Frightening flags

As I've mentioned before, my son loves flags, so sometimes we check out Flags of the World, a great site where we can fly around the globe in an imaginary plane and look at all the colorful flags. This one, thankfully, is not among them.

It's is from the Benin Empire, and dates to the early 19th century. That empire is now defunct, probably because they weren't as good at chopping people's heads off as the competition. I have to say it's an odd flag. A nation's banner is supposed to symbolize its very essence, what it means to be part of that nation, and this is what the leaders of the Benin Empire came up with? Ah well, that was a while ago, and the world has changed right? Nope. Exhibit A: the flag of Saudi Arabia.

The Arabic is the Shahada, the Muslim article of faith, saying, "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." No problem there, but what's with the sword? Is this how they want Islam to be depicted? How about giving money to the poor, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, unlike lopping people's heads or hands off. Then we have Exhibit B, the flag of Mozambique, also a modern example:

Yep, that's a Kalashnikov! The flag was adopted in 1983 and is based upon the flag of the Liberation Front of Mozambique, which fought for independence from Portugal and eventually won. A Marxist party, it incorporates as its symbol a hoe, book, and gun, a common Marxist collection to show the unity of various parts of society. In the 90s the party dropped its Marxist ideology but hasn't changed the flag. Opposition groups have called for a new image, but so far nothing has changed.

Now I know it's not politically correct to criticize anyone's culture but your own, but I have to say, "People, change your bloody flags!" And I do mean bloody. How am I supposed to explain flags like these to a four year-old?

Ichthyoelectroanalgesia!

A few weeks ago a fellow writer invited me to tag along to a talk at Oxford University Press about the Oxford English Dictionary, the most complete English dictionary in the world. One of the editors told us about how they put the dictionary together and all the work that goes into it. They have hundreds of readers around the world who scour through newspapers, magazines, and books looking for new words or new uses for old ones. An interesting detail was that the editors reject the majority of words people send in because they are too new, too rare, too regional, or just plain misused.

I gave them a word that probably will get rejected. Ichthyoelectroanalgesia! If you know your Classical languages, you know this means using an electric fish as a pain reliever. I came across the word in an archaeology article about old Roman and Parthian medical recipes, including one that involved pressing an area of your body that's giving you trouble against an electric fish. Apparently the low charge will relieve the pain. No, I haven't tried it.

This word stuck with me for a couple of years until I got swept up in the zine movement of the mid Nineties. Actually it started way before that, so I was hitting the second wave. Anyway, I produced my own zine dedicated to travel and archaeology and called it, you guessed it, Ichthyoelectroanalgesia. I only did four issues before I went on to other things, but I had a distribution of about two hundred and met lots of interesting people through the mail, including some I still correspond with.

I Googled my beloved word and found that two archives have copies of my zine. I've passed into zine history! One is for science fiction fanzines, which is strange since mine wasn't an sf zine, but I did trade with some sf fanzines so maybe that's where they got it from.

I'm also very proud I got to stump an editor at the OED with a word. :-)

Settled in Oxford

We've been in Oxford for two months now and we've really settled down, meeting the neighbors and making friends. The problem with Oxford is that it's such a nice place with so much going on that it's hard to focus on work! We've both been trying the discipline ourselves to get enough work done each day, but as you can see from some of the posts in my other blog, I've had mixed success.

Julián has been loving Oxford. His English is much better. Back in Madrid I was the only person who regularly spoke to him in English, so while he understood everything, he didn't say much. Now he's rattling on in English, even when he's playing by himself, and he's even picking up a bit of an English accent!

The school we have him at is good too. It's a Montessori school, and that allows him to pursue his own interests, mostly things related to geography like maps and animal cards. He's also producing two or three drawings a day.

I like the diversity there too. Most of the kids are bilingual or even trilingual, and his best friend is a little Nepali guy who is so much like him I beginning to think they're twins separated at birth. His school back in Madrid is mostly Spanish kids, with only a few North Africans and South Americans, so I'm glad he's getting to interact with so many different kinds of people. The best part is that he doesn't notice the differences at all; they're just the kids he plays with! Growing up in a whites-only neighborhood and a whites-only school, I had to unlearn a few things. Hopefully he won't have to unlearn anything.

