The Night of the Crazy Flags

As many of you may have gathered, I was bored during the Long Break. I missed the other Strategists. So, when the Strategists arrived back, I was quite thrilled when a number of them ended up in one room at one time. And, of course, that room was the SOC.

Following up on the Night of the Crazy Maps, we had the Night of the Crazy Flags. CN Sister, pictured, showed up with a bunch of flags that she'd brought with her after her visit home to the States. In the process of putting them up, CN Warden (whose girlfriend thinks we should change his code name, and who hasn't been pictured previously here at Operation Highlander) decided to don the Union Flag as a cape - quite stylish, as if he's our own personal Action Man or some friendly British version of Superman. At any rate, using a veritable arsenal of push pins, we mounted the flags upon these hallowed SOC walls over the course of the evening.

At present, we have: a pirate flag on the little window in the SOC's door, a Scottish Lion Rampant, Italy, Wyoming (pictured previously), Spain, Catalan, Denmark (which CN Sister has subsequently used as a blanket), the Scottish Saltire, Peru, North Korea, the Falkland Islands, the United Kingdom, the Bundesrepublik of Deutschland (Germany), and Ireland. Of those flags, I think that the Falklands and North Korea belong to CN Ness, Wyoming belongs to me, the Lion Rampant belongs to CN GBU-16, and the rest belong to CN Sister. As you can see, CN GBU-16 even showed up in her running gear to get into the act (and, as usual, looked gorgeous in the process).

Along with the maps (and my recent addition of a loop of paracord to the ceiling above my desk for hanging bundles of bananas from), the flags really make this otherwise clinical room feel a bit more like home away from home. It makes it a lot more comfortable to spend, say, twelve hours in the SOC working on a journal article, or researching deterrence, or discussing the finer points of arms control theory. And we owe it all to the Night of the Crazy Flags.