House Flags

The trigger: MC&S ad
Image via Wikipedia
(fair use to illustrate blog)
In one of those chains of odd connections, it turns out I want to write an article about "house flags"... these are the flags that civil shipping companies fly on their ships to show what line the ship belongs to. The same scheme is often used to decorate the smokestack(s) on more modern ships, which can be seen from farther away

Why do I want to write that article? Well you can thank Rettetast, I guess. He, or his bot, left me a message that a magazine ad image I uploaded (conforming to the then current Fair Use standards) long long ago (mid May 2006, and 2 years is a long time in wiki time) to illustrate the Merritt-Chapman & Scott article was no longer in compliance with current practice, and I needed to write a better justification. Perfectly legitimate and an important thing to fix, since the WMF has mandated all wikis be in compliance with fair use.

In reviewing the article I thought to myself it would be nice, since the MC&S house flag featured in the logo (and in the bottom of the ad) if I could find a house flag image to use that was better than the very grainy one in the ad. So I searched, only to find this page. It has a better house flag all right, drawn by Eugene Ipavec... but the irony of it alll! It's a recreation, based on the very Wikipedia article and image I myself uploaded!

This spurred me to search, and I found that the term "house flag" is used over 30 times in articles but has no article of its own. Doing the research is problematic though, as the term is very common and thus you get a lot of false returns. But I thing I may have found some few tidbits and if i can tear myself away from drama I will take a crack at changing the redirect I put in to become a real article. It may not end up very large but it would be better than the tidbit in the Maritime flags article (which itself is better than nothing)

What serendipitous connections, or even self referential ones, have you found that spurred you? And do you have any leads for good sources for a House flag article? (grin)