Ok, real quick. I just wanted to pass on something I just learned.

If you are starting to get a bunch of funny characters appearing in your self-hosted wordpress blog like  (which was all over my blog). The best way to remove it is to comment out the following lines in your wp-config.php file. You can do it like so:

// define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
// define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Just a FYI. Seemed to work for me.