Funny T-Shirts

Secretly control the TV,
anywhere, any time!

If I die in my sleep tonight I'll be sure to let you know.

I'm not afra-
hey! who's that on-

GAK!

Oh this is just a Bloody Mary rip-off. Think somebody is trying to see how many Google hits for "Toma sota balcu" they can get out of this?

165 pages so far.

and how is a little girl going to bury me? bring it on i say.

I'm wondering if that's an anagram of some sort. I've messed with it a little and can't figure out one.

Toma is a common Romanian first name (Thomas) and both Sota and Balcu are Romanian last names. Does this bring us closer to any kind of solution?

Actually if I think about it, Toma is also a common last name in Romanian, not just a first name. So we have three Romanian last names or a Romanian name - compound last name. Can all this be a coincidence?

http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/
Brings up more than a few anagrams. My favorite is AMOS AT OAT CLUB.

Probably the signature of the person that came up with it. Do you have a translation for Sota and Balcu? Crap....duh, there's a Romanian that works here.

Oh, great, Alex, so now YOU'RE safe, and the rest of us are going to get suffocated. Thanks a LOT!

He said they're phoenetic spellings, someone hearing the Romanian and writing down what they heard in english without knowing what the meaning was so its hard to translate, or its code for something.

I do not understand - do we have a week to post a message or not?

Well, the second and third words are indeed Romanian last names, but they don't mean anything. There are names in other languages too (including English) that aren't necessarily meaningful, right?

"There are names in other languages too (including English) that aren't necessarily meaningful, right?"
As far as I know, almost all names in English and in all other languages that I know anything about mean something, or at least used to mean something. The exception would be the dumb-sounding names (in my opinion) that people occasionally cook up for themselves or their children out of thin air.
My name (Gary), for example, is an old Anglo-Saxon name that meant something like "Spear Carrier." My last name means "Barrel Maker."
However, most English speakers don't know what these names mean, although neither name is unusual in English.

Charybdis! How dare you give us that link! It's addictive!!

Now I can't give you a counter-example of a name that doesn't mean anything, because you'll say that "probably it used to mean something long ago", and you're probably right. At least in Romanian there are a lot of loan words and names from other neighbouring languages. Such loan words were usually taken up with a phonetical spelling, the new word not meaning anything. After that, add some hundreds of years of "weathering in common people's mouths" and you'll end up with a name not resembling anything. Probably both Sota and Balcu used to mean something in Romanian, Hungarian, Serbian etc, but I bet the guy behind the urban legend had no intention of using this meaning.

Compare how the Ellis Island immigration officers spelled a newcomer's name: for example Tony Curtis was of Hungarian origin (his family was called Kert̩sz before he went to America, meaning "gardener") but who would today know what his name means?

Big Gary C's real name is Gary Cooper? Somehow the screen name now fits...

Since we're talking about last names now, does anyone know a site where you can reasearch where a last name came from? Although I've tried to reasearch it, no one can figure out what my last name means and since my family came from England the spelling shouldn't be all that different...

Zoltan, I'm not sure I understand your comment that loan words don't mean anything in the new language. If they don't mean anything, most people wouldn't bother to say them, since the principal purpose of speaking is to communicate something.
English also contains a great many loan words (perhaps all languages do), but each loan word means something in English, and usually the English meaning is not too far from the meaning in the source language.
Speaking of Ellis Island, apparently it's something of a legend that the clerks there routinely changed people's family names. Ellis Island had a large corps of interpreters, most of whom were native speakers of the immigrants' home languages, and in any case the names registered at Ellis Island were usually copied directly from the passenger lists of the arriving ships. Last summer, I visited the Ellis Island museum, and the curators there said they have been trying to find documented cases of names being capriciously changed by the immigration inspectors, but so far they haven't come up with any examples.
As for Tony Curtis, if you mean the actor who was in "Some Like it Hot," according to the "World Almanac and Book of Facts," his original name (before he adopted the stage name Tony Curtis) was Bernard Schwartz. I'm not sure what the W.A.& B.o.F.'s source is for this information. What's yours?

Fay-Fay, if you'll tell me what that last name is, I'll see what I can do.

Correct, my mistake. There are a lot of Hungary-related sources stating that the original name of Tony Curtis was Kert̩sz - see for example http://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/85/rq-85-huntastic.html - but they are all wrong. The actor's parents were indeed Hungarians, but they were called Schwartz (lots of German last names even in Hungary, many of their owners Jewish), as you said. In any case, if you google around a bit, you'll find many cases of Kert̩sz becoming Curtis, and probably that was producing the confusion.

Big Gary: I didn't mean loan words, but names. To stick with the Hungarian examples: what does Pataki mean in English? Or Sarkozy in French? Nothing. Yet, the names of these famous politicians are of Hungarian origin (pataki = from the river, sarkozy = from SÌÁrk̦z, a Hungarian region). So, asking for the English meaning of the now American name Pataki is like asking a Romanian about the meaning of Sota or Balcu.

By the way, I have also visited the Ellis Island museum and I know that they are defending the theory of the unchanged names. After all, they want to attract visitors in search for their genealogy, and with erroneous names this wouldn't work. Thinking about all the diacritics and special characters in many European languages, I find it hard to believe that so few name changes were made. In addition, many name changes were made by the immigrants themselves, thinking they would assimilate better.