I moved all my Evernote notes to markdown format (a tutorial that I need to write). I keep control of my files, not some other company. And markdown is free. Markdown is a plain text format that is readable. It’s not some complicated format that will be unusable years from now.

Every day I create a new note to capture my ideas. I keep all these notes in a program called Obsidian (also free). It gives me an easy way to search through all my notes.

I’ve been using markdown for my daily notes since 2021. It’s a system that works for me. I sync my notes via Dropbox, so they’re available on multiple computers.

However, I never bothered with images. I don’t want to use up storage on Dropbox because it has a cap on how much storage I can use.

My notes are all text. If there is a note referring to an image, I just put the filename in there. If I need to reference the file, I would search my hard drive for it. Honestly, that rarely happens.

But it would be nice to have the images show in the notes. Obsidian’s default way of handling this… if you drag an image into your note, it includes the reference to the image in the note. It saves a copy of the image to your main Obsidian folder (called a vault). That is not going to work for me, because I don’t want a ton of images building up in my Dropbox.

I need my images to be OUTSIDE my Obsidian vault. But that image needs to appear in the note.

I came up with a solution. Anytime I put an image in a dedicated folder, it automatically copies the image’s path. I got into my markdown note, and paste in the path. Boom. The image appears!

It involves a bit of AppleScript, so this will work only on Macs.

The Setup Steps

1. Create the folder

Set a dedicated folder on your computer that is OUTSIDE your Vault. (Remember, we don’t want this to be in a Dropbox folder).

I keep my folder at: /Users/myusername/Documents/Images-for-Obsidian/202607

To make things manageable, I have a folder for every month. That way, I don’t have a bajillion images in one folder. And over time, if I need to transition the folder off my local hard drive, I can take all the months from one year, and do the work.

2. Create the Script

1. Open the Script Editor app on your Mac.
2. Paste the following AppleScript into the window:

AppleScript

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
    set finalString to ""
    
    repeat with anItem in added_items
        -- Get the POSIX path of the file
        set thePath to POSIX path of anItem
        
        -- Replace spaces with %20
        set {TID, text item delimiters} to {text item delimiters, " "}
        set pathList to text items of thePath
        set text item delimiters to "%20"
        set encodedPath to pathList as string
        set text item delimiters to TID
        
        -- Build the Markdown string
        set theMarkdownLink to "![](" & "file://" & encodedPath & ")"
        
        -- Append to finalString with a newline if it's not the first item
        if finalString is "" then
            set finalString to theMarkdownLink
        else
            set finalString to finalString & linefeed & theMarkdownLink
        end if
    end repeat
    
    -- Copy to clipboard
    set the clipboard to finalString
    
    -- Confirmation
    display notification "Path(s) copied to clipboard!" with title "Folder Action Complete"
end adding folder items to

3. Go to File > Save.
4. Crucial: Save it in the folder: ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/. Name it something like “CopyPathToClipboard.scpt”.
   • Tip: If you don’t see the Library folder in your home directory, hold the Option key while clicking the “Go” menu in Finder; “Library” will appear.
     

3. Attach the Action to Your Folder

1. In Finder, right-click the folder you want to watch (e.g., your “External Assets” folder).
2. Select Services > Folder Actions Setup…
3. Ensure Enable Folder Actions is checked at the top.
4. In the list on the left, find your folder. If it’s not there, click the + button to add it.
5. With the folder selected, click the + button in the “Script” column on the right.
6. Select the CopyPathToClipboard.scpt you just saved and click Attach.

How to use this workflow

1. Drop an image file into that specific watched folder.
2. Wait a split second. The script will fire automatically in the background.
3. Go to your Obsidian note and press Cmd + V. The formatted Markdown link is already waiting on your clipboard.

Important Caveats

• Multiple files at a time: This script is designed to handle multiple images. Since you are dropping files into a folder, the script will trigger immediately upon the file being moved into that folder. If you move 10 photos at once, the finalString variable will accumulate all 10 links, and once the loop completes, it will push the entire block of text to your clipboard at once.
  
• The “Drop” Delay: If you are moving a very large volume of files (e.g., 100+), the script may take a few seconds to process. You will know it is finished once you see the notification.
  
