sometimes it's just the very little things that bug me a bit.
one had always been that phosphor does not like UTF encoding a lot and shows german "umlaute" just worng!
a little program called recode comes handy here!
this ends up calling phosphor something like that:
/usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -root -program 'fortune | recode -f utf8..latin1' -scale 3
now, all you gotta do is add this in your configuration dialog of xscreesavers phosphor.
useless....but still :D