Unintentional Surrealism Awards

Time once again for Dan and Vince's Unintentional Surrealism Awards. This year's recipients are:

Best Digital Cable Listing:
Turner Classic Movies, "Here Comes Trouble" - "A cub reporter helps solve the murder of a stripper. (1948), (Comedy)."

Best Overheard Conversation Fragment:
That guy who walked past at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf - "And then you stand up from the chair and suddenly you've got an assful of chlamydia."

Best Random Action of a Public Official:
The Parking Enforcement officer who drove past a line of parked cars with a wet sponge tied to the end of a metal stick, rubbing the sponge on the wheels of the cars.

Best Election-Year Election Results:
From CNN.com - Muskogee, Oklahoma Elects 19-Year-Old Mayor — A 19-year-old freshman at the University of Oklahoma was elected mayor Tuesday of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in the northeastern part of the state.

Best Surreptitious Way to Ensure Your Shareholders Fire You:
Speed Racer.

To all the nominees who didn't take home the coveted Dan and Vince Tube O' Ground Beef Trophy this year, try harder. Or, alternately, try less hard and hope the universe favors irony.

Vince Out.

Confirmed! John McCain, Don Rickles Actually Same Person

You heard it here first, folks. DNA evidence confirms it.

So when "John McCain" announces his running mate will be George Carlin, don't say we didn't warn you.

And a note to everybody at the FCC: with Vice President Carlin to look forward to, just start packing up your offices now.

30 Days Underneath the Ground

As it happens, not everyone agrees on certain definitions. For instance, what a pair of practicing Surrealists consider "public art," other people might call "vandalism." The people who run the LA County Jail, it turns out, call it that. See, they think that urinating on the Los Angeles Times building...well, let's just say we weren't able to convince them that our ambitions were pure, lofty, and gallery-worthy. Live and learn.

So we've been away for a while.

You know what's objectively funny, though, no matter who you are or what personal distress you might be in at the moment? A grown man being lifted in the air by two uniformed policemen, while he's still urinating yelling "Warhol did it first! Warhol did it first!" at the top of his voice.

Thanks for waiting. Here's some surreal:

In the Liquid Paper room where there should have been no shadows,
Shadows began to pool, and took the form of a man.
Invisible to all but he, skeletons crouched in the corners
Bowing musical saws with their own femurs
Or attacking washboards with borrowed ribs.
A hummingbird the color of smoke hovered
Above the figure in the bed. Eyes closed.
All eyes were closed.
The shadows crept to the form, the woman
Shrinkwrapped in white linen, and knelt.
"Poetry" he whispered, "is a bead of sweat
Tracing your perfect spine down...down...down..."
And, at long last, she opened her eyes.

R.I.P. Alain Robbe-Grillet

We are saddened by the loss of French filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay for one of our favorite films Last Year at Marienbad. Funeral services will be held last month and will be preceded by a memorial viewing sometime next year. Or they'll all occur at the same time in a linear fashion... To be honest, I've always been a little confused by the whole thing.

Dan.

LA Times - Probably the Final Chapter...of Shame!!

Ok, so we heard back from XXX XXXX at the LA Times about the blatant re-use of our Surrealism for their Entertainment fodder. As you can probably infer from the tone of our opening sentence, here, things did not go as we'd planned. This is XXX XXXX's new statement after his "investigation" (notice the use of sarcastic quotation marks):

"Dear Dan & Vince,

Just to follow up: I've discussed this with Patrick Day and his editors and they are unfamiliar with your blog. They came up with this premise together, while brainstorming. So maybe great minds are thinking alike?

For what it's worth: What I'm also getting on this is that such a juxtaposition between movies and reality is not a totally brand-new one, though, and variations on it have been done in years past.

Thank you again for writing with this matter of concern to you.

XXX XXXX"

So they're taking the easy way out by claiming total ignorance of our blog, and probably even our existence. But notice their use of flattery. If they're so "ignorant" of us, how can they possibly comprehend the greatness of our minds?!?! People pleaded ignorance about this mortgage crisis thing, too, but that didn't mean it wasn't real.

That's right. We said it. We're real.

I know we put on this big show that we're actually Sur-real, but we're just as tangible as the day we were born. Maybe even more so, since we're now far more massive, and it's just possible that mass equates to degree of reality.

And, LA Times, you really hurt our feelings. Sniff. All we wanted was a little picture of Rene Magritte somewhere in the Entertainment section. But no.

Ok. Now we're really mad. We thought we'd try to barrage Patrick Day with all kinds of slanderous rumors, but it turns out he was too clever for us by having a name that's almost exactly the same as a holiday where everybody drinks too much. So whatever we said about him would get lost in the annals of Google and if anybody did find it, they'd assume it was some type of liquor hallucination and forget all about it.

So now, it appears, the only thing left to do is to take this to the people who have been affected most by this scandal -- the candidates. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

LA Times - The Next Chapter...of Shame!!

Tsk Tsk Tsk.

As previously reported in "Surrealism...On the March!" notice would be paid to the LA Times about the purloining of our Surrealism. Here is the official Dan and Vince email release to every editor we could find contact information about at the LA Times:

"We were wondering what to do if it appears you guys re-appropriated a feature story from us without credit? It occurred to us that Patrick Day's Feb. 7th article "Real Lessons from Fake Presidents" bore an astoundingly striking resemblance to our blog "Let Hollywood Be Your Super Tuesday Guide," which was published on Feb. 1 and prominently linked to by the Internet Movie Database on Feb. 5th, generating thousands of hits and certainly leaving the door open for someone at the Times to read it. And then the Times article wound up in the exact same IMDb link list where our blog first appeared. We guess it's possible someone just happened to come up with the exact same idea five days later, using the same examples and some of the same Geena Davis jokes, but it begins to strain credulity, which, for us, takes some doing. Just because we're Surrealists, don't think we don't bleed like everybody else."

To which their reader's liason responded:
"Hi Dan & Vince, Thank you for writing. I'd be interested to know the particular elements that you are seeing as bearing an 'astoundingly striking resemblance' between those features so that I can look into this further. XXX XXXX Asst. Readers' Representative"

Notice the use of sarcastic quotation marks. We did.

Stay tuned.

Surrealism Hijacked! Shame on the LA Times

I wake up this morning, squeeze a little coffee onto a toothbrush, brew up some Colgate, and put it in a mug for Dan, and then I e-zip on over to the LA Times online. And what do I find there? BLATANT THIEVERY!! MISAPPROPRIATON OF SURREALISM!! And the FAILURE TO GIVE PROPER CREDIT WHERE DUE!!!

What am I so mad about? I'll tell you (although, admittedly, it would be far more Surreal to not tell you...):

As many of you saw, the other day the Internet Movie Database prominently featured a link to our previous blog posting Let Hollywood Be Your Super Tuesday Guide (thank you, btw), in which Dan and I used movies and TV shows to predict the future efficacy of either our nation’s first Black or female president. Thousands of people read our blog – we have the stats from Google Analytics to prove it.

And then this morning, a full six days after our original post, the Los Angeles Times has the effrontery to blatantly rip us off without even sticking a picture of Rene Magritte in the article to throw us a bone. They ran a piece called Real Lessons from Fake Presidents, in which they used the exact same premise as our blog, except across racial, gender, and genre lines. They even used the same movies and TV shows we did (including 24, Deep Impact, and Commander in Chief), and made the same Geena Davis joke. As if that weren’t bad enough, they promised zombies in the tease, and then DID NOT DELIVER ZOMBIES.

You don’t have to take our word for it, though. You can read the article here.

First The Onion, and now this. Rest assured, notice will be paid.

Vince out (grrr).