Farsong Blog-o-Matic - Spokane in the News

As per usual, Spokane (the place I lived for most of my life, though for which I express no hometown sentiments) did something stupid.

This time, it's in relation to Zune, and how at CompUSA, it came with a free $15 iTunes gift certificate.


I actually saw some girl walking around with one of the brown Zunes, yesterday. I could hardly contain my laughter.

I actually took the time to mess around with the Zune recently. I can condense the review into two points:

1) Holding and operating the Zune with one hand is not ergonomic; it made my thumb hurt. The Zune is a two-handed affair, and while not hard to use, it is not made for one-handed use.

2) The interface, while clean and neat, angered me. All the menu titles were in lower-case—that is, there are no capital letters at the beginning of the words. Both as an English major and a Grammar Stickler, I despise that choice. As a graphic designer, I also find things wrong with this scheme as well—namely that, without capitals or other forms of punctuation and separation, the menus flow together into one long, incomprehensible sentence; the individual items in the list become at once harder to discern as they are part of a jumble of words.

The decision to use no capitals in the menus was obviously part of a brilliant plan to make the Zune seem “hip,” “cool,” and “with it”; it only serves to show that Microsoft is out of it—trying to appeal to the teenyboppers and their unintelligible SMS abbreviations (I don't think the product name has a capital letter in it, either). Fashion is no excuse to abandon the conventions of language—this only results in miscommunication and confusion in understanding of ideas.

Words are cool, as is being able to understand other people. Taking the vowels out of words, removing the capitals, and castrating language is not. Unfortunately, though, English-speaking people seem to not understand this.

Germans, however, do. The are very protective of their logical, grammatically-sound language of which the principles of construction are clear (the German word for sentence—“Satz”—is the same word as for a mathematical equation); they are offended when non-native-speakers butcher the grammar. Like many things in German (especially humour), the German language is a Science and an Art for the German People. Specifically, this is one of the reasons that German is a much better language than English.


edit: Another reason that Germany is cooler than America: Industrial art lamps. Form where else but Berlin!
[via the Gizmodo]