• Overwriting: Remember that every time you drop files into this folder, it will overwrite whatever was previously on your clipboard. If you need to append to an existing list in your note, paste the previous result first before dropping the next set of files.
  
• Testing: Try dropping just two images first to ensure the line breaks (linefeed) appear exactly how you want them in your Obsidian note.
  

By using this, you achieve a fully “passive” workflow: you simply drop the image(s) into the folder, and the Markdown text is instantly ready to be pasted into your note.

The post Obsidian users: How to keep your vault on Dropbox, but keep the images outside Dropbox appeared first on Spudart.

Last week we went to Hen House in Wheaton for lunch, and I ordered the “Egg Mountain,” mostly because it comes with pancakes on the side. I love their pancakes. The main part of the meal is always so filling that I can save the pancakes and bring them home.

When pancakes are a side at a brunch restaurant, they tend to feel like a throw-in side. Like, “I ordered an omelet, and what? You are giving me pancakes too? I didn’t really order them, but sure, ok.” Then you are like, “Oh man, now I got these pancakes.”

But I’m telling ya, those pancakes can come into good use.

By the way, when you’re at a restaurant and having a hard time deciding what to order, do you ever look up photos of the dishes on Yelp? I do that sometimes. I strictly don’t use my phone when eating with others, but I can’t resist the urge to see what the food will look like.

The name of “Egg Mountain” sounded fun. Listen to these ingredients:

Cherry applewood bacon, sausage, ham, onions, peppers, and aged Wisconsin cheddar cheese. All caramelized with 2 broken eggs piled with cubed potatoes mountain high. Served with toast or pancakes.

But after our giant omelet experience at Yolk in Chicago, I wasn’t sure if I wanted another massive egg concoction. So I looked up photos of Hen House’s Egg Mountain on Yelp, and there was a photo that looked pretty appealing.

Sure, I’ll order that!

Then I looked closer to see who posted it. It was me! Apparently, I had already ordered this exact thing two years ago and completely forgot. My photo even became the primary photo for one of their featured dishes.

The invention of the PB&J pancake sandwich

The next day, I pulled out my leftover pancakes for lunch. Normally I put yogurt on pancakes, but I’d already had yogurt for breakfast.

I figured jelly could work instead. That’s kind of like syrup, right? And if you’re putting jelly on a pancake, you might as well add peanut butter. And if you’re doing peanut butter and jelly, you might as well put the two halves together like a sandwich. One pancake is more than enough to make one.

The kids were TOTALLY excited, and a little jealous of my new sandwich.

The end result? I didn’t have enough peanut butter and jelly on it. I’d put on the same amount I’d use on regular bread. That’s not enough. A pancake demands more. The fluffy thickness of the pancake overpowers the peanut butter and jelly. You need to load it up. Sometimes the thing you’re working with requires more than you first thought. Go all the way and load up on the peanut butter!

I saved one pancake for the next day and told the kids they’d get a PB&J Pancake Sandwich too. They were so amped. They reminded me to put on extra peanut butter and jelly.

See the jelly oozing out the side? That’s the correct ratio. It was a hit with the kids.

Now we’re considering writing a letter to Hen House suggesting they put this on their kids menu. It bridges breakfast and lunch. It’s totally the perfect brunch sandwich. Kids love PB&J, and kids love pancakes. This combines both. (While they are at it, put it on the regular menu for adults too!)

Good things don’t always have to stay in the category where they started. Sometimes breakfast can become lunch, leftovers can become something new, and what seemed like “extra” turns out to be exactly enough.

The post Introducing the PB&J pancake sandwich appeared first on Spudart.

This time, it’s for my official coin used to settle family disputes. His post “Your Coin Toss Stories” uses a clip from my blog post, An official coin for family decisions.

Ironically, both of the articles are about the Cubs in the World Series.

The post I made it into another one of Paul Lukas’ articles appeared first on Spudart.

For the past few days, I’ve been taking two toys at random from my closet and putting them on my desk for the day. Every day I change out the set. Throughout the day, I look at the toys and consider their similarities.

