No sooner do you put one Evil Empire behind
you than another begins to sprout—in Brussels! Don't they
get it? Just when other railroad-era continental-scale
empires are discovering how woefully maladapted centralised
administration, one size fits all regulation, and discredited dirigiste dreams of “the one best
way” are to the information age, the anti-democratic elitist
eurocrats are constructing their own anachronistic claptrap empire at
the expense of the natural rights, individual liberty, local autonomy,
and cultural diversity which made Europe the wellspring of Western
civilisation.
If you're lucky enough to be outside the Union, thank your
lucky stars and proudly display this symbol to ward off those
twelve most unlucky stars from your flagpole. If you're inside,
say “enough is enough” with this No EU
symbol. You can download the symbol as an image file in a
variety of resolutions, as a scalable PostScript definition, or
you can purchase the symbol emblazoned upon a bewildering
variety of merchandise.
Downloading Image Files
The No EU image is available for downloading in a
variety of resolutions, ranging from small images ideal for
adorning Web pages (as long as you don't mind them
attracting the occasional
bullet hole), through
intermediate images suitable for screen backgrounds, to hideously
high resolution (albeit in files of modest size) for pre-press
applications. The links below give the file name, width, height, and
file size in kilobytes of each of the available images. You can preview
the images in a browser window by clicking the link, or save an
image to your computer by right-clicking (or however you pop up the
link disposition menu on your computer and browser) and selecting
“Save Image As…” or the equivalent to download the image to
a local file. The last link in the list is to a
Zipped
archive containing all of the different resolution images.
Note: the following extremely large images are intended for publishing
applications. If you attempt to display them in your browser on a
machine with limited memory and/or disc space, the browser may
crash. If you need these images, right click and save them
directly to disc without displaying them.
All images are in
Portable Network Graphics
(PNG) format, and are interlaced to download incrementally when included in
Web pages.
PostScript Page Description
The No EU symbol is defined in the PostScript page
definition language, which permits it, when output to a
PostScript compatible device, to be rendered with all the
resolution the device permits. If you have such a device, or
use a publication system which supports inclusion of PostScript
illustrations, you can dispense with the images and work
directly with the PostScript definition. The link below
downloads a Zipped archive containing both a stand-alone
PostScript page definition and an Encapsulated PostScript image
suitable for inclusion in other documents. Please see the
README file in the archive for details of its
contents.
Use the link below to download everything related to the No EU
symbol. Not only do you get all the different resolution images
and the PostScript source code, this archive also includes the tools (mostly
Perl
programs) used to produce the images from the PostScript. These tools
rely heavily on current versions of
Ghostscript
and the
Netpbm
image processing toolkit; unless you have that software installed on
your machine, the tools will do you little good.
Curiously, there doesn't appear to be a standard for which way the
bar runs (top left to bottom right or top right to bottom left) in
interdiction signs.
bar sinister
bar dexter
In European road signs, a red bar running from top left to bottom right like
the one shown at the right is the most common, with a series of grey
bars which look like a tire tread running in the opposite sense indicating
the end of a restricted zone. (An “end deer crossing” sign done that way
would be delightful, but I've never seen one.) In other signs:
no smoking signs in offices or no skateboard signs in shopping malls for example, you see
the red bar used about equally in each direction. In heraldry, a bar running
from top right to bottom left like the one in the image at the left is
referred to as a “bar sinister” (from the Latin word for “left”), and
denotes illegitimacy. In preparing these images, that seemed an
appropriate choice to express disapprobation of the bastards in Brussels.
Still, if you prefer the bar running the other way: “bar dexter”—top left
to bottom right—it's easy enough to accomplish. To transform
an image from bar sinister to bar dexter, simply load it into your image
processing program and perform a “flip left and right” or “mirror image”
operation, which reverses the bar while leaving the balance of the image,
which is horizontally nonchiral, unchanged.
To reverse the bar in the PostScript definitions, edit the PostScript
file and change the “Angle of the bar” near the bottom of the file
from 45 to −45.
Do Not Enter
European road signs use a
red ring with no bar surrounding a symbol denoting the
prohibited item for “No entry”—for example,
forbidding bicycles from motorways. Such a graphic is metaphorically
applicable in countries at risk of joining the European Union, albeit
a bit more obscure. You can create such a symbol by setting the angle
in the PostScript file to −999 which will suppress the bar,
as in the symbol to the right. In this symbol, I've also widened the
circle (Width of circle 55) and shrunk the flag (Width of flag
0.62) to approximate the proportions found on such signs.
LONE STARR: But, Yogurt, what is this place? What is it that you do here?
YOGURT: Merchandising.
BARF: Merchandising? What's that?
YOGURT: Merchandising. Come. I'll show you. Open up this door. Ha,
ha, ha, come. Walk this way. Take a look. We put the picture's
name on everything. Merchandising. Merchandising…where the
real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs—the T-shirt,
Spaceballs—the Coloring Book, Spaceballs—the Lunch box,
Spaceballs—the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs—the Flame
Thrower.
In association with
CaféPress.com,
a collection of No EU merchandise is available. Click on an item to
view it in the
No EU Emporium,
or click the link below the images to
see all available merchandise (including some items not shown here).
All of these items are offered at cost—you pay only the
CaféPress base price—we don't make a centime from sales of these
items.
The author of this document accepts no responsibility for
the consequences should you publicly display this image.
The image definition and all derivative works are in the public domain.
No sooner do you put one Evil Empire behind
you than another begins to sprout—in Brussels! Don't they
get it? Just when other railroad-era continental-scale
empires are discovering how woefully maladapted centralised
administration, one size fits all regulation, and discredited dirigiste dreams of “the one best
way” are to the information age, the anti-democratic elitist
eurocrats are constructing their own anachronistic claptrap empire at
the expense of the natural rights, individual liberty, local autonomy,
and cultural diversity which made Europe the wellspring of Western
civilisation.
