I was a teacher in Japan for awhile. What a crazy, cute, strange, awesome place. I found a site that reminded me of that. Check out www.engrish.com. If any of you have lived in foreign countries, I suppose we could go on and on trading "bad english" stories, but here are a couple of my favorites (actually, send me your best stories!!).

One occurred when my wife and I walked into quite a large worship conference and looked up at the overhead. The people were intensely worshipping to the Kevin Prosch standard Shout to the Road. Yes, Shout to the R-O-A-D. You see, the word "Lord" contains both an "L" and and "r", letters whose pronounciation provide no small challenge for the Japanese. I can just picture the poor frustrated guy who transliterated the song, hopelessly trying to sound out the word.

By far the oddest thing I saw kept me laughing for weeks at just the thought of it. I was at a ceramics festival and I saw a conservative-looking, middle-aged woman wearing this t-shirt, white letters on blue, boldly declaring:

I MESSED WITH THE GOVERNMENT AND NOW MY KNOB GLOWS IN DARK

Really. Wow.

I guess it's no different than when we wear Chinese characters on our clothes or tatoo them on our bodies having no idea what they mean. I have this hunch with Evian Natural Spring Water. Have you noticed that spelled backward, "Evian" is "naive"? I just know there are some French guys somewhere laughing, "zey can get eet from za tap for naseeng, baht we will pud it in a plastic boddle, and charge zem a dolleur fifty, he he he..."