Drunk with power, last night I did some severe pruning in Wikipedia’s main Heraldry article, taking out a lot of arcana that do not belong in an overview (barrulets? erminites?) and adding a few paragraphs on design principles, symbolism (or lack thereof) and styles. I’m eager to see what someone will do to it next.

I’ve also been poking at a lot of Buffy-related pages, mostly adding links and reshaping awkward or prolix sentences to my taste.

I wonder whether any entity in Holstein uses a symbol like this. The coat of arms of the former Counts is usually described as a white nettle-leaf (nesselblatt) on a red field, but has also been seen as a white field with a red indented border.

Twenty years ago I sometimes played cards with a deck of six suits: the extras (both blue) were boat-wheels and pairs of tennis racquets. Recently I thought, if I were designing a deck with new suits, they’d be heraldic favorites – crescents, stars, fleurs-de-lis – to go with the lozenges, trefoils and hearts that also appear often in armory: all more recognizable than those blue thingies.

And that in turn reminded me of Saturday morning advertisements for Lucky Charms breakfast cereal: “pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers.” Today at the grocery barn I looked for a box of Lucky Charms to check my memory, and found the stars and shamrocks replaced by rainbows and – oh come now – green leprechaun hats. How long has this been going on?!

Sir George Martin’s new coat of arms

Idea for Ron Paul: attach a rider to Patriot II, to change the flag, because it has become customary to do so when instituting a new tyranny.

Ananova: EU rejects call to change flag. Whew, and yet – Is anyone somehow a bit disappointed?