Tuesday, January 30, 2007

everything but beautiful

So, update on the wikipedia situation: 2 hours. That being the approximate amount of time I spent on that site today. A conversation I had at school:

Someone I go to school with, asking me to look at something: ... I mean, if you have time.
Me: Um? I am looking at a wikipedia page about the heavy metal umlaut. I would say I have time.
Note: according to the above-linked article, the heavy metal umlaut was once cleverly refered to in Spin as "the diacritical mark of the beast." That got a chuckle. I also greatly enjoyed metajoke.
"How many members of a certain demographic group does it take to perform a specified task?"
"A finite number: one to perform the task and an additional number to act in a manner stereotypical of the group in question."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html
http://www.waggish.org/2003/02/19/reusable-imagery

Prolix said...

That is so awesome! I especially like the part that shows how the article grew, how vandalism gets fixed, etc. Anyone who doesn't belive in the philospohy behind wikipedia should watch this little movie.

I think we should try to make "heavy metal umlaut" into an expression of enthusiasm, like "rock and roll!" the kind of thing people yell to each other at concerts, or before getting into car accidents.

And more references to heavy metal punctuation. Thank you, anonymous.

Christopher said...

Thank you for allowing me to waste even more time before going to bed. Honestly, these things are dangerous! You can't just throw out obscure and amusing wikipedia links without warning.