code: public static String jigger (String text)
      {
          if (text == null) {
              return null;
          }
          try {
              return new String(text.getBytes("UTF8"), "8859_1");
          } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException uee) {
              log.warning("Jigger failed", uee);
              return text;
          }
      }
docs: Many databases simply fail to handle Unicode text properly and this routine provides a
  common workaround which is to represent a UTF-8 string as an ISO-8859-1 string. If you don't
  need to use the database's collation routines, this allows you to do pretty much exactly
  what you want at the expense of having to jigger and dejigger every goddamned string that
  might contain multibyte characters every time you access the database. Three cheers for
  progress!