New Year's Resolution

For those who are seeking suggestions on new year's resolution, may I suggest stop getting tattoos from these templates?



Especially the infamous "Asian Font" seen here, aka. English alphabet in gibberish Chinese.

Joanne Raine's "Supermarket" Tattoo

Apparently the big story across the pond in UK is a girl's tattoo. A young girl named Joanne Raine got her boyfriend's nickname tattooed on her with Chinese characters at a dodgy tattoo shop. Of course, they have since then broke up & the tattoo is not exactly the boy's name.


News links via BBC, The Northern Echo, & video via LiveLeak



The phrase "supermarket" is 超級市場 or abbreviated to 超市 in Chinese. I have no idea how and why 盟联行 was interpreted as "supermarket" in the news clips.


Update: Dec. 13, 2007 - I have emailed BBC regarding the error of interpreting 盟联行 as "supermarket" .

Kanjix

Johan and I had a good laugh at this website called Kanjix, where its motto is "A good KANJI name for you."



Besides the Engrish plastered all over the site, their kanji examples are not what I would call professional quality.

We are both curious who would pay $19 for 800 pixel size jpeg & additional $9.50 for PDF (Why not just use PDFCreator, it is FREE!).

I suggest their slogan should be changed to:

(Engrish + Eihongo) * $ = Kanjix!


Update: I find it to be very ironic that Google Adsense is posting an ad about Kanjix.

Sasha from New York in Miami Ink

An anonymous reader emailed me this screen capture from episode 12 in season 4 of Miami Ink.



It starts at 38:30, some person telling her story:

"Hello. I'm Sasha from New York and I've got this really cool tattoo on my back of a crescent moon surrounded a kanji, which is Japanese symbol and it's all me, it's my initial. And crescent moon is there basically to protect me, to make..."

Another sucker of the "Asian font".

"Kyan"

My friend Jon Rahoi (who runs a fantastic site about mangled English spotted in Hong Kong and various locations in China) has recently sent me a photo of his personal trainer's tattoo.



Jon says:

Hi Tian - my personal trainer showed me his tat today. He thinks it says "Kyan" which is his son's name. He said his Taiwanese-Okinawan friend wrote it for him. In Cantonese I think it says, "hei nguk mo" (happy house fight or brawl or something) and I'm guessing it would also be at least three syllables in Japanese, too. So I thought he was on crack. BUT when I put them into Google

喜屋武

I get 76,000 pages - mostly of a girl named Chiaki Kyan, who is a cosplay idol. I'm stumped as to where they're getting "Kyan," though. It's a mystery to this poor gwailo...

anyway, thought I'd share.

DeadlyViper.org

Sacha G. has emailed me about a website called DeadlyViper.org. I tried to understand what the site is about by reading its About US section, then quickly got bored by all the vague catchy phrases.


http://deadlyviper.org/

However, both Sacha and I were curious about the significance of all the characters plastered on the site. For example, 加西生學由天誼 does not even form a sentence, but random characters placed together.

Luckily, after I emailed them, Bryce Green replied and confirming that "the characters are just random. They were selected by our designer because they looked compositionally cool."

Tatt's ink-redibly unfunny

The Sun recently printed an article about a man named Vince Mattingley and his tattoo. Since The Sun is a tabloid newspaper, I don't really believe the story. Then again, look at all the people I have documented here in my own site.


http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article369654.ece

According to the article, 屈臣 means "Coca-Cola".

That is absolutely nonsense.

The two-character phrase actually mean "crooked official".

Plus, Coca-Cola is 可口可樂 in Chinese & コカ・コーラ in Japanese.