Photo by Norman Walsh

Web-surfing recently brought me to a trove of scholarly reviews of Oxfordshire pubs. Its index page alone is great for the lovely names it catalogues: the Penny Black, the Coach and Horses, the Five Bells, the Rose and Crown, the Lamb and Flag, the Jolly Postboys, the Catherine Wheel. (I’m quite the fan of pub names, as the name of my jewelry business shows.)

The site’s guardian apologizes that some of the reviews are as old as six years, but of course to somebody like me all the way over here, they’re all valuable for their wit, their color and the way they show how much this crowd cares about their pubs.

At the Gardeners Arms in North Parade, a reviewer notes, “The dog is very small and yappy.” (Contrast this with the plaintive “No dog. Why?” at the

Photo by Norman Walsh

Wheatsheaf in Abingdon.) The “labyrinthine” Royal Oak on Woodstock Road is “A pub for all tastes, but perhaps a tricky place to meet friends, unless they are tall friends with flamboyant hats,” writes reviewer Pontus Lurcock.

In some reviews, there is a notation of what the sign outside looks like, but much more attention is paid to which beers are served for how much money and in what condition they are served. Also important are the newspapers available and the general ambience.

Though here’s a nice description, from the Chequers, in Cholsey: “The pub sign is mock heraldic with the head, wings and feet of an eagle sticking out of the sides of a chessboard. Intriguingly, the bottom-right-hand square is white, not black. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.” And the Crumpled Horn, in Heathfield Village: “The pub sign is a bull (with one horn crumpled) in a morning suit, leaning on a cane.”

Photo by Norman Walsh

Language/communication geek that I am, I love observing what doesn’t need to be spoken between these members of a fairly specific sub-group. There is an apparent feeling of antipathy towards Morrells, a pub and brewing group that used to own a lot of these places and might have either homogenized them or just served its own beer there, it’s hard to tell exactly.

Photographs are used by kind permission of Norman Walsh, who blogs about UK pub signs. Thank you!

For my brain, at least, this is a powerful tool. I think it’s because I find it hard to remember more than about five items at once (and I have a whole lot of company in this, it seems).  My own personal recurring nightmare has me back in college, which would be great, except I can’t remember all my classes and it’s the middle of the semester and I’m never going to catch up and I … well, you get the idea.

A while back, my husband and I took a three-day “staycation,” and in order to combat our tendency to treat staycations like any other day off (yardwork, errands, TV, take out garbage) I wrote up some of our options in travel-brochure language.  Here’s a sample:

Translation: We have pets and Netflix. And a back porch with a birdfeeder. But it sounds better that way, no? And I started out with a bunch of fluff about local restaurants we could eat at –  with specifics, like the French toast at the cafe’s Sunday brunch — plus local activities we always mean to do but never manage, like touring the winery ten minutes away from our house.

Apparently my BS travel writing is plausible: My spouse said he started to wonder when he got to “your favorite films” (how would they know?) and didn’t fully realize it was all my silliness until he got to the “trained staff cats.”

The main point, though, was that what we have is pretty dang great.  And also, presenting choices as a menu makes your mind work a little differently.

I used this trick again when I was recovering from surgery: I planned a mini-pantry of meals I could fix just using the hot pot (I was unable to walk unaided for a few months).  Knowing that my brain was going to be hazy and thus neither I or my relatives would know exactly what was available in the pantry, I made a list — but to make it appetizing, I put the items in the form of a menu:

It gave us a chuckle or two, sorely needed at that time, and relieved our brains of having to think, “OK, now, what can I fix today?” There were many days when I wasn’t really hungry, but looking over the list — the words presenting themselves to my mind, with the colorful image of an apple and cheese slices, etc. — did help to stimulate my appetite.  And this even though theoretically I knew exactly what was in the pantry, because I’d put it all there.

