle plates were also there to keep me on my toes, since the sequencing had reached the very end of the alphabet. This particular plate was issued between the 1st and 14th of July: It's possible that Arkansas exceeded ZZ 999 and reversed to 001 AA during the week of the convention itself.

Two closing shots, ending on a foreboding note. It's a sad commentary on our society that the Equal Rights Amendment isn't part of American constitutional law, but the Armed Nut Amendment is...and there was no escaping that in Rogers any more than in the rest of the country.

But I could escape from Rogers...though it took a few misadventures trying.

Morning ceremonies began with two new inductions into the group's Hall of Fame. First on the list was Dick Pack...a forty-year veteran of ALPCA who also helped establish the Illinois-based Mid-America Plate Association chapter in the 1970s.

Mike Naughton, a longtime ALPCA president and officer (and another Illinois MAPA luminary) was second on the list. There have been a total of 31 inductions since the Hall of Fame was established in 2004, both living and posthumous.

Next came the display awards. First-place winners received an attractive porcelain-enamel souvenir styled similarly to a 1938 Arkansas license plate, while second-place winners received plaques with actual 1954 Arkansas plates mounted to them. 1954 was the founding year of ALPCA, making this the 61st club convention.

Oh, and there was one more prize: The "Best of Show" award which, like the Stanley Cup, is a traveling trophy for super-duper achievements ordinarily unattainable by mortal men. By no one's surprise, it went to Gus Oliver. (Maybe the judges liked the NASCAR cut-outs after all.)

As for yours truly? My eyes and ears were directed to the stage, waiting and burning with anticipation...until suddenly, I heard the words "Andrew Turnbull" be called. My display (or more precisely, the "Canada in the Year 1985" portion) won a third-place prize: "Honorable Mention," in ALPCA-speak. Even so, I was excited: This was the first very time I had ever received an award for a license plate display in the nine years I've been attending hobbyist meets and conventions, and it was a perfect way to crown the week.

The main convention hall reopened at 10 a.m., but the scene was decidedly sleepier than it had been the previous three days: A fair number of collectors had picked up their tables the evening before, others were hurriedly spending the next morning doing the same, and there was very little left to see. After making one final round of the hall to make sure I left no stone unturned and bidding a final adieu to a few other collectors, I bowed out at high noon and set off on the long drive home...where I would receive more unexpected excitement on the road.

But that's a story for another day.

One of my favorites was this audacious bicycle exhibit, with 36 "Share the Road"-themed plates fastened to the spokes of an enormous bicycle tire. An adjacent vertical display contained statistics and related information.

There were so many recent plates on tables and on display that it would have been pointless to determine what the newest one of them might have been...but the oldest was another case entirely. The Cincinnati plates of 1906-1908 predate the advent of statewide registration in Ohio, and were crafted out of solid brass. The Illinois plates date to the same era, and constitute both Chicago, Elgin, and statewide registrations.

This set (here shown as a composite of two pictures) had a similarly historical theme, comparing the current-issue plates of 34 states with license plates of the same states from 100 years earlier. Fascinating, and thought-provoking...not least because there's no guarantee that this set will be repeatable in another 100 years.

Shawn Auchinlock compiled this outstanding collection of early (and almost impossibly-rare) Newfoundland license plates. The earliest motor vehicle registrations began in 1906. Annual license plates began to be issued in the capital of St. John's in 1920 and spread throughout the entire dominion in 1925, which joined Canada as its tenth province in 1949.

The nation of France recently discontinued its long-standing number plate code suffix system in favor of a suffix band and single numbering series. This display board contained a assortment from different regions of plates of this new design.

Weird and wacky prototypes and design exercises for Georgia license plates...some of them similar to production designs, and some of them far off. The 1985 Georgia Tech prototype design actually wound up being dusted off and used five years later as the general-issue base.

The single most expansive display was this colossal Oklahoma exhibit by Gus Oliver, which consisted of literally hundreds of plates mounted to seemingly a dozen display boards, took up an entire corner of the convention hall, and left no detail overlooked. I suppose the cardboard cutouts of NASCAR drivers were there to "set the mood" for the NASCAR-themed license plates (why is the OTC subsidizing a for-profit corporation at all?), though it was a little too over-the-top for me...

By my fourth day in Rogers, I was really starting to break a stride. I found license plates from Idaho, Louisiana, North Dakota, Texas for the marriage equality run...whittling the states needed from 29 all the way down to 11. I uncovered several other interesting subjects for my collection as well, including a "bingo board" for the front of heavy trucks and a beautiful, never-issued plate from my unlamented home state for my '85 birthyear run.

The convention hall was so big that it had taken over a day and a half for me to simply comb over every table. When I stepped away from my own table, I left instructions so that people could call me by cell phone or track me down by my outfit if they needed to find me.

