Mark Gritter has a lovely post giving a tour of some of the wackier symbols in Unicode. (Quick and dirty explanation for those who don't deal with type all day: Unicode, as I understand it, is a standard that allows computers to deal with characters from multiple languages. Theoretically speaking, it should obviate the need for various weird hacks and kludges that people used to need to do to represent non-Roman characters.)

Anyway, as Mark points out, there is some wacky stuff in Unicode. I think I personally went over the edge when I got to the "snowman" character. Though a little voice in the back of my head is saying, "Someday, girl, you're going to desperately need a snowman character to use in a technical document! You won't be sneering then, will ya?"

A commenter on the post gives a link to a list of Unicode characters, arranged by "block". It's quite fascinating to look at as well. I didn't know that Cherokee (warning: somewhat slow to load) had its own character system, clearly based on roman characters, but with some strange and beautiful additions. Nor did I realize that there was (apparently) sufficient demand for computer representations of Ugaritic and Linear B for them to be included in the standard. Then there are the character sets I've never heard of, like Bopomofo (warning: somewhat slow to load), which looks like an extremely simplified Japanese character set.

This is all reminding me a bit of when I was ten or so, and we got our first Macintosh, and I got my first introduction to the wonderful world of fonts. I must have spent a couple of hours with Microsoft Word, trying out every single installed font. I turned in a school essay two-column formatted in Zapf Chancery, after which my fifth grade teacher took me aside and explained that, while she did not by any means want to discourage me from typing my assignments, if I ever turned in anything so unreadable ever again, I'd get an instant F.

After that, everything that went to school went in single column 12 point double-spaced Palatino, and I saved my font experimentation for personal projects.