In case you’re having trouble reading the sign above, it says “Montréal” in some martian-like language also known as French.

I’ve been avoiding writing about this for multiple reasons, but fuck it. Here it is anyway.

The subject of the Çingleton conference here in Montréal was brought up on the latest episode of Marco Arment’s Build and Analyze podcast. Being from here, I was super excited to hear what he had to say about the city! What a disappointment that was…

Before I go on, I just wanna say that I really admire Marco Arment. He created my favourite iOS app ever, Instapaper, and he was also the lead developer of Tumblr back in the site’s early days.

Anyway, where was I? Right. Well in his own words, “All their signs are like unicode errors.” That made me laugh because, well, it’s true. We do use characters that aren’t used in the English language.

He then he goes on about how he couldn’t understand any of the signs as if we used some sort of hieroglyphics as the alphabet. How he didn’t know how to drive when he was first in line at a red light. How dumb our laws are, along with a couple others. Exaggeration at its best.

Oh and his comment about how people from the US use the word “American” made me laugh soooo hard. I wont get into that one though.

The link to the podcast is below if you’re interested. Skip to 9:10 for the Montréal bit. It’s cute.

Build and Analyze episode #47: Some Kind of Meat.

Image by Laurence Miall on Flickr