Up until recently, the fact that the flag of Libya is a plain green rectangle was probably my favourite piece of flag trivia, because not many people were really aware of it. It seems staggeringly boring and pretty lazy when you compare it to, say, Turkmenistan:
If anything, this has gone too far the other way, with a sort of Persian carpet inlay and a frankly overindulgent five stars adjacent to the familiar Islamic crescent. Also, I particularly like the ring of H's in the bottom left hand corner. Imagine how long it would take to paint this flag on to your face if you were going on a protest. This is probably why the country remains rigidly autocratic.
Returning to the first flag, the reason why the Libyan example is no longer such a good piece of trivia is because it's been all over the news for the last few weeks. As it turns out the green represents Colonel Gaddafi's 'Green Revolution' and his 'Green Book'. Or, perhaps more accurately, creating a national flag consisting of a plain green rectangle symbolises the staggering arrogance and delusional nature of the man. Anyway, coalition airstrikes are now in the process of replacing it with the much more dynamic post-independence tricolore:
This is, quite simply, a first class flag. It's simple, its colours are vibrant and compliment each other perfectly, and it's distinctive. Scroll back up to the top and have another look at Gaddafi's flag, then look at this one again. I have to wonder whether the international support for the Libyan rebels is in some way influenced by how achingly cool this flag is. Particularly when you compare it to the former flag of a country in which the international community was not willing to intervene, Rwanda:
I don't want to come across as insensitive, the Rwandan genocide was a truly shocking event that eclipses everything that's happened in Libya so far, but this flag looks like it was made on Microsoft Paint.
In contrast, Nepal has taken a much more left field approach when it comes to flag design:
It takes some balls to stick two isosceles triangles together and call it a flag, but the result is something that, unlike many of the world's flags, is utterly unique and gives some sense of a unique culture, in a way in which the flag of, say, Yemen simply does not:
Indeed, the Yemeni flag is part of a family of flags that hark back to the previous golden era of pan-Arab nationalism, based on the same tricolore as Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Jordan, whose flags I won't bore you with here. Whilst this may give these flags an important historical significance, visually it's pretty uninspiring. Compare this with the properly badass flag of Mozambique:
Yep, that's an AK-47. Another flag not to be fucked with, and one of the few decent communist flags left, is the machete-wielding banner of Angola:
I also like the flag of Barbados, because it looks like the flag that Poseidon, god of the sea, would carry if he led an army of mermen out of the ocean to slaughter us land-dwellers:
Arguably the funniest flag ever, however, was this gem which is believed to have been used within the Empire of Benin, in West Africa, around the 19th century. I sense from the highly sophisticated and subtle symbolism in this flag that this was a welcoming culture, one which preferred to show restraint and favoured diplomacy and negotiation over confrontation and violence:
I hope you have enjoyed this brief journey through the world of flags, and that you have perhaps come to appreciate why they have tended to stick in my memory more than some of the less practical and less useful things I have learnt about in life, such as algebra, or German. There are many more I could have included here, such as the Kyrgyzstan tennis ball, the theologically unambiguous Saudi flag or the Mauritian gay pride flag, but I feel it is only right to end with the greatest flag of all, the three cutlasses of my home county:
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