Today is: Pokémon Fuecoco and Dinobot Snarl

Commonalities

• Prehistoric roots: Both characters share a common conceptual ancestor in the dinosaur family. Snarl is a robotic Stegosaurus, while Fuecoco is a fire-type creature, kinda like a young theropod.
• Armored exteriors: Visually, both toys have protective-looking physical traits. Snarl possesses the iconic metallic plates along its back, while Fuecoco has a bold, solid, and blocky physique that gives it a sense of built-in durability.
• Warm color palette: They have a nice, strong color harmony. Both figures utilize a vibrant mix of oranges, yellows, and reds.
• Sturdy presence: Despite one being a mechanical warrior and the other a fun monster, both are designed with a “chunky” aesthetic that gives them a significant sense of weight.

Differences/contrasts

• Ancient power vs. modern charm: Snarl represents the industrial aesthetic of 1980s mechanical beasts, while Fuecoco embodies the clean, rounded, and expressive design language of contemporary Pokémon.
• The unlikely guardian: Snarl looks like a big brother. His imposing armored body watches over the smaller Pokémon.
• Tactile textures: Snarl has hard-plastic mechanical plates. Fuecoco has smooth, organic, and inviting curves.

The post Pokemon Fuecoco and Dinobot Snarl appeared first on Spudart.

I love how the Kodak Charmera keychain camera is able to shoot so low to the ground. I think that’s actually the strongest point of the camera. Sure, it’s cute. The photos are retro-looking. Those are nice points. But the lens gets so close to the ground, it makes for fun worm’s-eye-view photos.

Today I was playing around with the camera on my desk. I photographed my Destro metal mini-figure. The background was a bit distracting with hard drives stacked on books. So I grabbed the nearest sheet of paper, which happened to be a story from the “Short Story Dispenser” from my local library.

The story, Squiggle Monster by Kristy Roser Nuttall, is quite good, I’m going to have a blog post about it soon on spudart.org—once I get back to the library and get a photo of the machine that dispenses these stories.

Actually, I have a number of to-dos related to this image

1. Photograph the Short Story Dispenser at my library.
2. Photograph of the Kodak Charmera shooting so low to the ground. Maybe make a blog post about it when I accumulate enough on-the-ground photos.
3. Submit a story to the Short Story Dispenser.

So many things to do. I could withhold my blog posts until I get them done. But sometimes you just gotta blog. That’s exactly what this “notepad” category on my blog is for. These looser thoughts.

I go through the thousands of photos on my hard drive from the past 25 years. So many photos. So many times I’ve never written about them or published the photos. Mostly because I was waiting to do something else.

This photo of Destro could have just sat in my archives, and nobody would have ever saw it. But I figured, ok, I’ll just write something about it, and post it on Flickr. And now that it’s on Flickr, I’m expanding the story with this blog post. I’m continually amazed by Dave Winer of scripting.com, and how he can just write and post. Write and post. Do his topics repeat? Yeah. But it actually works, because you get a feel for what he stands for. And a lot of the things he stands for, I also believe in. Like, decentralized, open web technologies, and independent publishing. And so I continue to read his blog.

The post Destro in front of Squiggle Monster appeared first on Spudart.

I followed the same 13-fold triangular method today. But I wasn’t folding the Stars and Stripes.

I was folding the Chicago-style hot dog flag.

And the protocol here demands something different entirely. When the final fold is complete, and the triangle rests in your hands, you don’t look for stars. You look for a perfect field of neon green relish, sports peppers, and a stripe of yellow mustard. The poppy seed bun. The tomato wedge peeking in at the edge. The celery salt, implied.

I’m pleased to report: the fold was successful.

Why a Chicago hot dog flag?

I’ve written before about finding more days to fly your American flag. The American Flag Foundation lists 19 official days to fly the Stars and Stripes, but March and August sit there completely empty. What are you supposed to do, just not fly anything?

My answer has been to collect flags that deserve their own holidays. I fly the Estonian flag every February 24th for Estonian Independence Day. I’ve thought seriously about flying flags for presidential birthdays. I once proposed flying the American flag for a friend’s 50th birthday — fifty stars for fifty years.

The Chicago-style hot dog flag fits naturally into this philosophy. Chicago has its own holidays. Chicago has its own pride. A flag deserves a folding ceremony.