So there are several factors at work, including presentation; offering choices; and reviewing everything that is actually available, which in my mind is kind of the same as the practice of “counting your blessings.” We forget things we have when we see them all the time. We forget that we live in a place we’ve chosen, surrounded by items we love. Putting them in a slightly different context makes them pop out, and putting them in a list frees our mind from having to remember them and lets us concentrate on simply choosing. So there it is: the power of the menu.

Corner joint shows the gap before I spackled and painted it. Small planks temporarily taped to the wall -- my "extra hands" -- hold the trim piece level while I nail it in place.

So my first bit of advice is to pay someone to do this for you. If you’re still reading, my second piece of advice is to rent a power miter saw for this project, which I assume would give you more precise joints. No pre-cutting at the store is going to work, because you have to fit these lengths as you go along — walls aren’t perfect, and all sorts of variables will throw you off. (Usual advice is to start in a corner and work outward from there.)

My third piece of advice is to not mess with laser levels or chalk lines or however you were going to mark the straight line on the wall. Just take a yardstick and mark the same height all around the wall. Fast; and no futzing with tape measure error. And if you somehow marked a line that was perfectly sea-level true, but wasn’t parallel to the floor, it would look wrong anyway. Right?

Standard advice on placing chair rail is about 32 inches from the floor, or alternately 1/3 the height of the wall. You could also go old-school and put it where your chairs’ backs actually strike the wall.

My fourth big tip: Tape a line on the wall first and eyeball it. If the height you’ve chosen looks strange, it’s easier to move tape than to repaint.

Sneakiest of all, though, was how I got around only having two hands. I bought little poplar planks and sawed them off at uniform height. Then I taped them to the wall I was working on (see above). Apply a little glue to the rail and hoist it up onto the slats; the slats prop it up level long enough for you to smack in the first few nails. Voila, spare hands!

Ever since Alamo commander Buck Travis wrote, “I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls,” people have wondered exactly which flag he meant.

On October 13, 1835, in the coffee room at the Banks Arcade on Magazine Street in New Orleans, two companies of volunteers were formed to help Texas fight Mexico for its independence; they were later fitted out with weapons and grey uniforms. The first company entered Texas at the Gaines Ferry over the Sabine River, and on their way to St. Augustine, the troops were met by a group of local women who gave them a pale blue silk flag, bordered in gold (or maybe white) fringe. The Handbook of Texas also notes they were given a public dinner at St. Augustine, and in Nacogdoches, they were honored with roasted bear and champagne. (The second company came by ship, and they met up in San Antonio.)

Members of the Greys fought in battles from Bexar to San Jacinto, and this flag was captured at the Alamo. It is, says the Handbook, “the only flag still in existence that allegedly flew at the Alamo.” Some illustrations of the fort show this flag flying as well as a Texas-and-Coahuila flag. The Alamo web site describes the issue fully in its answer to the question “What flag flew over the Alamo during the siege and battle?”

There seems to be a remarkable amount of mystery about the flag’s present-day whereabouts, given that we’ve known who had it since 1835 (Santa Anna wrote a letter about it, and we have occasionally asked for it back, most recently in 1995).

And by the power of the Internet, I actually saw it earlier this year, on an interactive part of a Mexico museum’s website which allowed you to scoot around a panoramic view of the rooms. It wasn’t labeled or named on the website, but it was pretty clear what it was, there in the corner:

As of right now, the flag is no longer viewable on the website, so I presume that unseemly interest from an IP address in Texas prompted the museum to yank it down. No se preocupen, nuestros vecinos. Solamente quisé mirarla. Luckily, some other people have posted pictures, and more appear in books.

But let’s have no more of this “whereabouts unknown,” “said to be a mystery” stuff. We know where it is. And we’re pretty surely not getting it back!

About my design:

I’ve worked hard, using four photographs taken in different decades, to make my design as faithful as possible to the real flag that was captured on March 6, 1836. Several Web stores sell T-shirts carrying pictures of this flag (one actually uses a copyrighted drawing from a book), but I feel confident mine’s not only among the most accurate but also scaled properly to make a high-quality image at full size. That is, not a blown-up JPEG.

