Hm. And while I still have the nerve, I think I shall add a little anecdote, viz:
The study of flags is like the study of people (which makes sense, I suppose, flags usually serving as symbols of a people or a group or a nation or a something) in that there are all kinds of nutty things that happen, and there is no explanation for them, but that's what makes them interesting.
(At least to me. Hopefully, I'm not cluttering up the page by sharing this.)
Once upon a time, Egypt, Libya, and Syria formed the Federation of Arab Republics, which Federation lasted either not quite five years or not quite seven, I'm not sure, and had very similar flags as a result. Thing is, Libya (by dint of the "Green Revolution" of 1977) adopted the flag it currently uses -- which, as Tom S. notes above, is one of the many flags of predominantly Muslim countries which lacks a crescent -- around that time. This flag is a solid green field (if memory serves, like unto the flag of the Prophet).
All of which is really an overlong setup to the fact that, among people who study this sort of thing, the flag of the Socialist Libyan Arab Peoples Jamahiriya (and ain't that a mouthful) is referred to as "a tricolor of green, green, and green."
A tricolor of green, green, and green.
You know what? I think maybe absurdity, not variety, is the spice of life.
I delurk here for the first time (having written responses to perhaps twenty threads and then deleted said responses out of sheer terror -- Lord, you people are intimidating! -- because the topic of flags has come up, and I am a geek about flags. I'm not the most knowledgeable person in the world (though I do have a fairly large aptitude for useless information), and I admit I like looking at flags because of the pretty colors, but still -- a hobby's a hobby.
Well, said I to myself, perhaps I am wrong, but I seem to recall that some of those nations-with-no-crescent-on-their-national-flag have a crescent on their naval ensigns or suchlike subnational flags. It occurred to me that this might be... well, at least kind of interesting, if you like that sort of thing, but in no way taking away from the point.
(Which is that Alec Rawls is a loony, of course.)
So you know what I did? I hit the World Flag Database on the mighty Internet, and did a little poking around. And it turned out that I was completely wrong about that. Feeling not a little annoyed at myself -- I had been certain that there was at least one country that had a crescent on its ensign and lacked one on its national flag! -- I hit the Flags of the World site as well, hoping that perhaps I was remembering a flag that had been recently changed.
Nothin'. (Well, actually, there was a breakaway theocracy in southern Java from 1948 to '62 that had a crescent, but it's gone now anyway and doesn't even bother to serve my point. Which didn't have all that much in the way of point-content in the first place.)
The moral of this story, of course (to go along with one of Our Hosts' comments above) is that no matter how well you think you remember something, do. The research. First.
Hm. I wonder if I'll manage to post this one. Guess we'll find out, eh?
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