ESPN & Matt Roth of Miami Dolphins

Dustin Chinn of Comedy Central (All Hail to Jon Stewart) spotted this giant 春 (spring) on ESPN's website.


http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/index

Neither of us understood what ESPN's intention of plastering this particular character on their site, especially when Spring is NFL's offseason.

After reading the site, the only I can think of is the "haiku" theme. Even with that, why didn't ESPN just use 俳句?

Later Stacy emailed me this photo of Miami Dolphins' Matt Roth.


larger view

According to a 2005 interview with Pro Football Weekly, Roth claimed "I got some Chinese writing — my last name."

Roth is correct about they are simplified Chinese characters, however I really doubt his last name is 疼闹扑权.

Joyful Life

Jason V. from Brazil has sent me two photos of work done by Stanley of STATTOO in Minas Gerais.

The first one was just three characters thrown together, but the second one was terrible:


http://sp2.fotologs.net/photo/50/59/58/stattoo/1174402499_f.jpg

Not only these five characters are randomly thrown together, the second one does not even exist, and fourth one 喜 is upside down!

Amber's Tattoo from Big Brother 8

I don't watch reality television shows, therefore I have no idea who Amber is. Apparently she is one of the house guests in Big Brother 8.

HS reader & Big Brother 8 watcher Jenn G. emailed me this screen shot of Amber's tattoo,



According to Jenn G., in one of the previous episodes, Amber claimed her tattoos are:

Family
Strength
Honor
Wisdom

If anyone has seen the particular episode, please confirm if Amber has made such claim.

The Banta Family

This person went to Charlie at Asylum Tattoo of Covington, Kentucky and got some names tattooed, assuming they are family members names. The end result is posted in BMEzine's gallery dated Aug. 4, 2007.


http://bmeink.com/A70804/high/bmepb577039.jpg

My fellow katakana tattoo connoisseur Alan has this to say:

As these things go, I guess this one is not so bad. It appears to be the names of people in a family, with the family name バンタ [Banta] written horizontally and the given names ジム [Jim], アネット [Annette] and タナー [Tanner] written vertically under it.

The tattoo artist did make a mistake in that the final stroke ー in the name Tanner should be vertical instead of horizontal. This appears to be a common mistake that we also saw on Kimberley's tattoo.

Pocket-Sized Book

Reader Lynn sent me this photo of a pair men's swimming shorts from Wal-Mart. Since she is a Japanese major, it was odd to her to see hiragana characters meaning "pocket-sized book" printed on the shorts.




I confirmed this with Alan, and he says:

The hiragana is clearly しゅうちんぼん [shuuchinbon], which is the Japanese reading of 袖珍本, meaning a "pocket-sized book" which was perhaps the size of today's paperback books, a handy size for carrying in the sleeves of kimono.

But as to why someone would want to have this written on their swimming trunks, I have no idea. Bizarre!

Of course, we both think it was meant to be a jab at the wearer's testicle size or the popular sport of pocket pool.


P.s. why do people still shop at Wal-Mart?!