Canada | Flagging Headquarters

READY. AIM. FLAG!

View Comments 15 June 2010

By Atlas Al

Fans of basketball, baseball, tennis, American football, the annual Lumberjack World Championship – all are God awful when compared to soccer fans. You won’t see more beautiful women at any sporting event other than the World Cup. Yes, this is a fact.

The well known cliché goes “…is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel”. I say shooting fish in a barrel is as easy as flagging at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Whether looking at flag-painted fans in stands or watching their flag bikinis bounce on TV after their team made a goal, these flagging bullseyes can’t be missed.

Supporting your national team goes beyond supporting your local team back home. Local teams purchase and trade foreign players all the time. Real Madrid’s players aren’t all Spanish: Cristiano Ronaldo is from Portugal, Kaka is from Brazil, and English David Beckham had a stint with the team a few years back. Every four years, however, football players put on their country’s uniform and play for their countrymen back home. Fans feel the same pride when they slap on a T-shirt with their country’s flag and they’re well on their way to cheering their homeland.

I haven’t experienced a World Cup yet; but when I do, I think I might short circuit with so many foreign women around. It’s too easy to spot who comes from which country because they paint themselves in their country’s colors and wear flag clothing.

Sports fans aren’t the only ones who wear flagging bullseyes – Canadian backpackers are notorious for sewing their flag into their packs. A Canadian once told me, it’s so foreigners don’t confuse them with Americans. Very true. Americans overseas would never broadcast their nationality for fear of unwanted attention. So, if you meet someone with a North American accent and they don’t have any flags anywhere to be seen, they’re probably American. My friend Dr Rim has been known to wear a Swedish flag on his pack, probably to take the piss out of Canadians.

Don’t forget to wear your flagging bullseyes the next time you’re at an international flagging range. Someone might snipe you.

[Check out more photos of Sexy World Cup Fans]

Flags of the World, African flags, South African flag, Canadian flag

Australia, Canada

HARD TO WEAR SOFTWARE

View Comments 23 February 2010

By The Hunger

The Olympic circus has come to Vancouver with all the global fervour and controversy we had hoped for. With flag mania sweeping the city, is everyone waving the right flag?

Australia’s performance at previous Winter Olympics is about as memorable as the name of the third astronaut to walk on the moon. In recent years, however, Australia has steadily improved its position on the medal tally.

Australia has won two medals so far: gold to Torah Bright for the women’s half pipe, and silver to Dale Begg-Smith in the men’s moguls.

On paper, Begg-Smith is about as Australian as Marmite. Canadian born, he came to Australia when he was 16 years old after a falling out with his native Canadian team. He has held an Australian passport for 6 years (he had to wait 3 years to actually get it), and now resides back in his hometown of Vancouver.

To clarify, he’s a Canadian flag, he’s an Australian citizen, and he currently resides in Vancouver, Canada. If the IOC’s rules were in tune with the Constitution of Flagging, Canada would have one more medal on their tally and Australia would have one less.

Changing nationalities just to play for another team shouldn’t be so easy.

Dale Begg-Smith’s case isn’t exceptional as there are many other sportsmen and women, past and present, who’ve flown a different flag in their pursuit of victory.

A person’s passport is generally the safest way to determine a person’s nationality (e.g., I was born and grew up in Sydney, Australia and hold an Australian passport. Case closed). For people who have had more elaborate upbringings (e.g., parents are from different countries, or people who have immigrated to a different country), their cases are more difficult to classify than Shaun White’s “Double McTwist 1260.”

I believe someone’s “home country” is like one’s hardware and the “adopted country” is like his/her software. “Home country” can have more than one definition: the place where someone is born or the place where someone spent the majority of their upbringing, or the more complex definition, “who they consider themselves to be more.”

When, if ever, can someone re-wire their hardware? Can the original hardware be modified after new software is installed?

Just because someone lives in a country different to their own, it doesn’t automatically disqualify them from representing their “home” nationality. Begg-Smith’s case is an example of this. I mean, if I were an elite winter sportsmen, there’d be more possibilities in Canada/U.S. than in Australia.

Australia’s other medallist, Torah Bright, also lives abroad in Salt Lake City, and she was the official flag bearer at the Opening Ceremony. But she didn’t represent the United States, did she?

I find it interesting to see which team a dual citizen will support when their teams go head to head, especially when they’ve lived in their “adopted country” for many years.

Is it possible for people to support two teams equally? It’s a difficult question for me to answer as it’s a choice I’ve never had to make. I would like to think that people prefer one team over the other no matter how infinitesimally small the difference is.

Many people share the same story as Begg-Smith. The world’s population is always on the move and there’s nothing wrong with looking for greener pastures.

The only way you’ll ever be accepted as someone from a certain country is not by how many medals you win, the number of years spent in the country, or even a flag branded on your body. Whatever country you come from, the most important issue to consider is if you feel honoured enough to fly your flag proudly.

Flags of the World, Oceanian flags, Australian flag, Canadian flag

Canada, United Arab Emirates

VANCOUVER’S FOREIGN BORN PERFECT STORM

View Comments 11 February 2010

By Atlas Al

Vancouver is a special city for many reasons. One reason in particular is that it has one of the highest concentrations of foreign born populations in the world.

A common definition of foreign born (or non-native) is someone born outside of their country of residence. It can apply to immigrants or expatriates (usually, expatriates intend to return to their country of origin). Dubai, for example, is tremendously multi-ethnic because the majority of the population (a whopping 82%) is from abroad. Most of these foreign born people – most notably from India – will have to return to their native lands because it’s impossible for foreigners to apply for UAE citizenship.

