Why does my title include this strange…

do you have both the ‘site title’ and ‘tag line’ filled in under dashboard – settings – general?

the meta title is usually generated by http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_title where the theme sets the | character as separator; or possibly whatever seo plugin you might be using.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress

what theme are you using?
what seo plugin if any do you have activated?

try posting in the plugin’s forum at http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo