I’ve recently stumbled into a new passion: vexillology—the study of flags. It’s a little odd, I know, but I’ve gotten so into it that I changed my bookmark for reddit to be r/vexillology so that it’s the first thing that I see!
My collection is minimal. Shalene gave me a Colorado flag for Christmas, and I picked up an American flag for Flag Day.
There aren’t too many flags I see myself flying outside, but here’s what’s on my list currently:
Army Flag—This and the Colorado flag will be my “daily flyers”, since there aren’t as many rules governing how to fly these versus the American flag (see U.S. Flag Code)
Bavarian Flag—I hope to fly this one during Oktoberfest season (three weeks)
German Flag—I’d probably only fly this during the World Cup or on November 9th to commemorate the anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling.
Happy Flag Day! Coincidentally, it’s also Army Day—hooah! We took down our Colorado state flag this morning and put up our newly purchased United States flag. I did hesitate to buy an American flag, though. I thought about buying an Army flag instead, which doesn’t have nearly as stringent rules as the American flag. It’s a lot of responsibility, but I’m excited to learn more about a specific flag for a change, although U.S. Flag Code is no joke.
I’m working on a long-form piece related to white privilege, racism, and the Confederacy. I’m really excited to share it with ya’ll. After publishing this Sunday Shares, I’ll link to my Google Drive doc in case you want to provide feedback before I finalize the essay. I’ve loved doing all this research to form my own opinions.
CONSUMPTION
Read
Tweet:
Children should be raised the same way muscles are built:
Expose them to the largest setbacks they can recover from.
I’ve found that people who’ve only “won” growing up are quite fragile and have a disproportionate fear of failure.
I actually found this last week after going down the vexillology wormhole. I just searched Spotify for the word, wondering if anyone had done music related to it (I honestly don’t know what I expected to find…), and I happened across Deadmau5!
Podcast: This week on Shark Tank – Mark Cuban joins to talk UBI | Yang Speaks (Apple Podcasts | Spotify)
Andrew Yang—former presidential candidate and founder of Humanity Forward—interviews Mark Cuban, and they discuss how they would change the structure of government and voting as well as how people interact with the government.
Learn
Concept: Dutch Baby Pancakes
Shalene calls them German pancakes, which didn’t sound right—plus, I had never had them in Germany. I heard them called Dutch Babies when I first had them. After a quick Google search, it turns out that all of those names are correct, however, it’s definitely an American dish (Wikipedia). By the way, what is it with our habit of naming things after other ethnicities, but then it’s truly an American concoction?
It represents the spectrum of acceptable political views at any given time. I had never heard of this until someone mentioned it in a tweet, but it seems extremely relevant given the political discourse happening over the fast-paced social media platforms these days.
Joseph Overton was the director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and this term was coined after he died.
Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren. This week, I’ve been super into vexillology—the study of flags! I’m not even that into historical flags. I mostly love the designs. In fact, I’ve been lurking on r/vexillology and r/logodesign for some time now, and they’re still my favorite subreddits.
Production
Drawing
Lightsabers
I needed to get back to drawing. In fact, I’ve been wanting, craving, and toiling with getting back into drawing for years now, but the gap between where I’m at and where I want to be is so large, it’s discouraged me. I thought this would be a fun way to incorporate some of my recent interests (I’ve been watching Clone Wars and Rebels with my daughter and playing the mobile Heroes game). So I finally got around to sketching again and drew up some lightsabers. I love how personal they are and how they represent the user. It ties in well with this week’s focus on symbols and good design 🙂
Henderson Family Flag
I did some flag designs based on my family crest. I finished four design ideas, and I’ll throw up 5-8 this week. I’m also working on my wife’s maiden name, too, although their crest has less symbols to work with 😬
Website
Book Notes
I spent some time adding books to my Book Notes page, but there’s something buggy going on with the formatting. I’ll have to revisit these, because any new additions end up crashing the page.
I was listening to a podcast on what a world flag would look like. Apparently, there’s already such a thing! I’ve also been doing some brainstorming all week on what flags I would design, and when considering an Earth flag, the two designs that I had in my head are very similar to James W. Cadle’s “Flag of Earth” (so good!) and u/thefrek’s design (or even more designs). Another that is great would be Philip Kanellopoulos’s “Abstract Earth Flag”. If you’re interested in more conversation about it, check out this Quora post.
Roman Mars, the host of the 99% Invisible podcast, knocks this one out of the park. He gives his TED talk on his passion for the often forgotten city flags.
The whole album is great, and I first discovered @killparis through @ToastDance. I’ve been casually loving his jams ever since, but I’ve made a concerted effort to tune in this week.
Podcast: Vexillology (FLAGS) with E. Tory Laitila | Ologies with Alie Ward (Apple Podcasts | Spotify)
This was a great dive into my obsession with flags this week. As a side note, her podcast dives into different fields of study. This was an off-the-wall episode that brought a lot of fun ideas up.
I remember discussing this question briefly in my econ class when the health econ professor was our substitute. It’s obviously relevant to today, and I think Difference Wiki has a lot yet to be explored! 🤨
Ponder
Quote:
(Feel free to download and/or share)
As I am slowly refining this newsletter, I’d love feedback on the format and content. Reach out in the comments or via Twitter (@JonnyMHenderson).