The flag itself was designed and illustrated by Anthony Hall of Hare Brained Design, a Chicago artist who has built an entire collection of Chicago-themed flags and pennants.

The Chicago-style hot dog flag is no longer available available again. He’s also got flags and pennants for deep dish, Italian beef, the CTA, and dive bars.

The fold itself

The 13-fold triangular method for the American flag has documented symbolism for each fold. The first fold represents life. The second, belief in eternal life. By the thirteenth, you have a triangle representing the tricornered hat of the Revolutionary War soldiers.

For the Chicago-style hot dog flag, here are our thirteen meanings:

1. The poppy seed bun — the foundation that holds everything together
2. The Vienna Beef frank — the reason we’re all here
3. Yellow mustard — bold, simple, the first layer of flavor
4. Neon green relish — the color that started a thousand arguments about what relish is supposed to look like
5. Fresh white onions — the sharp bite that keeps you honest
6. The tomato wedge — summer in Chicago, sliced
7. The sport pepper — the heat that sneaks up on you
8. The dill pickle spear — the crunch that ties it all together
9. Celery salt — the finishing touch you can’t quite name but would immediately miss
10. The blue line around the bun — the border, the boundary, the flag’s own Chicago flag blue
11. The poppy seeds — too many to count, like the neighborhoods of this city
12. The vivid yellow field — Chicago in summer, bright and unapologetic
13. The triangle itself — a proper Chicago dog is a complete thing, and now so is this flag

By fold thirteen, when the triangle sat in my hands with that blast of yellow and the glimpse of green relish peeking from the edges — something felt right.

Days to fly the Chicago-stye hot dog flag

I made a Google Calendar for American flag days a few years back. Maybe it’s time to make a second one. Chicago Holidays. Flag-flying reminders. The hot dog flag goes up; the city gets honored.

Chicago’s birthday is March 4th. (Happy 189th this year.) The city was incorporated in 1837. That’s an obvious day. But the hot dog flag deserves a broader calendar:

• March 4: Incorporated (city) 1837
• End of March, beginning of April: Opening Day at Wrigley Field and Guaranteed Rate (baseball and Chicago dogs are inseparable)
• April 4: Chicago flag designed (1917)
• May 1: World’s Fair opened in Chicago (1893)
• May 27: Century of Progress Exposition opened (1933)
• August 12: Incorporated (town) 1833
• August 16: Fort Dearborn burned to ground (1812)
• October 8: Chicago fire started (1871)

View this calendar. Or add this to your Google Calendar.

A flag worth the ceremony

There’s something genuinely moving about treating a ridiculous flag with complete seriousness. The beige flag deserves to fly. The Idaho flag deserves its July 3rd. The Estonian flag deserves its February 24th, with Arvo Pärt playing on the speakers.

And the Chicago-style hot dog flag — vivid yellow, that glorious pile of toppings rendered in full color — deserves its thirteen folds and its triangular rest.

The post Folding the Chicago-style hot dog flag appeared first on Spudart.

LOL LOL LOL

But I’m here for it. Let’s start the horizontal movement—the way it should have been all along.

The post Instagram’s horizontal awakening appeared first on Spudart.

She pulled out a plastic bag full of foam star stickers and asked the girls if they’d like silver, gold, blue, red, or green. One of my daughters chose gold. The other chose blue.

The kind woman explained that she likes giving them out because a few years ago she came across a sticker that said, “You are beautiful.” A friend of hers at the Elmhurst library knows the artist personally. So now she spreads shiny stars to people as a little act of encouragement.

I told her I was familiar with the artist, Matthew Hoffman, and that he’s been making larger sculptures these days. I actually attended his 10-year anniversary show back in 2013 for the “You are beautiful” project. Here’s one of my photos from the show.

She headed back to her table to start her dinner. But before we left the restaurant, I walked over to her and mentioned that I also carry metallic stars in my wallet. I showed her my tiny sticker sheet and offered her a pick of whatever colors she wanted. She chose gold and green.

I found it so amusing — she gives out random shiny stars to strangers, and here I am carrying a small sheet of metallic stars in my wallet. She couldn’t believe it. Honestly, I couldn’t either.

