I tend to post rants about useless and unnecessary blog posts, and still I do these things myself. Links to supposedly cool stuff, small comments that no one else finds interesting and so on. I think that I’m aware of this though. If there’s one thing I hate it’s when people claim that you must be perfect yourself in order to complain about others’ behaviours. Screw that. It’s small-minded schoolboy behaviour – a weak defense against valid criticism that one isn’t prepared to recognize. Oh, and look! It seems that one of my very first blog posts was on this topic! Good God, I’m starting to repeat myself already.

Either way, I found something vaguely interesting that I thought fit to post. Let me start at the beginning. I was reading a Something Awful article which – for some reason – made me look up Italian ice cream on Wikipedia. This led me to read up on the origins of the banana split and other stuff, and about the history of ice cream in general. This, in turn, led me to ice cream brands, and Häagen-Dazs in particular. There I noted that the name is an example of foreign branding; it’s just a made-up name intended to look cool. (Ah-hah. Pun intended.) Another typical form of foreign branding is the heavy metal umlaut.

Still with me? See why I don’t get stuff done – I read too much useless crap on the net.

Now for an interlude. Years and years ago I heard an amusing anecdote about an American band called Troja who decided to print t-shirts for their tour. This was all fine and well…until they got to Sweden. The t-shirts were inexplicably sold out. Why?! All they had done was add a cool umlaut to the o in their name.

The Swedes who are reading this are grinning by now, but I’ll delay the punchline for a little while nonetheless.

Through Wikipedia I finally found a reference to the actual incident; the anecdote is finally verified. The band was in fact called Trojan, and this incident was a cause of their album Chasing the Storm. Oh yes. The album cover shows their uber-cool name: Tröjan.

Okay, here’s the punchline for the non-Swedes: in Swedish tröjan means the shirt. I would definitely have bought that t-shirt!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 2:40 am and is filed under Music, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.