Parsons: Disliking "too many stars," he assigns a "B", 73/100. It's a flag design without any glaring flaw, but also without any glaring merit. Looking past that, something about Chile's flag - perhaps is it the blue square amidst all the flaggy rectangularity - mildly displeases me. Michael5000: For a UnitedStatesian, the flag of Chile is disconcertingly similar to the flag of Texas, a much wider political unit.
Parsons: He gives it an "A-", 80/100, without comment. If Romania and Chad ever go to war using 18th Century infantry tactics, though, there's going to be real trouble. I can't imagine that anyone in the international diplomatic community felt too excited about taking the question on in any event, the issue seems to have faded. in 1994, but Romania understandably didn't feel like changing at that point. In 1989, the blank tricolor was made official - but this rendered Romania's flag identical to what was now an existing national flag, Chad's. After the cretinous Ceauşescu dictatorship was toppled in the late '80s, these symbols began to be torn off or cut out of Romania's flags, sometimes leaving a defiant hole in the yellow stripe. But not so fast! Chad came into being and designed its flag in 1959, when the French high-tailed out of Africa, and Moldova's flag didn't come along until 1990.īut what about the old-school country of Romania? Well, it had used a blank tricolor in the past, but during the communist era - that's from WWII to the early 90s, for those of you who were born yesterday - there was an appropriate communist national symbol in the yellow stripe.
So, you might be tempted to accuse Chad of copping a design already in use by a European country. Now here's the deal: Romania has a virtually identical flag, and Moldova, which is arguably the Romanian chunk of the old Soviet Empire, has a very similar flag but with a coat of arms on the center yellow stripe. I don't see what's "bad" about it, particularly - it's got the three primary colors, a pretty obvious set. Michael5000: Well, what we have here is a tricolor. Parsons: Parsons: Complaining of a "Bad Tricolour," he gives it a “B-”, 65/100. They should not be taken as critical of the countries, ideals, cultures, or people that the flags represent. These discussions are about graphic design, and perhaps about nationalism and national symbolism in general.
Its trajectory must have been strange indeed, bouncing at several angles to land, just so, on a place you couldn’t have deliberately sent it if you had tried a million times.Īnd of course, I was delighted! For not only did I have full use of my computer again, but I got to rush into Mrs.5000’s office and utter, for the only time in my life, that classic line of happiness and relief:įlag Friday is a periodic discussion of the world's national flags the project is explained and indexed here. This was, of course, a HUGE pain in the ass.Ī few minutes later, I got lucky and noticed my missing “ > /. Deciding that “it will show up eventually,” I went back to work, punctuating every declarative sentence by sticking a paperclip into the gap left by the missing key. She helped scan the floor for a while, but eventually we both gave up. Mrs.5000 poked her head in, saw me on my hands and knees, and asked what was going on. I found the “ N”, I found the “ L”, I found the “ 0 / )” – I found all of them, in fact, except for the “ > /. Then, came the hard part, which was finding where the keys had landed in the chaos which is my home office.
This worked beautifully: I was able to dig around inside the computer and clean out a couple of years of accumulated crap until the spacebar stopped giving me grief. So, with my characteristic caution and attention to detail, I started popping off assorted letters and letting them fly randomly over my right shoulder. Then I remembered that you can actually ~remove~ computer keys. With a tweezers, I was able to dig out a couple of minor fuzzballs, but most of the junk was too tightly lodged to budge. I turned it upside down and shook it, but that didn’t help. I was having trouble with my space bar the other day - allmywritinglookedlikethis - and on investigation I noticed that there was a ton of dust and crap built up in the keyboard.