Dude, check out these totally sweet tattoos with Chinese letters!

Here's a blog I really like, Hanzi Smatter. You can think of it as the counterpart to Engrish.com. A guy who's actually literate in Chinese examines tattoos, t-shirts, and other instances of commercial misuse of Chinese characters ("hanzi", or "kanji" in Japanese) in the West.

Living in Japan I saw plenty of bizarre English printed on signs and apparel, but it seems to take an American to be stupid enough to have foreign-language gibberish permanently inked onto their flesh.

One of my students in Japan told me that an American soldier she knew (there was a US military base in town) sent her a digital photo of a friend's tattoo and asked her to check the meaning. The tattoo-bearer thought it said something like "World Peace". It was actually the name of a brand of a cheap Japanese fruit-flavored kid's drink...basically the equivalent of having a tattoo that said "Kool-Aid".