Erstwhile Muse

Neo-Bauhaus post-industrial thrashcore

or Bad Typography jokes at their worst.

I've decided on a name for my second non-existent band.

The Skausage

Of course, what every up and coming amateur ska band of the mid to late 90's needed (even fictional ones) was an equally amateurly drawn cartoon frontman. Thus was born the image you see above. I wish I could remember where I have the original .psd file of both that image and the band name—assuming I still even have it anymore after several crashes over the years. I'd still love to get a t-shirt made up after some tweaking.

Some of you may remember some incoherent ramblings I made years ago about the mythical, non-existent ska band The Skausages!—yes, the exclamation point is part of the name. I don't remember precisely what got us started on the random brainstorming that lead to such silliness, but I suspect it was rampant boredom and an over-abundance of gamer funk. Needless to say, it is undoubtedly best for the world that yet another low talent ska band doing covers of 80's tunes and one semi-original song based off of a dog treat commercial remained but a strange glimmer in the eye of it's creator.

Today though, I know precisely where it all came from. Lee IM'ed me with a typography question, specifically looking for the proper name of the daggers they use to denote footnotes and the like. My combined Google-fu and random typographic knowledge led me to the answer rather rapidly.

What it also lead me to was the sidebar in the above linked Wikipedia article on typographic punctuation conventions. The one that caught my eye was interpunct, what I had previously been accustomed to referring to as the middle dot from its HTML Entity code of ·. Something about this word struck a chord in the old brain, and I went off on a bit of a tangent, complete with gratuitous umlautage, and the rather non-sensical genre description in the title. By the end of it all, I had derived:

In·ter·pünkt

Turns out though that I'd already been one-upped even before I was finished. Browsing through some of the pop culture references in the heavy metal umlaut article on Wikipedia, I came across mention of a bunch of kibologists who had formed an actual band known as Interröbang Cartel, complete with actual songs. Thoroughly defeated, and by my favorite obscure typographic mark at that.

Ah well, if some CCAD students can get away with Times New Viking, I should be able to amuse myself with private little jokes like this...

Edit:

It just came to me today that what the name really needed to finish it off was gratuitous self-reference. I have amended the name above to include interpunct marks at the appropriate places.

Labels: music, random, typography