When Your Child Scares You

Julián's obsession with flags continues. He likes looking at our visual dictionary because it has pictures of all the world's flags (along with lots of cars, his other obsession) and he also likes the Flags of the World site because it has an interactive map, a coloring section, and lots of regional and city flags too. I never thought a three year-old could get so focused on something. A couple of nights ago we were on the website, flying around Africa in our imaginary plane, and I showed him the flag of Chad:

He asked me, "Where's the crest?"

"There is no crest, kid," I replied.

He hopped off my lap, pulled the visual dictionary off the shelf, opened it to the flag section, and asked, "What flag is this, Papa?"

He was pointing to the flag of Andorra:

OK, now I'm worried.

Flags Of The World

Hmmm, never seen this flag before? Well, that's because it's not for a country but a website. To feed Julián's continuing interest in flags, I found Flags of the World. It's the Internet's biggest site devoted to vexillology (the study of flags) and has images for more than 75,000 flags. They have all the countries, of course, as well as regions, cities, military flags, etc. This is Julián's favorite site at the moment, even knocking demolition derby clips on YouTube into second place. The interactive world map is the best way to navigate the site, and there's a section for blank flags to print out and color. Suddenly our refrigerator has become covered in flags! Below is the flag of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark that recently voted for more independence, but not full independence.

Below is the regional flag for the western province of Ilulissat Kommuniat, Jakobshavn. Glaciers and snowflakes. How appropriate!

And here is the flag for the big island just off its coast, Qeqertarsuup Kommuniat, Godhavn. Northern lights above a whale.

Hmmm...all these flags are on a white field, so they don't show up too well with a white background. They are all rectangles, as are most flags of the world with the exception of Nepal. Are there any other exceptions?

Learning the Flags on Embassy Row

I was a single dad for the past nine days because Almudena was off in Oxford and Bonn for work. She brought me back a nice bottle of German mead, so all is forgiven. One of the nice things about taking care of Julián solo is I get to take him to school. It's right next to where Almudena works so usually that's her job.

Julián loves the bus. He already has several "bus friends", some of the drivers know his name, and he likes to read the numbers of the passing buses. Must be his mother's mathematical mind. His school is along embassy row, so I've been teaching him the flags. There's no better way to show off than to have your three year-old shout out, "Look, the flag of Colombia!!!"

What strikes me is how much the embassies symbolize their countries. The French embassy is a marble palace. The Japanese have a clean, modern office building. The American embassy is a fortress.

And the embassy of Canada, my own country? A little office in an upper floor of a nondescript building tucked away on a side street. Ah well.

"I Want To Go To The Science Museum"

When you hear your 2 1/2 year-old son say this, you know you're doing something right. As I mentioned in a previous post, Julian has become obsessed with the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Now when he wakes up he asks to go there. He needs to see the Iguanodon and play with the microscope, after all.

Sad to say, I'm now in Missouri and he and his mother are back in Madrid. Apparently he really liked being home for a couple of days, then started getting upset because he couldn't do all his favorite Oxford activities.

I know what you mean, kid, American microbrews are nothing compared to good, honest English real ales.

Well, at least we'll be back in Oxford for six months next year.

These past two weeks have been interesting from a parenting point of view. Julian has always been an active and observant kid, but being in a different country, and being in a small town instead of in the center of Madrid, really opened his eyes. He got to feed ducks for the first time, climb trees, play by the river, all the stuff country kids take for granted. He was amazingly energetic, ate hugely, slept like a log, and learned a bunch of English. Hopefully we'll be able to schedule some regular periods of fresh air from now on.

Raising A Museum Junkie

One of the best parts about parenting is seeing your kid excited about something you love, and I've discovered that Julian is a bit of a museum junkie like his papa. We're in Oxford at the moment, and I've been taking care of him in the mornings while Almudena works, and then she takes over while I work in the afternoons. Part of our morning routine is to go to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where he gets to touch ammonites, pet a stuffed cheetah, and stare at dinosaurs. He's even learned how to use the zoom and focus on a microscope, even though he's not yet three.