A sheet of gold stars has been in my wallet since 2013 (blog post). On the drive home, I explained to my wife where the idea originally came from. The podcast I listen to, Bible Project, does Q&A episodes where one of the hosts, Tim Mackie, will often say after a good listener question, “that person gets a gold star.” It’s always a metaphorical gold star (the questions come in as voicemails) but it stuck with me.

So over ten years ago, I brought actual gold star stickers to one of our Bible study sessions as something fun. Whenever someone made a really good point, I’d give them a literal gold star. My friends found it hilarious. I kept a sheet in my wallet ever since, just in case.

Well. Ten years later, I finally remembered they were in there — and got to use them again.

The post Unexpected connection over star stickers appeared first on Spudart.

This is the flag the Republic of Macedonia used from 1992-1995

Look at that flag. The curves at the ends of the rays do a great job of implying there’s an orb at the center. It doesn’t look like a disc — it looks like a spiked ball.

A spiked ball could communicate “we project fierce, spiked defense to anyone approaching from the outside.” But from what I understand, Macedonia gained their freedom from Yugoslavia peacefully in 1991. So a spiked ball of war isn’t really the message they were going for. Maybe a spiked ball massager would be more fitting?

The official statement for the flag calls it a “disc”, not a sphere. And the real story behind it is way more interesting than weapon comparisons. In 1977, archaeologists dug up the tomb of King Philip II of Macedon — the father of Alexander the Great. This symbol was on his tomb.

The father of Alexander the Great! You can see why the brand new nation of Macedonia wanted to put this on their flag. It reaches back to the prestigious roots of ancient Macedonia. It says: we have history. We have roots. We are the real deal.

Archaeologists called it the Vergina Sun (named after the town Vergina, where the tomb was unearthed in Central Macedonia, Greece)

Two weeks of glory

In 1992, the Republic of Macedonia adopted the Vergina Sun for their flag. It lasted exactly two weeks before the trouble started.

• July 11, 1992: The flag of Macedonia is introduced.
• July 25, 1992: Due to Greek objections, the United Nations, the Olympic Games, and foreign embassies were barred from flying it.

Two weeks. The flag was two weeks old when it got banned from the Olympics.

Greece’s argument: That’s our symbol. It belongs to our northern province, which is also named Macedonia. The Greek government feared that a new, sovereign Slavic nation calling itself “Macedonia” and flying Alexander the Great’s royal family crest implied a territorial claim on Greece’s own northern lands.

Talk about conflict! Over graphic design! I love it!

The more technical reason for the Olympic ban was that Macedonia’s National Olympic Committee hadn’t yet been formally recognized by the International Olympic Committee. But the outcome was the same: those poor athletes from Macedonia. They had just gotten their independence, and now they couldn’t compete under their own flag. Six Macedonian athletes competed as Independent Olympic Participants (IOP) in the Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympic Games.

The six who competed anyway

Elizabeta Pavlovska Women’s 100 metres hurdles — Qualifying Heat: 14.26 (did not advance)

Lazar Popovski (competed in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004; flag bearer in 2000) Canoeing: Men’s Kayak Singles, Slalom — 123.82 (34th place)

Lazo Miloević Canoeing: Men’s Canadian Singles, Slalom — 170.22 (31st place)

Kire Filipovski (also competed in 1996) Swimming: Men’s 200 metre butterfly — Qualifying Heat: 2:08.71 (did not advance)

Nataša Meškovska Swimming: Women’s 100 metre butterfly — Qualifying Heat: 1:04.16 (did not advance) Swimming: Women’s 200 metre butterfly — Qualifying Heat: 2:16.54 (did not advance)

Zoran Šorov (also competed in 1984 and 1988) Wrestling: Men’s freestyle 57 kg

• Lost to Jürgen Scheibe (GER) 2–6
• Lost to Rumen Pavlov (BUL) by fall
• 7th in pool, did not advance

They competed without their flag, without their name fully recognized, as “Independent Olympic Participants” — a bureaucratic placeholder for a country that very much existed.

What is your country’s name, exactly?

