Oh, and Bahrain has a vagina dentata, complete with pubic hair.
Poor old Eritrea, meanwhile, appear to have hastily cribbed theirs from a cigarette packet the night before the design competition closed.
And what is up with all the Phrygian caps? They may have originally been meant to evoke sturdy yeomanry manning the barricades while boldly throwing off the shackles of oppression, but now they just look as if the Smurfs were running a thrift shop.
Let’s all share Papa Smurf’s hat, shall we? But don’t touch it, you don’t know where it’s been.
The sun has got his hat on (a pole)
I’m sorry…
VAGINA DENTATA???
I want to google it to find out what it is… but I don’t.
oh god, why did I read this thread right before going to bed? I’m going to have vagina dentata nightmares…
My fave - the island where my grandmother was from. Dominica*.
The parrots are sisserou, which are native only to the rain forests of the island. There’s a coconut(?) palm, a banana tree, representing the only exports of the country - thoguh if it wanted to be more realistic it should have a fat tourist, since inbound tourism is the actual mainstay of the economy - and what I believe to be Columbus’s ship, since he was reputed to have discovered it.
Best of all though is a big fat froggie (known locally as crapaud), which is a local speciality. It tastes like chicken, of course.
*Note: NOT the Dominican Republic
Never mind. After a look at some of those things I can see that the fight was lost way back…
[Barry Sadler voice]
Fighting vultures from the sky
Fearless birds, who soar and dive
One hundred birds will test today
But only one wears the red beret.
[/BS voice]
They’ve got nothing on PNG.
Have y’all seriously looked at the US’s lately?
First of all, apparently we don’t cotton to this “Coat of Arms” nonsense. Oh no, we have to be different. We have a Great Seal.
On the front of the Great Seal is an obscene looking eagle who’s…um…spread eagle (where the hell does that expression come from, anyway?) in a most unnatural manner. I mean, really, does that look like an anatomically possible position for an eagle? It’s like it’s saying, “Jeez, I’m sorry about winning that National Bird competition, Turkey…but hey, I have drumsticks too!”
From a design point, I don’t understand why everything is naturalistic, with small details and shading, and then the clip art apron of modesty is slapped onto the bird’s breast.
Flip it over, and you get a pyramid in a desert with a floaty eye and more Latin. Ooh! Look, we’re so educated and obscure, we have a language we don’t speak, a building that doesn’t exist in our country, and Sauron’s Eye of Doom floating over the most inhospitable terrain our country has to offer. But, y’know, lovely horizon.
That’s not a hat or a UFO, that’s (a badly-drawn) Orko from He-Man! Clearly they revere The Masters of the Universe.
They stole their slogan from us…and translated it into English.
That’s nothing. Look at the flag of Poland, or is it Indonesia? How about The Netherlands and Luxemburg? Tunisia and Turkey?
That’s a Bird of Paradise. (I hesitate to guess what its popular name is! ;))
Grenada has cool supporters: an armadillo and a blue pigeon.
Thailand’s official Garuda emblem is just plain scary.
And Bhutan cheated; they procrastinated and instead sent in the King’s carpet.
In the voice of the Abominable Snowman in Bugs Bunny cartoons: I will love him and hug him and pet him and squeeze him and I will call him Harold.
You missed Monaco with Poland/Indonesia
And our sympathy to the folks in charge of Croatia, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia who had to face the challenge of a requirement that it HAS to be a horizontally striped RWB tricolor. Thank heavens for crests and arms, I guess.
Oh, and furthering the confusion, the one thing that distinguishes the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran flags is the Coat of Arms in the center… and now compare El Salvador and
Nicaragua.
These guys weren’t even trying! Actually, part of the thing that during the rest of the 19th century, they kept trying to re-constitute the USofCA, apparently each under the impression that themselves would be the natural seat/leader/Big Cheese thereof…
And in Re: Pierre Harold the Condor – See also his less-CG-kiddie versions in the CoAs of Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia.
The Andean nations are for some reason extremely enamored of the Andean condor, right down to the point where a popular kids’ cartoon character is Condorito.
PLOP
Doesn’t even have a fraggin’ seal on it…
I looked back a bit in the archives. It looks like at least half of the strips end in a Muttandjeffian backspring on the part of someone…