No one ever tracked me down. I made very few sales at the convention, but had a few strange experiences trying. Once I came back to my table to discover that four or five plates had disappeared...as though someone had picked them up and walked out the door. Dismayed, I put together a list of what was missing and was on my way to the ALPCA secretary's table to report the "thefts" when I ran into Norm Ratcliffe, who had the table next to me. He broke the news that I had made a sale in absentia, and the money was waiting "under the old New Hampshire plate." That was a relief, though it was hardly the most satisfying experience.

Another strange experience came later the same day. I had a 1925 Illinois plate that I had used as a guinea pig in some plate-cleaning experiments and now had for sale at the arbitrary price of $15. Some grey-haired collector walked up to me, fondled the plate, and asked: "Would you take $5?" I paused for a moment, then acquiesced. After all, I had acquired the '25 in a bulk auction for a song, I had been lugging it around for five years, and space was at a premium.

The grey-haired collector then started to snicker. "You sold it! I didn't think you were going to do it! I should try that on other people!" And he walked away with the plate, leaving me feeling sullen and dejected.

Five minutes later, he had returned with a second five-dollar bill. "My wife said I shouldn't take advantage of people." So I sold it for $10, and I learned not to trust people to be in good faith again.

I brought two hinged two-panel displays to the Rogers meet. One was my recently-finished exhibition on "Canada in the year 1985," with plates from the provinces and territories permeated by a timeline of national events that year. The other was split lengthwise between my U.S. birthyear motorcycle run-in-progress (33 states, last I checked) and my most creative effort, an exposé on "3M's disintegrating license plates" which seemingly turn grey, blister, and lose their reflective properties if you look at them wrong. I wasn't sure whether to submit it as one display, two, or three for the purposes of judging and exhibition awards, but ultimately submitted it as one since it all ran together.

After one more lap of the convention hall with nothing extra to show for the effort, I started to shift gears into conversation. Brent Kirchner of Alberta gave me a crash course on the legions of automobiles he had owned or driven over the years, and he informed that I'd been pronouncing "Parisienne" incorrectly for years. Scott Broady found a fantastic 1981 Kentucky plate...nearly mint condition, with the short-lived Georgia-made die variation, and with an upside-down "8" in the serial for good measure...and I congratulated him profusely.

After a small group dinner in which I consumed some messy fish tacos at the Bonefish Grill across the street, I headed back to the convention center for the arguable climax of the week: The ALPCA Donation Auction; a five-hour affair in which thousands of license plates and related memorabilia were sold off to benefit the organization. The Yukon Territory government generously donated a number of expired and sample plates for the event; as did the Arkansas and Nevada DMVs.

But no, I didn't buy anything there. I saw utterly nothing on the board or in the lots that captured my fancy, so I spent my time making MST3K-style pot shots at the action with Royce Williams in the back row. Most of the entertainment came from watching the auction itself, as one collector scooped up lots upon lots of bulk plates that could generously be described as scrap metal; fool and money parted.

Lest anyone forget, Arkansas was a Confederate state that seceded from the U.S. during the American Civil War. It was a segregationist state, one that spawned a bloody race riot in 1919, and one in which inter-racial marriages were illegal until Loving v. Virginia came through in 1967. Don't think it's over, either: The fact that all the state's national representation is in the hands of the Republican Party—the organization that has monopolized the white-supremacist vote for the last 50 years—speaks volumes about the present-day state of affairs.

Arkansas' leaders didn't bother writing a declaration explaining the reasons why they seceded a century and a half ago, but fortunately several other states did. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world," said Mississippi. "The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization," said Georgia. The US "has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States," whined South Carolina. And lest there was any doubt the Confederate view was white-supremacist and theocratic, Texas gave mention to "the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations" and spoke of a government in which "white men" and no-one else were equal.

The original Confederate National flag was very indistinct, and essentially was the American flag with a few stars and stripes removed. What we usually equate with the "Confederate Flag" today is the design that originated as the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It's a very striking and powerful symbol: This is why it was quickly embraced on the battlefields and integrated into the canton of the CSA's national flag by 1863. And this is why white supremacists with a hankering for the antebellum south revived the flag as an ideological symbol 90 years later, in the 1950s...neatly coinciding with the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948, the advent of Brown v. Board five years later, and the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

This was the same decade in which the Battle Flag was inserted into the design of the Georgia state flag, and shortly before it was erected in itself above the South Carolina capitol dome. This was the same decade in which "In God We Trust" was shoved into place as a national motto and added to our hitherto-secular currency and "Under God" was inserted into the hitherto-secular Pledge of Allegiance. This was the same decade in which my Grandparents' Senator conflated atheism with Communism and persecuted LGBT workers as "security risks." All of this stuff went down at the same time for the same reasons: As a reactionary backlash against humanism, secularism, civil rights, and the premise of a more inclusive, more modern, kinder, fairer, and more sustainable world.