The 1992 Olympics passed. In 1993, more bad news arrived. The United Nations declared the country would henceforth be called “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. That’s the name of their country. A six-word name. The UN explicitly stated that “the expression begins with the uncapitalized words ‘the former Yugoslav’, acting as a descriptive term, rather than ‘The Former Yugoslav’, which would act as a proper noun.”

So it’s lowercase the. This matters, apparently.

But it raised a whole new problem: where does a country called “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” sit alphabetically? Wikipedia’s entry on the Macedonia naming dispute explains what happened:

Greece rejected seating the Republic’s representative under M [as in “Macedonia (former Yugoslav Republic of)”], and the Republic rejected sitting under F (as in “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” which turned the reference into a proper noun rather than a description). Instead, it was seated under T as “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” and placed next to Thailand.

Seated under T. Next to Thailand. Because of a lowercase t in “the.”

The grievances kept stacking up. In 1994, Greece blocked Macedonia’s access to its closest seaport — an economic blockade that cost Macedonia 2 billion dollars.

In 1995, Macedonia capitulated. The Vergina Sun came off the flag.

Before we get into the new flag, let me point out that I came across this flag and its story on Phil Huckleberry’s newsletter, Meta-Spiel. He has an interesting perspective on the flag. Check out his post, Phthursday Musings: School’s Out.

The new flag (sort of)

It looks like they took the Vergina Sun’s rays and expanded them all the way to the borders of the flag. Which seems odd — Greece was so upset about the symbol, and yet here it still is, kind of. The sun is still there. The rays still burst outward.

There are some differences, though. Notice how the ends of the rays no longer curve. They end in a straight line just before meeting the sun disc. No more implied sphere. No more spiked ball. Just clean geometric rays that clearly read as flat — a disc, not an orb.

It’s a subtle distinction that apparently mattered enough to avoid another international incident.

The cartoonist who designed a country’s flag

The designer of the 1995 flag is a Macedonian named Miroslav Grčev. One year after designing the flag, he became mayor of the largest city in “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” A person who designs the country’s flag then becomes mayor of its biggest city. Has that ever happened anywhere else?

Grčev is, according to Wikipedia, a Macedonian architect, graphic designer, comic artist, and caricaturist.

Comic artist‽ The flag of a country was designed by a comic artist?

Are any of his comics online? Sadly, no. But there is a book, “Seven Decades of Macedonian Comics,” that mentions him. Here’s what Google Translate pulled out:

• Grčev published his first comic in March 1971 in the newspaper Fokus.
• His most famous creation was the weekly strip “Studentskiot Trajče,” which ran in Studentski zbor.
• He was also a director of short animated films, part of what was known as the “Macedonian school of cartoons.”
• He stopped creating comics in 1981, citing a lack of publishing space, the “immaturity” of the local environment in accepting the medium, and the incomprehensibly low valuation of comic creation at the time.

Back in 1980, Grčev directed a two-minute animated film called Black Flag. I cannot find a watchable version anywhere online, but the description goes like this:

A man with a black flag in his hands leads a large group of people. The masses obey the leader’s commands despite the fact that he is leading them into an abyss. However, the flag he carries is tied to a tree and from the collapsing table only the leader is saved, climbing the flag.

He made an animated film about a flag leading people into an abyss. Fifteen years later, he was designing his country’s flag.

How does a comic artist end up designing a national symbol? It actually makes a lot of sense when you look at his background. He had extensive graphic design experience. He was an architect accustomed to thinking about public space and identity. Starting in 1992, he worked on the Detailed Urban Plan for Skopje — a district-level master plan dictating building heights, land use, and construction conditions for individual plots. He was someone who thought professionally about how societies represent themselves in space. When the government needed someone to design a new national symbol during a political crisis, they found their person.

He hates what they did to his flag

Grčev talks about the design process in a detailed account (also available as a PDF on ResearchGate). He was given two conditions:

1. The new flag must use the same colors as previous national flags — a blood-red base with a golden-yellow symbol.
2. The flag must include a graphic symbol of the sun.

So he had to use the sun. He made a bunch of versions. Then the design that was selected got quietly altered without him. He has not gotten over it:

Moreover, someone, evidently at the last moment, had separated the rays from the sun’s disc, and left them cut away, spreading as planks. It was clear to me that the adopted design was a “victim” of an overnight “political debate” in which the “compromise” was an evident and ignorant uglification of the graphical solution, realised that night “on the fly”.

