"Wendy"

Facebook (remember the days when it was exclusive to students only?), aka. cum bucket of the internet, has so much to offer.

You can get reconnect with "friends" that you never had interest in real life, lose your privacy, get bombarded by clever data-mining advertisers, and blah blah blah...

It comes with no surprise there is a group called "CooLeSt TaTToo On FaceBook...." with this posted in it by Wayne Fright (go ahead and friendquest him):


http://photos-413.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll-sf2p/v236/165/18/624295413/n624295413_2973720_4222.jpg

Yep, it is an upside-down "Wendy".

Enola's Tattoo in Waterworld

io9.com recently posted something about futuristic bad-ass tattoos, one that received much attention is on the back of Enola in Waterworld (it was a shitty movie by Kevin Costner, come to think of it, were any of Costner's movies good?).

From Engrish & Hanzi Smatter

I thought Enola was a dwarf when I first saw the movie. Perhaps that was because the camera's angle that made her head huge and shrunk her torso.



The characters on the left of the circular thing is "latitude" and "longitude" on the right. I don't know why the movie people decided to break two characters into three. It is not like they are saving any flesh space.



The characters inside of the circular part is longitude & latitude's actual coordinates.

Latitude = 27° 59' N
Longitude = 86° 56' E

Spoiler alert: it is the location of Mount Everest.

Welcome to Washington State Convention & Trade Center

Bejing Sounds sent in the following photos from Washington State Convention & Trade Center (WSCTC):





I have never seen 迎 in 欢迎 (welcome) written in such way.

Nov 2008 Wired - Lost, in Translation

In November 2008 issue of Wired magazine, there is an interesting article about underground (or should that be "under-net") volunteers that would add subtitles to popular American television shows for those who do not understand English.

The concept is interesting however the illustration accompanying the story is not so.





While both English and Arabic alphabets are up-right and correct, the four Chinese characters are upside-down.

認真爆笑 means "serious laughter" in Chinese.

This is second time I have spotted Wired magazine making similar snafu.

Dad 9.15.94

Alan and I both can't figure out what this tattoo is about.


http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A81015/high/obkj-my-first-tattoo.jpg

Is it 伕, "common laborer", or 佚?


Update: This tattoo belongs to "Joker" in Rankmytattoos.com

Scary Spice, tell me what you want?

While scanning through gossip site, The Superficial, I came across several images of Melanie Brown, aka. the former Scary Spice, modeling for Ultimo Autumn/Winter lingerie line.


http://thesuperficial.com/2008/10/scary_spice_will_frighten_your.php

I have no idea what the character circled in red supposedly to be.

Is it 女? Or, is it 太?

Oh, Melanie B, why can't you tell me what you want, what you really really want? According to the song, what she really wanted was "zigazig ha".

Sharing the Misfortune

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A81006/high/n77m-my-chinese-tatto.jpg

有難同當 is a Chinese idiom means "to share the misfortune together". If this was picked from a tattoo template book, I am sure there are many sharing this misfortune.

BBC: The Kremlin Digger

Alan noticed something odd about the photograph in BBC's article about Russian journalist, Elena Tregubova.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3227666.stm

Alan says: "The Japanese in the background is obviously reversed. Perhaps the BBC published a mirror-image reversed copy of the photo. Although obviously intended to be Japanese, the text in the background is not exactly legible anyway and it does not seem to make any sense. Maybe the Japanese is reversed on the background image. Who knows? I’m not sure why such a journalist would want to be photographed in front of such a gibberish background. Is this fashionable in Russia or something?"

My guess would be it had something to do with paragraph 3 of the article:

"In one chapter, its author describes a flirty sushi lunch with Vladimir Putin, then head of the Russian security services, the FSB."

Sushi, #42 on list of things White people like.

HS in Folha de S. Paulo

Natasha from Brazil emailed me to let me know Hanzi Smatter was recently cited in Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper in circulation.

She offered to translate the last part of the article into English:

"(...) At that place there was a "Japanese name converter" - but of course, at the corner of the studio, there was an album - which, according to the teacher Diego Raigorodsky, was 'an horror show'. "The dragon looks like doodled by a kid, and the 'long life' symbol doesn't exist."

He indicates the site hanzismatter.com, "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in western culture". There you can find the girl who wanted to tattoo her boyfriend's name, but actually tattooed "supermarket". "That's why I tell people to research", says Djehdian. Even because, jokes teacher Yan, "I never saw a tattooer at a mandarin course."

Thanks, Natasha!