Don't count on any defender of the Confederate Flag to admit this, though. They delve into a laundry list of euphemisms masking the truth so loosely that it's a wonder why they try at all. "It's about states' rights!" Right: The right of states to assert the right for people to own other people as subhuman property, and the right of slave states to force free states to capture and return fugitive slaves against their wishes. "It's about southern pride!" Right: A pride that's been steeped in white supremacism and de facto Christian theocracy for literally several centuries of time. "It's a symbol of our past!" Right: And you keep dragging that past into the present. "It's about heritage!" Right: It's about the heritage of belligerently starting a war because an abolitionist entered the White House, and the heritage of an economy built upon the labor of slaves. Kind of reminds you of all the insurrectionist threats the Christian right wing has spit out since Barack Obama won two mandates as President of the United States, doesn't it?

Flying the flags of the Confederate States and United States together confuses me to no end, as the two entities were diametrically opposed and the former was an act of treason against the latter. It would make more sense to wave the Stars and Stripes in tandem with the flag of the USSR.

And considering what the other major entity was that asserted a war upon its right to disenfranchise or exterminate people as subhuman inferiors, overlaying your flag with German military decorations seems like the last thing a neo-Confederate would want to do to improve their case...

All of this was very much on my mind at the ALPCA Convention in Rogers, and the stench permeated the convention floor itself. Thanks but no thanks: I don't buy license plates from white supremacists or their enablers, thankyouverymuch.

The ALPCA festivities started the day before with an informal "meet and greet" in the convention center's parking lot. I didn't bother showing up until noon, just in time to see other people packing up and leaving. Soon, I understood why: I felt like I was wearing a damp sponge, and it was no fun at all to linger outdoors in the 35-degree southern heat.

On Wednesday, the actual convention began...and I was ready. I had a pair of two-panel foldable displays that I had prepared for this convention. I pulled them out of the car...and stopped. There was no way I could get them inside, and carry my grocery box of loose plates in one trip without having at least three extra hands. But I could work my way to the entrance incrementally, taking one or two of the bulky objects at a time. That's the tactic I use to carry groceries from the car, after all.

Eventually I succeeded, reserved a table for myself, and got to work. I had a mission in mind: I was going to find each and every one of the 29 states missing from my marriage equality run...or do everything I could to shatter the stereotype of the collector as a geriatric homophobe in the process.

The rest of the day was a complete blur. I chatted with a number of long-standing collector acquaintances, including Royce Williams, Eric Tanner, Ross Day, Dave Nicholson, Joe Sallmen, and Andrew Osborne over everything from license plates to Ontario restaurants to Subaru mechanicals. I also spent six hours parsing through the tables of half the hall (spending nearly no time at my own table in the process), and was so busy that I forgot to eat lunch.

But the day's efforts weren't in vain. By the time I walked out the doors, I had found license plates from Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Virginia, West Virginia (!), and Wyoming for my run. Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee had been acquired in the parking lot the previous day, pulling the tally of missing pieces down from 29 to 15.

Could the next day be just as productive? I'll have to wait and see.

The city of Rogers, Arkansas is right next door to Bentonville, Arkansas...and Bentonville's greatest claim to fame might be its status as the home of a store chain that might be a bit familiar.

Did you know that there's a Wal-Mart Employee Cheer? (Whoops, sorry. Wal-Mart insists it has "associates," not employees.)

This seems as good a time as any to tout this other video, showing what appears to be a cancerous growth spreading from Arkansas.

The first Wal-Mart store actually opened over in Rogers in July 1962. The original building still stands, although it's very inauspicious and is currently split between a building-supply store and antique mall. The local tourism book claims that the building contains a plaque commemorating its pioneering status, but the book lied.

There still is a Wal-Mart store 0001, though its physical location has been shunted from building to building a few times. Its second site presently houses Wal-Mart's claims administration office, of all things.

Of course, Sam Walton's retail empire had an existence that was seeded before 1962. Years before they crushed the competition, strong-armed their suppliers, and ran afoul of every labor issue in the book, they were here. Walton managed his first variety store in 1945; this store as the first "Walton's" Ben Franklin per se came five years later.

There is a plaque here! Maybe the tourism book was just confused.

The facsimile of Walton's 5-10 store now forms part of a Wal-Mart museum spanning an entire corner in downtown Bentonville. It contains several physical exhibits of products, packages, advertising, and memorabilia; video presentations, and an ice cream cafe...if you're in the mood to dine on Wal-Mart food, of course.

Lest anyone think they weren't trying hard enough, a facsimile of Sam Walton's '79 Ford truck is parked outside. The South Carolina inspection sticker kind of hints that it isn't the genuine Arkansas article, but if you want to see the actual truck you don't have far to go. That's on display inside, along with a painstaking re-creation of Sam Walton's actual office. I'd sure hate to have been the lowly associate tasked with putting that together!

Remember the Wal-Mart Cheer? That's mentioned in the museum, too. You just needed to know that.

At least admission is free. Much like a stopped clock is right twice a day, Wal-Mart winds up being benevolent once in a while.

Altogether, I'd have to place this attraction in the "see" category. I was at once both strangely captivated and appalled.