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Comic and Rant for Saturday, April 6, 2002
True Stories of Easter! |
In the part of my previous rant where I mentioned that, like Dilbert, I’ll sometimes have an idea that’s good enough for a couple strips but not the whole week, I nearly cited this week as another example. Good thing I forgot, as I then came up with this, my first strip tied to a specific date! Basically, it happened just as you see here, albeit minus Jeff’s comment. I was alone at the time, as one should always be when engaging in the delicate art of keyboard licking. The strip originally intended for today will appear next week, probably on Thursday (no link in case I’m wrong again!). I recently bought a product called Pödö, or “Pödö,” to be completely accurate. As their webpage isn’t up as of this writing, I’ll describe it: it’s a pizza flavored spread for people who wanna make pizza bagels or muffins or whatever but are too lazy to open more than one container (well, two if you count the bagel/muffin/whatever bag). It’s not bad, but the reason I brought it up is the gratuitous umlauts (that’s “¨” for those unfamiliar with the term). I mean it was bad enough when Heavy Metal bands did it (spoofed by Spinal Tap with their umlaut “n”, something for which, oddly enough, there is as yet no HTML tag) - presumably because merely misspelling words had gone out of style and wouldn’t be cool again untilt the advent of Hip-Hop - but now it’s gotten into the mainstream. Hell, it’s gotten into our food! I suppose there’s a slim chance the umlauts aren’t gratuitous, but it’s pretty unlikely. First off, they’re not limited to the name, but also appear in other parts of the label. The product apparently comes in “Tacö Flavör” and various types of “Pizza Flavör.” Even if that weren’t the case (or it was maybe the idea of an American marketing department), there’s the fact that umlauts belong to Germanic languages while pizza is Italian and tacos are Mexican. Neither Italian nor Spanish uses umlauts (AFAIK). One thing none of the Umlaut Abusers seem to understand is that umlauts are not decorative - they change the pronunciation! If the little dots aren’t meant to be the textual equivalent of racing stripes, then the word if pronounced like this. Actually, I like to imagine it’s pronounced “Poodoo,” which appropriately describes the brains of those who think gratuitous umlauts are cool. Y’know, I’m sure I had more to whine about, but I can’t think of anything right now, so I guess I’ll see ya Tuesday! |
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