Urban sociologists Lisa Benton-Short, Marie Price and Samantha Friedman wrote a paper entitled Global Perspective on the Connections between Immigrants and World Cities. In it, they developed the Immigrant Index that measures global human migration and immigrant concentrations around the world.

According to these researchers, one of the many variables that should be considered when determining global cities is its foreign born population. I, too, agree that a city’s foreign born population should carry some weight when configuring global city rankings that might alter some of the current GaWC rankings.

The chart below shows some of the data collected from the Immigrant Index:

Rank	City	Country	Percent	Largest Source of Immigrants
1	Dubai	United Arab Emirates	82	India
2	Miami	United States	51	Cuba
3	Toronto	Canada	50	India
4	Amsterdam	Netherlands	47	Morocco
5	Muscat	Oman	44.6	India
6	Vancouver	Canada	39.02	People’s Republic of China
7	Auckland	New Zealand	39	England
8	Geneva	Switzerland	39.37	India
9	Mecca	Saudi Arabia	37.75	Pakistan
10	The Hague	Netherlands	36.57	Israel

To be considered a foreign flag, in my opinion, Vancouver’s foreign born population must have arrived in Canada before/after a certain age. Just because a person was born in a different country doesn’t mean they are that country’s flag. It depends how they think and act. Do they behave like Canadians or from the country they were born in? The younger the age of a foreign born person who moved to Canada, the more likely they will consider themselves to be Canadian no matter what their physical attributes are. The older the age, the more they will identify with their country of origin.

Another variable to consider when determining flag status is accents. If they still have one, then that’s a sure sign they’re not a local. It doesn’t always work as a flag status indicator and some people are very good at smoothing out their accent, but it is something to take into consideration.

For example, my dad moved to the USA when he was in his mid-20s. He doesn’t like my jokes about how he’s now more American than French – even with his thick French accent – because he’s lived in the states longer than he lived in France. All jokes aside, he’s a French flag because he’s hard-wired as a Frenchman and he still maintains his French point of reference to the world even though he may have adopted some American attributes in thinking, mannerisms, and dress.

A world event like the 2010 Winter Olympics – beginning tomorrow at the BC Place Stadium – combined with an already multi-ethnic population, will create a flagging “perfect storm.” Spectators, and locals alike, won’t be able to walk down the streets of Vancouver/Whistler without hearing a steady stream of accents, dialects, and distinct foreign languages.

This year’s games will have more than 80 participating nations with the USA, Canada, Russia, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, and Sweden entering more than 100 athletes each in various events. Because of the close proximity of the athletes’ living quarters, is it safe to assume athletes from one country will fraternize with athletes and team officials from other countries, potentially hooking up and getting each other’s flags? With so many foreigners in Vancouver, Olympic athletes won’t be the only ones to have a chance to flirt with foreigners.

There’s nothing like spicing up a city with immigration and an event like the Olympics. I can’t imagine another metropolis outdoing Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games to create such a fertile, flag-rich environment. Wait a sec… London is the Capital of the Flagging World. Summer Olympics 2012?

[Chart taken from Wikipedia’s article, “foreign born”; originally from the paper entitled Global Perspective on the Connections between Immigrants and World Cities by Benton-Short, Price, and Friedman.]

Flags of the World, North American flags, Canadian flag, Emirati Arab flag

Canada

SANTA CLAUS’S FLAG by Atlas Al

View Comments 21 December 2009

By Atlas Al

That’s right, even Flagging Headquarters has succumbed to good Old St. Nick. In a December 23, 2008 article called Santa a Canadian, declares citizenship minister, Jason Kenney, the Canadian minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, said in an official statement, “The Government of Canada wishes Santa the very best in his Christmas Eve duties and wants to let him know that, as a Canadian citizen, he has the automatic right to re-enter Canada once his trip around the world is complete.” But wait, there’s more. The Canadian government has “proof” that Santa is Canadian:

–Santa’s outfit is red and white like Canada’s flag.

–NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) has been tracking Santa’s trips for the last 50 years and says he always starts somewhere in the Canadian Arctic. (Track Santa for yourself at www.noradsanta.org)

–In 2007, Canada Post claimed to have processed nearly 1.2 million letters from children all over the world who sent letters to Santa Claus, North Pole, Canada H0H 0H0.

Drøbak in Norway; Uummannaq in Danish Greenland; the Swedish town of Mora; the Russian town of Veliky Ustyug; Santa Claus Village in Rovaniemi, Finland; the Canadian Arctic; where does he come from? If the Finnish Santa Claus gets less mail than the Canadian Santa Claus, should that determine where Santa comes from?

According to the Age-to-Flag Determination Theory, it doesn’t really matter where Santa is living these days or where his base of operations are. What matters is where Santa grew up before moving to one of the above mentioned countries.

Whether you call him Santa Claus, Father Christmas, St Nicholas, St Nick, Kris Kringle, Sinterklaas, Pere Noel, or Father Frost, the chances of finding Santa Claus (let alone knowing where he comes from) are about the same as finding Osama bin Laden. Yes, really.

I don’t really care where Santa comes from because everyone knows he’s not real (I found out when I was 3 years old; I didn’t get my Transformers walkie-talkies like I wanted). Isn’t it amusing how people—in particular, government officials—are actually claiming Santa Claus as one of their own? I’ll let you decide for yourselves. And if any of you ladies catch Santa sneaking down your chimney to give you a special present, please post a comment here regarding his flag status.

Flags of the World, North American flags, Canadian flag

READY. AIM. FLAG!

HARD TO WEAR SOFTWARE

VANCOUVER’S FOREIGN BORN PERFECT STORM

SANTA CLAUS’S FLAG by Atlas Al

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READY. AIM. FLAG!

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