Oh, hey, it's a lady who went to Hawaii on a squid research expedition and fit in an

allergies interview while I was there. Hi, it's Ali Ward. This is Smologies and Smologies are

kid-friendly all ages episodes that we have cut down and sculpted to be shorter.

And this week we bring you a lovely fellow who was a joy to meet up with on the island of Oahu

and Hawaii. So get ready for him. This dude loves flags. I love him for it. Okay.

Vexilology. Aren't you glad that there's a parenthetical flags after that because who knows what

Vexilology means? Where does this word even come from? Okay, buckle up. It's about to get cute.

So Vexilology has its roots in Latin for little sale, vellum as a sale or a curtain, and it's related

to veil. It was coined in 1959 by a flag enthusiast and designer and political scholar, the late Whitney

Smith Jr. And you feel like, I wish I were a Vexilologist, but you're just a flag fan. Don't worry,

you're still a Vexililophile. You're about to go through quite a journey hearing about everything

from why flags exist to what flags have to do with conspiracy theories to some pirate trivia. Why

Hawaii has a union jack on its flag, the hardest flags to draw, which colors we don't see on flags,

and why, how to design a flag, who designed our modern American flag, and how you two can have

fun with flags all year round. So get ready to fly high with flag professional and Vexilologist,

Tori Lidela. Okay, so this Vexilologist, Vexilologist, Vexilologist, God, his bachelor's in

museum studies at the University of Manoa in Hawaii and spent 17 years as a registrar in Honolulu's

mayor's office of culture and the arts. He was an expert in charge of public art collections and

who flies what flags when they do digs flags. He loves fabric. I always think of like how easy

Japan has it when you're a kid and you have to draw your flag. You're like, I got a dot in the middle,

I'm good to go. And then Mexico's like, I got to draw a serpent and some kind of bird. Some flags

are just geometric blocks and then others have these drawings on them that are difficult to replicate.

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