A stage midway through my reconstruction - you can see the deteriorated state of the lettering and particularly the eagle.

Doesn’t that uppermost typeface look modern? And there’s enough detail left, you can maybe see, to show the original outlined letters and drop shadows. I’ve studied typefaces for years — it was my hobby in junior high each month to choose a typeface and draw a wall-sized calendar page for myself — and have designed lettering for banners and posters, plus learned a lot about the use of typefaces in my design work at newspapers. So this was very familiar work to me.

A closeup of how I worked: starting with what was left, then reconstructing.

Each letter is drawn by hand. That alone makes it different from most versions for sale, which typically just use an existing typeface that’s in a similar style. I also use the original letter placement, except in about six cases where damage to the fabric had dragged a letter far out of place — those I restored to a more normal alignment and kerning, because once the rest of the design had been cleaned up, they were distracting.

For everybody who tries to reconstruct this flag, the eagle is a particular problem because it’s so very nearly worn away on the real thing. However, a plate in Robert Maberry’s “Texas Flags” shows an 1888 color engraving done in Mexico of various captured flags. It shows the Greys’ flag as having the eagle’s head down on the left side, tail down right, something like feet in between, and rays coming up from the eagle’s back. Other photos of the flag also reveal more detail. What you see on my finished shirt is an educated guess, at best. As when I worked on my San Jacinto flag shirt, I tried to think of what the original designer might have done, and used a lot of of detail to give a rich and finished final appearance.

And, also as with the San Jacinto flag, I really had fun researching and recreating this! Once again I’d like to apologize for how expensive these print-on-demand shirts are. I actually only make a few dollars per shirt. But at least it’s high-quality printing — and I’ve worked hard to make sure the design is high-quality too.

That is to say, they searched for a De Zavala shirt, found my design in Cafepress’ Marketplace, and paid $30 and $33 dollars (why the difference, I don’t know) for a shirt that was selling in my Cafepress store at $23. And Cafepress made, respectively, $27 and $29.70 in profit, as opposed to the $18 they would have profited from a sale through my store. Ya wonder why they optimize searches for their Marketplace as opposed to my store? I don’t.

There is a school of thought that I might not have made even that $6.30 in reduced commissions if it weren’t for Cafepress’ Marketplace. I say, “Horse manure,” because if you Google “de zavala flag shirt,” you get my shop as the first result. I’ll take my chances with that.

But I am NOT going to let a company sell my design for a higher price and give me less money.

Which is why that Google result now links to my new Printfection shop. Where you can buy the shirt in your choice of colors and fabrics for prices starting at $26. I get $4, and Cafepress gets absolutely jack.

Cotton, 3 shades of blue

Or in sustainable, organic cotton

It’s with sheer glee that I introduce my latest design. I’ve been working on this for weeks (in my spare time), even making a reconnaissance trip to see the flag itself and take its picture. I believe wholeheartedly that this is the best representation you’re going to find on a shirt of the San Jacinto battle flag. I’m very proud!

My research indicated that this image of seated Liberty with a staff, shield and Phrygian cap traces its roots through British coinage back to the Roman Empire — so I have restored the rock she originally probably sat on, as well as the plow and wheat sheaves on her shield. Read my full report on the symbolism in the flag here.

Now, my research also led me to believe that this design might have been adopted when the flag was repainted, and so it might not be quite what originally flew at the April 21, 1836 battle in which Sam Houston’s army routed Santa Anna’s troops and won independence for Texas. But this is the design that’s on the flag now, so that’s what I used.

As I was working, my mind wandered over what artistic choices James Beard might have made, if he truly did paint this for the Newport Rifles company, headed from Kentucky to Texas, back in 1835, and what it meant to the people who saw it then. I visited the state Capitol and pondered how cool it was that this icon of Texas independence hangs right there with the state representatives while the Lege is in session. I tracked down to my own satisfaction why Liberty is seated that way, and chatted with a coin expert in Switzerland about liberty-goddess images through the centuries.

