For no particular reason, I suggest you kill half an hour reading this website. I stumbled upon it a couple of years ago. I still think it's one of the funniest bits of the Internet.
To my surprise, there is no international body responsible for upholding simple standards of vexillilic aesthetics. Nor do the UN or Interpol have the power to call in and punish those responsible for such atrocities as the Brazilian or Cypriot flags. I suppose there is probably a conspiracy of rich western nations (those with permanent seats on the UN security council, no doubt) to prevent such crimes from being brought to justice; however, in the meantime I am giving letter grades to the existing flags of the world.
From the "Methodology" section:
To receive an F, a flag had to be so awful that its level of badness was clearly qualitatively different from that of any flag receiving a D. I had to feel that a country receiving an F had really set out to create a genuinely horrible flag, or didn't really know what a flag was. One prominent vexillologist I consulted put it thus: "Some countries' flags look like tea towels. If you'd rather be using the flag as a tea towel, and your tea towel as the flag, give it an F."
In the end, only three countries received such a distinction, all U.S. territories (hence my suspicions about the US using its security council veto to block the bringing of bad flag designers to justice). Of these, I wouldn't even trust the Northern Mariana Islands flag to clean my cutlery - it's probably not colourfast.
Some of the criteria:
Rule 1b: Do not write some stupid slogan on your flag.
British colonies and former colonies love putting widdly little coats of arms on their flags with Latin slogans like 'et cetera' and 'Caecilius est in horto' on them (e.g. Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands). This is because junior civil servants in the Crown Office of Naming Other People's Countries want to show off how valuable their Etonian education is.
...
Rule 3: Do not use a tricolour unless you are in Europe.
...The real problem with tricolours is not that they are bad flags - some are quite good - it's just that they are a hang over from a time when fewer countries had flags and tricolour space wasn't so crowded. These days no-one should be using a tricolour if they can avoid it. It's not that tricolours are bad per se; people should just know better than to start using one after say, 1900.
Africa is particularly full of awful tricolours. What makes them particularly bad is that they are all the same colours: that red yellow green thing. Why aren't countries just embarrassed by the fact that their flag is the same as their neighbours, except backwards, upside down, or with a big green star on it? Rwanda deserves special mention for unbelievable unoriginality in this field.
OK, I'm amused.
I should try this on my husband too.
Posted by: Amber | 01 February 2009 at 11:22 PM
I think the whole idea is awesome.
Posted by: mrsdarwin | 02 February 2009 at 10:51 AM