Dan M

I was speaking just the other day to the guy who sets our Dick Detective puzzles.  He's known around the office, inevitably I guess, as Sherlock Homo.  One of his other roles is to choose which set of photos we present each time we update the website.  And, this week, he set me a little quiz about the newest HMBoy - Dan M.  Could I, he wondered, simply by looking at the pictures, deduce where Dan was photographed?

One obvious difficulty, of course, is that there's nothing whatsoever in the pictures to give even a hint of where they might have been taken.  You couldn't have designed a blander background if you'd deliberately tried.  And the name Dan doesn't help either.  It's a pretty universal one, after all.

At that point Sherlock took pity on me and said that he'd flag up a clue.  Of course!  A flag!  The blue and yellow background colours - what do they suggest?

Well, any keen vexillologist will tell you that blue and yellow might indicate the flag of Barbados (but that's got a black trident on it too).  They're also the predominant colours of the flags of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Nauru - though each of those three adds one or more white stars to the design. CVV Store Forum

There are, though, three countries with flags that have just blue and yellow on them.  The first is Sweden - but I don't reckon that Dan looks like any typically Nordic type, so I'm going to rule that out.  Next comes Palau, which, in case you don't know (I didn't either) is a group of Pacific islands.  Dan doesn't look very tropical to me, so I'm going to rule that one out too. 

That leaves us with Ukraine which, given the number of its boys who can be found looking for patrons in Eastern Europe's gay bars any day of the week sounds like a good bet to me.  As Sherlick himself might say, "Elementary, dear Watson!"