1st place in Derby #104: Tattoo, with 791 votes!

Translating words and concepts from one language to another can be a difficult and nuanced project. Ask any exchange student who’s ever tried to put the moves on a local. It’s tricky. There are shades of meaning. There are idiomatic expressions. There’s a whole world of difference between “mouth” and “grub-hole.” There are scholars for whom translation is a lifetime’s toil. People are still squabbling over what the heck the Bible says. President Kennedy may very well have been a jelly donut.

That being said, we’ve never understood why, when it comes to the complex task of translating runes, ideograms, hieroglyphs and kanji into simple English nouns like “strength,” so many people put so much trust in the first tattooist they bump into in whatever horrible little Florida town they’ve chosen as this year’s Spring Break destination.

Think about that. Some burly biker freakshow refugee told your kid sister that a certain squiggle was Chinese for “loyalty.” Now, she might have thought “wow, I wonder how he knows that? I wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who’d completed a graduate degree in Asian languages. I suppose you can’t always judge a book by its cover.”

But she didn’t. Instead, she thought “AWESOMMMMMMME, I WANT THAT ONE, QUICK, WHILE I’M STILL DRUNKENUF FROM THESE MUDSLIIIDES SO IT DOESN’T HURRRRT.”

Wear this shirt: to cover up that great big chest tattoo you’ve got of Q*Bert (CBS “Saturday Supercade” version) smoking a huge bong through his proboscis-thing. It seemed so awesome at the time. Who could have guessed you’d outgrow it?

Don’t wear this shirt: around people who actually have binary tattoos. For one thing, they might take it as an insult. For another, you don’t really want to be hanging around with those nerds anyway, do you?

This shirt tells the world: “’Regret’ does not compute”

We call this color: Royal Blue Tattoo

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