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Comment by PuerkitoBio | Hacker News Reader

Easy for me as I know black metal (extreme metal in general) quite well, so I got 18/20 (they did put some obscure bands in there). But that is funny how close some names look/sound.

As someone else pointed out, they should've added more Swedish bands (was Marduk there? I don't think so?) so that it would be harder even for Swedes, I guess. But then again, Sweden is better known for death metal and melodic death metal (that must sound funny for non-metalheads!), and those bands tend to have english names, such as At The Gates, In Flames, Dismember or Entombed. Hard to mistake for Ikea brands!

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Oh well, I guess even Swedish names would be pretty easy for Swedes, when you have he choice between "hell" and "kitchen table" :D

I think the Ikea products are named after places.

Depends on the products, many are places, some are given names, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea#Product_names

Some are, others are more or less punny/witty/semi-relevant nouns/adjectives/adverbs. One example I remember from the quiz is the oven called "Dåtid", which sort of means "past time".

Edit: Of course there's a relevant section on the Wikipedia page, should've guessed. :)

Edit 2: Never knew there was such a system to it!

And funnily enough some floormats or toilets are named after Danish places.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ikea-and-loat...

I'm a little familiar with IKEA stuff and not at all familiar with the bands, and I got 13/20. I recognized a couple of IKEA names, so those were easy. Otherwise, I pretty much used the heuristic of, "if this is reasonably pronounceable by the average American, it's probably IKEA". That didn't work great, but it seems to have done better than chance.

I had a similar background and strategy and got 14/20. I call it statistically significant :)

I went straight ikea and got the same score (sample size=1)

20/20 here. Several of my favourite bands in that list (Watain in particular).

20/20 here too. Did not know a single black metal band, but on the basis of being Swedish I aced it with the following logic:

Swedish word? Ikea. Not a Swedish word? Band.

That's basically how my Swedish coworker aced it too, I faired much worse.

Back in the 1990s, I used to wander around IKEA with death metal friends, reading out the names of products in the "death metal" voice.

According to staff there we weren't the only ones.

Sorry if this is unrelated, but you've reminded me of a band I used to like (Atom and his Package) and his song "Me and my Black Metal Friends":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPFbfrNkn_s

I'm Swedish, like metal and only got 18 of 20. [Edit: Time to get more into Black Metal :-) ]

(My absolute favorite Swedish [Technical] Death Metal is Meshuggah -- complex, fast.)

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