UMLAUTS

I went to Wikipedia to did get the definition of 'fascist' to link to post I was working on about Al Gore's labeling of right-wing bloggers as "brown shirts." But that had been blogged to death elsewhere, so I didn't bother with it. However, there was a keen article at Wikipedia on the heavy-metal umlaut.

A heavy metal umlaut is an umlaut or a diaeresis (though always called an umlaut in this usage) over some of the letters in the name of a heavy metal band — almost always without regard for the actual pronunciation of the name.

Umlauts are often used in concert with a Blackletter or pseudo-Blackletter typeface in the band logo to give it a more gothic feel. Many bands have taken to using umlauts and other diacritics, often gratuitously, in their names.

Though I enjoy Motorhead, AC/DC and even GnR, I wasn't much of a heavy metal person in my youth. But I loved the umlauts. I was very briefly doing percussion (not drums) for an industrial band and remember offering the suggestion that we call ourselves the Üseless Ümlaüts - (pronounced Oose-less Oom-lauts). It didn't happen but I still think it was a great band name.

Oddly, I have always pronounced Hüsker Dü as if the umlauts were actually there for linguistic reasons. Wikipedia notes:

the punk rock band Hüsker Dü. The name is a Danish phrase meaning "Do you remember?". However, ü is not used in Danish and the correct phrase would be "hüsker dü?" The band took their name from a children's memory game, which added macrons over each u in the phrase, replacing these macrons with umlauts.

Anyway, I didn't have anything new to say about Al calling us brown shirts. However, I thought that most of the right-wing blogs tend to have a more libertarian flair than anything else. The 'conservativism' of ur-bloggers Instapundit, Lileks or Sullivan is really small-government conservatism and not a social-engineering conservativism.

It's best that I didn't post anything about Gore's little rant. I would have probably accused the left of being in favour of social engineering, and being therefore closer to Nazism than their opponents.

But that would be unfair. There's no reason to suggest that the modern left is more inclined to support social engineering or attempt to define culture. I'm not going to call my intellectual opponents fascists. I'm going to bite my tongue.

Anyway, while I'm not a brown shirt but I have decided to become a Browncoat. Firefly rocked!

In Serenity, Browncoats are Independent Faction soldiers, a body opposed to the AngloSino Alliance in the Unification War. Defeated at Serenity Valley on Hera in 2511, Browncoats are forced to live as galactic outcasts. A small band of them skim the outskirts of the galaxy unnoticed until they find themselves caught between the unstoppable military force of the Universal Alliance and the horrific, cannibalistic fury of the Reavers, savages who roam the very edge of space.

I just finished watching the Firefly series on DVD, and I will say that it was the best sci-fi genre series ever produced for television. Yes, that means I think it was better than the original Star Trek. I'm not going to defend that statement any further. I just liked it better.

After that little bit of blasphemy, goodnight!