The San Jacinto flag is very different from a lot of the other early Texas flags; no bold blocks of color, no Lone Star. And years ago when I first saw it, I wondered what exactly it meant to those early Texians.  Now I understand a little better, and, at least to my eyes, it will never be a muddy, stained, obscure image again.

About my design:

I worked at creating a clean new version of the original stylized design, more or less as I think it would have looked when first painted. That is to say, the age spots and wear are all gone; I’ve researched what her symbolic devices are in order to fill damaged areas with a high-quality image; and because many Texans are used to the aged-cream background the flag has today, I’ve designed my image so that you can choose to place it on a cream-colored shirt or on a pale blue shirt, since the original flag was blue.

Click to buy the shirt!

Short link for this entry: http://bit.ly/sanjacinto

It’s clear that the image carries special meaning, but to modern eyes (at least mine) it’s not clear what. Well, the sword and the “Liberty or Death” motto are pretty unambiguous. But what’s the lumpy red thing on the spear, and why is she crouching, and who is she?

You can make out a shield at bottom right, which Maberry says is decorated with wheat sheaves and a plow. Clear enough, that’s for the settlers and farmers.

The red doohickey on the pole, Maberry says, is a Phrygian-style liberty cap, and after some research I have concluded that our Revolutionary forebears would burst into tears if they knew their descendants had forgotten what it was. Red, conical, felt. Traditionally supposed to have been worn by slaves in ancient Rome once they were freed. Very big with the Revolutionary Americans, also the French, whose “Marianne” wears one. It gets a nod in “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), where it’s referred to humorously as a kind of “red night-cap” atop a pole in such a way that it’s clear Washington Irving expects everybody to get the reference.

This led me to a path of research that showed me just who the lady is, and why she’s sitting down. She’s an Americanized version of “seated Britannia,” a traditional depiction of a goddess who embodies Britain, but who actually goes back to the days when the Roman empire had just slapped a great big wall across the island. Emperor Hadrian’s coins first use seated Britannia to represent Britain — a military province, as shown by the shield and spear — perched on a rock, possibly to show subjugation to Rome.

This image was recycled in 1672, when British coins of Charles II picked up the image of Britannia as a goddess with spear and shield, even keeping her seat on the rock. (The design was modeled directly on the Roman coin, using an image of a Scottish lady Charles II was lusting after.) She was used continuously on British coins for the next 300 years. In 1835, an American artist gave her a Yankee makeover with stars, stripes and the revolutionary hat on a stick. That image was used on U.S. coins from 1836 to 1891. Since James Henry Beard is supposed to have painted the San Jacinto flag in 1835 for Kentucky volunteers headed to help Texas fight Mexico…  either two artists had the same bright idea at the same time, or somebody’s got their dates mixed up. Our flag’s been repainted and refurbished a bit too much, so maybe somebody did the most recent repaint with a half-dollar in their hand. (Other versions do show up now and then.)

The visual evidence is compelling: This is a design that has pretty much been standardized since about 134 A.D.

Top photo: Heritage Auction Galleries. Middle photo: Courtesy of Classical Numismatic Group. Bottom photo: Courtesy of CNG Triton XIII Auction 2009. www.cngcoins.com. Chart by Sue Owen Whaley.

So there you have it: She’s a British (or Scottish) babe on a Roman rock, carrying an Anatolian hat on a stick. With perhaps a slightly French attitude toward upper-body clothing.

In case you’re wondering (I started to), the Statue of Liberty is sometimes said to be a depiction of the Roman goddess Libertas, but she was originally conceived as a colossal lighthouse in the form of an Egyptian woman with a torch, to stand on the Suez Canal. Egypt couldn’t afford her, and in 1870 Auguste Bartholdi retooled his plans, making her a gift to America. She was dedicated in 1886, and at least one source says she’s not wearing a Phrygian cap because it was a little too radical for the times, which saw a fair amount of monarchist sentiment going around in France.

