Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with surreal

What surreal vdeo is this?

AdamOddo — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:14:29 -0800

A few years ago I saw this video type thing and am wondering the name. Its kind of fuzzy memory. A girl is sitting in front of a class of people. They were saying she is empty inside. A guy went inside of her and was lost in a desert. I forget the rest and I am very stumped.

I want my Wogan!

pdb — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:53:43 -0800

Where can I watch Eurovision in the USA? Last year, when we were in London, I got my wife hooked on the ridiculous absurdity that is the Eurovision Song Contest, and the commentary stylings of Terry Wogan. This year, we're not going to be in Europe during the final - is there any US-available media outlet that shows the contest? Bonus points if anybody knows somewhere in Portland, OR to watch it.

Oh my organic days

naju — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:13:01 -0800

What's the name/artist of the blissful reggae/surf/pop song in Funky Forest: The First Contact? This is one of the best movies I've ever seen. And now I'm obsessed with this particular song. It's a song from Takefumi's dream sequence, which features 8 yellow-suited dancers. I think it's sung in Chinese. It's featured in the second half of this trailer (0:56 on). Please :)

What is the name of this book of surreal photographers work?

aqueousdan — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:31:56 -0800

What is the name of this book? A couple of pages for each photographer, all with a generally surreal feel to them. I'm sure it is called something like Photographing The Photographers but I cannot for the life of me remember the exact title to find this book. In the summer I went to an art exhibition and afterwards there were books relating to different types of art. In the photography section was this book but I forgot to write it down.

Best. TV. ad. ever. (if it actually exists)

night kitchen — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:19:14 -0800

SurrealTelevisionAdFilter: Did my friend really see an ad in which a family reacts in abject terror when the cartoon sun character on the juice bottle comes to life at their breakfast table? It sounds like something Saturday Night Live would have done as a spoof ad, but my friend swears she saw it on Telemundo roughly 10 years ago during daytime soaps (telenovelas). (And no, she was not under the influence of any mind-altering substances at the time.) She described it as a mother and two kids in a typical breakfast table setting, featuring a bottle of something like Sunny Delight whose label has a sun with a face. And, as usually happens in such ads, at a certain point the little sun comes to life and starts talking to them. Instead of the "usual" reaction though, the kids start screaming and crying and the mother, terrified for her children, tries frantically to shield them and get them away from the apparition.

I truly hope this ad exists because I would love to see it (and would love to be able to reunite my friend with it). So far, though, my google and youtube searches haven't yielded any trace of such a thing. Please help me, hive mind! Do you have a copy of this ad, or do you know where I might find it (or even some reference to its existence)?

I suppose HyperrealTelevisionAdFilter would be a more apt description, since terror is certainly a more realistic reaction than glee to an illustrated character that spontaneously animates at your table while you're trying to eat breakfast.

Bed floating in a river art?

kuujjuarapik — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 06:09:07 -0800

Is anyone familiar with a surreal painting that shows a man and a woman lying in a bed that is floating down a river? I remember seeing it a while ago, but I can't remember the artist's name or the name of the painting. I believe it is oil on canvas, and it has a very dreamlike feel to it. Googling "bed floating down river painting" and other similar phrases get lots of hits, but none are correct.

The Various Workings of a Cube-Shaped Gallery

0bvious — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:14:20 -0800

Imagine a cube-shaped building, with ten cube-shaped rooms along each side (10 rooms long, 10 high & 10 deep). Each cubular room has 4 walls, 1 ceiling and 1 floor. Each of the 6 interior surfaces in all 1000 cubular rooms is decorated with a different piece of art. The rooms can be moved around the building, as if it were an enormous Rubik's cube, but they can also be spun on their axes, so all 6 walls of all 1000 cubes is capable of touching all the others (if the cube is so arranged). How many combinations of art within the 'Cube Gallery' are possible? If you can run me through the workings of the maths I would be extra grateful. Also, what technical words/phrases/language are useful/interesting in expressing this concept? To restipulate the numbers:

- A cube gallery with 10 cube rooms along each side (10x10x10)

- Each cube room has 6 pieces of art on its interior surfaces

- All the cube rooms are capable of being rotated into every possible variation (ceilings becoming walls becoming floors etc.)

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for requesting more information about visiting Colorado!

davehat — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 23:20:18 -0800

I've started getting lots of emails thanking me for my interest in a variety of services/info requests/subscriptions that I definately didn't ask for. Is this some wierd cyberstalking, or is there some new sophisticated type of spam going around? So far, I have received about 20 messages from tradepub.com denying me subsriptions to trade publications as diverse as Nursing Monthly and Federal Computing Weekly.

I also been thanked for my enquiries about purchasing Boston Whaler Boats, visiting Colorado, getting a hair transplant and I've been sent a link to download i-anywhere's "M-Business Anywhere Developer Edition". There were a couple more before this, I think, but I just deleted them because I thought they were regular type spam that my web based email had missed.

Nearly all the emails have mentioned that whatever it was I requested has been (snail) mailed to me....

WTF is going on? Am I sleep surfing? Is someone just hiding behind a "fake" email address they think they've created? If so anyone have any idea how can I track the person down and ask them to stop?

I wouldn't be bothered, but there's no way to spam filter them so they arrive in my inbox. Also, I have no idea whether the person has opted out or if my email address is being distributed to every shyster in America....

Absurdist, surrealist blogs

panoptican — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:05:26 -0800

Absurdist, surrealist blogs? Any recommendations. Looking for blogs similar to OFFICIAL POET LAUREATE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, The Man Who Couldn't Blog, hell even Tony Pierce has his moments. I asked MetaChat this very question last night and they pointed me to a lot of fun ones but I need more (you see, I'm addicted to the rambunctious stylings of non-sense). MetaChat suggested The Dullest Blog in the World, THIS IS FUN TO MAKE A BLOG ON THE COMPUTER WEBSITE, The Bovine Inversus Experience and Girls Are Pretty. So what do you have?

Please note that the definition of "absurdist, surrealist blog" is open to your interpretation because I don't really have one.