Beg pardon?

Here's something that may appeal if you like playing with language, and have geeky leanings:

The World’s First Internet Special-Characters Poem, which dates from 1990 and is the work of Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese.

It goes like this:

<>!*""#

^"`$$-

!*=@$_

%*<>~#4

&{}../

|{,,SYSTEMHALTED

And no, the 'system halted' isn't the result of your poor confused computer having a freak out about the gibberish beforehand, it's the end of the poem.

If you're completely mystified - and I was, because I don't pronounce things in my head as I read, so I'd never thought about how some of these symbols actually sounded - here's a translation into spoken english:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.