And:

Ever since that October I am carefully following the situation, and I’m waiting for the moment when there will be born a consciousness of the need of a technical, practically aesthetic, correction of the national flag, and it’s artistic harmonization. I am waiting for that moment persistently and unhesitantingly, even though I note that an aesthetic correction, as a curse or faith’s spite, has as little chance to gain political support, as much as, from an expert’s point of view, it is more logical and necessary.

He really doesn’t like that the rays don’t touch the sun. And honestly? I kinda agree with him. That red circle around the sun is a little distracting. The rays feel disconnected — like they’re floating nearby rather than radiating outward. His original vision must have felt more alive.

Today Grčev is admired by some as an independent thinker who challenges nationalist myths and defends modern urban planning. Others strongly disagree with his views on Macedonian history and identity. It’s curious that he was the one chosen to redesign the flag when he seems to have complicated feelings about Macedonian national symbolism — or maybe I’m misreading his position.

N-Mac

From 1993 to 2019, the country was officially known as “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” — a six-word name they carried for 26 years. They competed under that name in every Summer and Winter Olympics from 1996 through 2019.

In 2019, Greece and Macedonia agreed to alter the constitutional name. The International Olympic Committee formally approved the switch to North Macedonia. The first Olympic Games under that name was the 2020 Tokyo Games.

North Macedonia is a country. Now you know.

I thought our globe at home wouldn’t have North Macedonia on it at all — and I was especially curious how it would fit the full old name. But our globe is a newer edition. It’s got the country listed.

Abbreviated as N. Mac.

N-Mac. That’s a great name. After all that drama — the Greek objections, the 2-billion-dollar blockade, the six-word country name seated under T next to Thailand — maybe they should have just gone with N-Mac from the start.

The N-MAC t-shirt with Vergina Sun

Since there aren’t any N-MAC tshirts, I made one. You can buy it.

As if the front wasn’t cool enough, check out the back

That’s right, it’s got “N-MAC” on the back. The font uses round dots, mimicking the nice round edges to the rays on the Vegina Star. A nice big 92 points to the year when Macedonia couldn’t fly their new flag at the Summer Olympics. Now you can fly the Macedonia Vergina Star with this shirt. Get yours today!

Footnotes

These are side-points that aren’t really related to the post. But they were too much to not include.

Does anyone else call North Macedonia “N-Mac”? Googling “N-Mac” tshirt returns no results. Although there is this, uh, interesting shirt with “Still MAC’N“:

Someone also made cool soccer jerseys in the North Macedonia flag style:

You can see the sunburst in the jersey design. It also looks kind of like Tron. The bad guys in Tron’s colors were red and yellow. I’d get this jersey with “TESLER” on the back — General Tesler would most likely wear number 5 on the soccer field, representing the traditional number for a sweeper or central defender. As CLU’s cold, commanding henchman, he controls the backline and shuts down threats, acting as a defensive wall much like the character himself. Team name on the jersey: Argon City, the setting for Tron: Uprising.

But forget those t-shirts. Get the internet’s first authentic N-MAC t-shirt.

The post The flag that lasted three years appeared first on Spudart.

Ewoks have come with us to Disney World.

To church

To the zoo

And to the Art Institute of Chicago

Recently, Paploo came with us to dinner at Maize & Mash in Glen Ellyn. During dinner, my Ewok was sitting near the edge of the table, right where the waitress would come by. 

It occurred to me that one of the joys of having kids is being able to have an Ewok sitting on the table and nobody thinks twice about it. The obvious assumption is that the Star Wars action figure belongs to one of the children. But in this case, the real reason there was an Ewok at the table was that there was a 50-year-old kid sitting there too.

This blog post is available as the very first Spudart Zine. That’s right, issue #1. As a thank-you for reading through to the end of this blog post, I would like to snail-mail this to you for free. No cost for the zine. No cost for shipping. I want this zine to be in your hands.

Just fill out this form to let me know you’d like this zine. I’ll be happy to mail it to you.

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