Funny; when I edited the parent comment, the confirmation page showed the correct characters. When I went back to the thread view, the chars were garbled again.
A test of unescaped angle braces:
Usage: foo
If you fix this and you want me to retest the funky chars after that, just let me know: <my username here> at yahoo dot com.
Oops.. sorry for the repost; I should have imagined that abusing a feature request thread for bug reports was not much more original than the converse. :P