It's good exercise too, because he runs all over the place. His attention span doesn't stay on anything long (the record is fifteen minutes on the microscope) but he'll flit from display to display for an hour or more before wanting to go off to University Park to play football or climb trees. My proudest moment as a museum-loving dad came when he learned his first dinosaur word--iguanodon!!! He's also learned ammonite, malichite, and tyrannosaurus rex, although he has trouble pronouncing that one.

Do I have a scientist in the making?

Photo of Oxford University Museum of Natural History interior by Michael Reeve, 30 May, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo of Iguanodon Bernissartensis at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium by Paul Hermans, 28th of December 2007, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

International Year of Sanitation

If you've been reading my blog for a while you know I'm planning a big trip to Ethiopia, although I won't be able to go for more than a year since we're researching in Oxford for most of 2009. I always keep a close eye on East African news to learn a bit before I go, and I came across a depressing article in BBC's Focus on Africa Magazine about the main river in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, having become an open sewer. The reporter interviewed a family living in the slum right next to the sewer/river, who have to haul water from a pipe a kilometer away. While their drinking water may (or may not) be clean, they still have to deal with the stench.

This is all too common in the developing world, and "First World" water is none too clean what with all the chemicals in our water table. In Varanasi I saw people bathing in the Ganges not a hundred meters downriver from where bodies were being burned. In Nepal I saw hillsides covered in human filth, with pigs rooting around in it and the village water supply flowing nearby.

That's why the UN declared 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation. No, I didn't know that until today either. Basically they want to teach people how to keep their water sources clean. Not a bad idea, but a little leveling out of wealth might help too. How about fewer wars and more water treatment plants? Or fewer billionaires and more jobs with living wages? Nah, no government would ever go for that.

Faking Divorce for the Sake of the Children

I mentioned my son's new school a couple of posts back ("The Religion Room") but didn't talk about how fierce the competition is for getting a place in public schools, which can vary widely in quality. Spaniards are are happy to falsify applications in order to get their kids in their chosen school: faking addresses, lowering incomes, creating illnesses, and now, apparently, they're faking divorces.

A kid from a single-parent home gets more points on their application, so according to a recent BBC article Spaniards are now pretending to get divorced, or sometimes really going through with it, to get their kid in the best school. The divorce rate goes up during application time, and many of these separations are miraculously patched up after the school year starts.

A long history of dictatorship followed by a succession of scandal-ridden governments has made Spaniards the most politically cynical people I've ever met in a democratic country. Many have no problems lying to a government that lies to them, and if it helps their child's education, why not? In a country where divorce wasn't even legal until 1981, the culture has now embraced separations of convenience.

Yet when the Pope died there were Catholic flags everywhere.

The Religion Room

Yesterday Almudena and I took Julián to see the school he'll be going to next year. I'd never gotten a good look at a Spanish public school before and I have to say I was impressed. The classrooms were well stocked, everything was clean, and they had some amazing computerized blackboards that immediately hypnotized all the toddlers on the tour.

One room they didn't show us was the classroom for religion. The topic is optional, although the conservative party wants to change that, and about half the parents opt for their child to have an hour of reading instead.

I'll be one of those parents. We passed by the religion class on the tour and I poked my head in. Virtually everything was Christian--posters on the life of Jesus, the Ten Commandments, a crucifix at the front of the class, etc. At the back of the class there was one poster on the "Religions of the World" that listed Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. There are a few more than that, folks!

I told this to Almudena and she just shrugged, saying "Religion class in Spain is Catholicism."

OK, fair enough. The vast majority of Spaniards are at least nominally Catholic, but I want my kid to have a well-rounded religious education. I'm an agnostic, but I think it's important.

It'll be easy enough. We know Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, Pagans, Bahai, and Zoroastrians. I even know one amusing little atheist who insists that his "knowing" there is no god is somehow less dogmatic than religious people "knowing" there is.

Between all these people and our well-stocked library I think we can educate him about all types of belief, not just the dominant one in his culture. Education isn't just about teaching kids the familiar, it's about exposing them to the different.