Asterisks, Ampersands, and At

So I'm sitting here today and I'll admit I got a little bored. I was staring at my keyboard and was looking at the asterisk above the 8. I never really noticed until today that on the keyboard it has 5 lines. I mention this because anytime I write an asterisk I make eight lines. Ya know make a "+" and then put an "x" over it type of deal. So this got me thinking...when you type are they also 5 lines. I open up word and type an asterisk...well wouldn't you know...it's 6 lines. WTF!? Why would it look like one thing on the keyboard and then it's something else when you type it. So I figure I wonder if it's always six. Well the answer to that is no...as I flipped through the fonts it can be anywhere from 5 - 8. That's dumb.

Now I sat there and wondered what other deceptions my keyboard had. Well turns out not really that many...the only other two that I have found so far are the ampersand (&) and the at (@). Ampersand doesn't change too much, but as I was flipping through fonts there's a good 4 or 5 different styles for how you can make it. None of which again are how I actually write an ampersand. I write it like a cursive E with a line above and below it, or I just use a plus sign. The at isn't that big of a deal at all, the only difference that comes about in that is how clear the a on the inside is and the shape of the line that goes around the a.

I know this is really random and doesn't really matter at all, but just something I noticed today and was kind of interesting/annoying. That's all.