July 28, 2005

Strangest (work-related) thing I've done today

I was entering names into Outlook and someone's name was German and had an umlaut in it. Rather than try to figure out how to insert an o with an umlaut, I hopped over to Google for some help (which, by the way, is back; amazingly Google had been restored while I was off on holiday. I didn't have faith that that would happen, so it was a surprise), trying to find an o-with-umlaut to copy into Outlook. What page should be my help but a Wikipedia entry on heavy metal umlauts? That Wikipedia has everything. In case you couldn't guess from the title, the article is about primarily heavy metal bands adding umlauts to their band names or album titles to give it a German look. Many examples are cited, especially for artists that use them gratuitously.

Some interesting trivia bits I picked up from the article:
-"In 1988, Jim Henson and General Foods released a breakfast cereal, Cröonchy Stars, based on the popular Swedish Chef muppet."
- "In the mid-1980s, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed parodied the heavy metal umlaut in the comic strip Bloom County with the fictional group Deathtöngue, fronted by the depraved and unwholesome singer/'lead tongue' 'Wild' Bill Catt and infamous for the songs 'Let's Run Over Lionel Richie With a Tank', 'Clearasil Messiah' and 'U Stink But I Love U'."
- "Gay heavy metal band/cabaret act Pink Stëël have two consecutive gratuitous umlauts, the first such instance in a band name." (That's quite the descriptor of the band, but in the next sentence it gets better. There's the band, Blöödhag, described as being a "library/scifi metal band." Rock on. But very quietly.)