BurntFlag.com

Soon, I’ll be resetting the stats so we can have a fresh start on flag burning. I should have done it on our 1 year anniversary…but I missed it.

By the way, we’re a year and a month old!

I was thinking to myself a bit and it struck me. Most people don’t come here to see me talking, they come here looking to burn flags, virtual as they might be. I’m not a blogger, don’t like blathering on about BS, and in fact, I simply hate the word blog. Whoever thought that writing stuff on a website needed a special name was only half there anyway.

So, to turn over a new leaf, there will be no more bungled posts here on the front page. You, the viewers, can decided which flags to burn, and why, at your own leisure. If you don’t like this change, feel free to burn burntflag.com’s flag in protest! After all, I can do whatever I want with my flag burning website…I do claim certain liberties for being the first, you know!

At last! A non-scientific data analysis!

As you can see, the United States is far and away the most burned flag, holding 28% of the top 10 burns…yet just 9% of all burns. What is interesting is that the Hezbollah flag was only put on the site on July 19, but has already accumulated 1360 burns. If prorated out to the length of time that the rest of these countries have been on the site, the Hezbollah flag would have been burned an astonishing 7175 times! Israel, to compare and contrast, fell into 13th place having only 310 burns.

The least burned flag on the site was of the Falkland Islands having only 4 burns during this time period. I suppose they’re too small for anyone to hold a grudge against them?

Soon, I will be rolling out an animated GIF image of each flag burning. They should be of decent quality, though a tad smaller than the Java applets to save on bandwidth. They will be watermarked, though!
This should satisfy some of the requests…

In my tinkering, I caused some CSS rendering issues within IE and perhaps old versions of FireFox. Content is still readable…but if you’re still using that kludge of a browser, perhaps it is time to upgrade?
One of these days, I’ll fix it up though…

Originally, this site’s message wasn’t about politics. I created it to have a bit of fun in response to childish ravings in the Islamic world about the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Obviously, it caught someone’s eye and was quickly defaced.

More recently, however, my thoughts seem to have turned toward the negative political actions of governments around the world, and thus the postings on the homepage took a turn from poking fun at the French to random musings about government oppression and corruption.

So, I’m in a bit of a quandry. Do I want to continue on with humor, or do I want to be a politically-charged website with a twist? Any thoughts?

I’ve updated most of the site with the new layout. Much more spiffy than the old one, if I do say so myself. This area, unfortunately, will continue to use the old layout until I garner the energy to write a Wordpress template to match the rest of the site.

One of these days, I’ll finish the updated layout. In an effort to be hip and on top of the latest buzz words, I’ve decided to include Web 2.0 compliant colors and rounded corners–just because.

Unfortunately, my host doesn’t yet support Ruby-on-Rails, so I can’t utilize that functionality. Because of that, we’ll have to stick to good ol’ PHP and Java. Sorry!

I’ve been continuously updating the site design and CSS…hopefully one day I’ll find something I like enough to let stick.

So there I was, watching some juvenile clips of people burning flags because they didn’t agree with someone else. It’s like watching a five-year-old threatening to break his sister’s doll because she ate his cupcake. Except from what I can tell, most of the people burning flags are burning their own flags that they either bought or stitched together expressly for the purpose of burning. If I had to choose what flaming item a nearby protestor was carrying, I’d pick a burning flag far before a Molotov cocktail, but that’s just me.

Anyway, while I was watching those videos, I felt I should do something. The first thing that came to mind was to start a flag-exporting business with my prime customer target being the Middle East. Based on my pyromaniac background, I invented a self-igniting flag that could have been manufactured at a fairly cheap price. Alas, realizing I don’t have the capital or backing to carry on with such ideas, I had to look elsewhere.

So, after stumbling across some (almost) horrific images depicting the dangers of playing with fire, I looked inward and built this site (well, those images and all of the religious and political stupidity surrounding flag burnings). I suppose for some people, the ability to burn a flag is their greatest form of speech (whoopity-doo). What they don’t seem to realize that thousands of flags each year are burned not for desecration purposes, but out of respect.

At any rate, because of my humanitarian love for the species, I would prefer never to be subjected to the likes of the above pictures again. Therefore, what I present to you is this method of burning flags with no chance of starting yourself on fire! Stay safe people.

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