And speaking of inspiring women, I cannot say enough about the knowledge and helpfulness of Dane Kurth, whose website www.wildwinds.com is a fantastic reference and a wealth of information on ancient coins. She tells me, “This (seated) figure of Britannia — as well as most of these female personifications — all hail from ancient depictions of Athena… Britannia, America, France, Italia etc… even Roma – all the same person, basically.” Thank you so much, Dane. Viva Helvetia!

So I got out my hand drill. I love my pretty little Ben Franklin hand drill (it doesn’t really have anything to do with Ben Franklin, but it looks like it ought to), and the job took two seconds.  I could choose any size hole I wanted, limited only by my collection of drill bits.

Then I realized I didn’t even need the drill, really: I just needed the bit. With a little patience, you can just spin the drill bit carefully in your fingers. (This is probably easiest with a small hole and thin leather.)

Scrap leather and a 5/64 drill bit

The bits are sharp as heck, which means watch your fingers, but it also means they carve into the leather smooth as anything. You wind up with a pretty tidy little hole.  So the next time you need your belt to cinch a little tighter, or your stirrups to go up a little higher, or you want to put a carabiner through your tool belt or who knows what, just pick up your drill bits.

Expanded capabilities: As you can see, the latest upgrades of the Guide include the ability to control nearby Nutri-Matic dispensers and several settings that allow it to work in tandem with your shipboard computer. Most importantly, the latest Guide relieves you of the need to carry a separate Sub-Etha Sens-o-Matic, incorporating as it now does a lighted indicator of Sub-Etha reception plus a Thumb switch. Hitchhikers everywhere can now complain along with everyone else about how many bars they’re getting or not getting.

Safety and comfort features: When events become overwhelming you can now adjust the Perspective in your immediate vicinity to something a little more comfortably self-centered, or opt to “grey out” perception of the immediate future and its dangers by toggling Temporal Focus.*

The Guide’s latest edition also incorporates the mind-bogglingly successful “Somebody Else’s Problem” Field, which renders troublesome objects completely invisible with a flick of the switch.

And while the Guide’s location sensors are as powerful and accurate as ever, we realize that the modern hitchhiker may not always wish their exact location to be known. Thus we have added a Location obfuscator, which not only hides the user’s current position but actually represents the hitchhiker as being at another location, the randomness and distance of which are adjustable. In beta testing, our field researchers pronounced this their favorite feature.

Touch technology: While the expanded feature set has not reduced what some reviewers have called the “insanely complicated” appearance of the Guide, we have by popular demand retained the original message, so calming to generations of hitchhikers: “Don’t Panic.” Even these large friendly letters are improved, however, as you will see they are now raised in a smooth embossed plastic that is not only soothing to pet and stroke but also osmotically releases low-level endorphins.

* Note: These functions bear no similarity to products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and any suggestion to the contrary will be dealt with by our large and rapaciously effective legal department.

Graphic design by Sue Owen Whaley offered in tribute to Douglas Adams, who would have had the first iPad out of the box. He’d have loved it, wouldn’t he?

Short link for this entry: http://bit.ly/guidecover

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Actually, I went yesterday. But I wanted to get a photo of the San Jacinto battle flag, which I’m already at work making into one of my Texian Tees.  (Here’s a photo that’s better — or at least more brightly lit — than the one I got.)  It’s a good thing I went, though, because just a few hours later, I learned that the House chambers, where the flag hangs, will soon be closed until November as part of renovations to the Capitol.

I always love visiting the Capitol, and I particularly like it when there are schoolkids going through:

Half of ‘em with their faces tilted back, looking up into the dome. This is what they’re seeing:

And I didn’t notice till I was going through my film that the star design way up there at the tippy-top is the star from the (disputed) De Zavala flag.  Which fact I’ve of course now retconned into the sales pitch for my De Zavala flag T-shirt! A lovely shirt in very soft navy-blue cotton; I’m wearing mine right now, in fact.