Look at what you started, Alanis Morissette.

Thanks to friends at FJM for finding this gem, but given their silence on the first two paragraphs, I wonder if they are slipping. (?!)

An unheralded irony exists in a strange parallel between the film industry and the game of baseball.

Reading this sentence is like stubbing your toe, except your toe is your brain.
Is it wrong to interpret the byline "Dean Chiungos is a fantasy writer for MLB.com" to mean, "In his fantasies, Dean Chiungos is a writer"? No, such an interpretation is not wrong, for at least two reasons.

(A) The combination of "irony" and "strange parallel" is redundant.

(B) The irony is not so much "unheralded" as it is "nonexistent." As a corollary of (A) above, the parallel is not so much "strange" as it is "tenuous and ultimately nonexistent."

(I suppose it would be awkward to open an article with, "A nonexistent irony exists...")

Here comes the irony! It's about to be heralded!

In the movies, the year's best supporting actor gets an Oscar just for playing a role over a finite period of time. But in baseball, the season's best supporting man has long gone unrecognized despite actually playing -- and living -- a role on a daily basis.

This is some serious fucking irony. Let's parse its many layers.

(1) The actor just plays a role, WHEREAS the ballplayer actually plays a role.

(2) The actor does so over a finite period of time, WHEREAS the ballplayer does so on a daily basis.

• Actors do not act daily. Their characters don't even matter in every day of the story portrayed in the film. Ballplayers play over infinite stretches of time.


• If you subtract (number of baseball games played by David Eckstein this year) from 365, you will obtain a positive integer. Try it for yourself.


• More topical arithmetic. Let f be the "writer indicator" function, defined on all humans as follows:
  f(person)=0, if the person is not a writer.
  f(person)=1, if the person is a writer.
  Then: (f(Dean Chiungos) - 1) is a negative integer.

(3) As if that weren't enough to make ironic the heretofore lack of baseball award analogous to Best Supporting Actor, the ballplayer also lives the role (WTF?!), unless of course Chiungos meant:

in baseball, the season's best supporting man has long gone unrecognized despite actually living

which would, like (1) and (2), be a funny way to contrast supporting actors and supporting ballplayers.


Baseball is our national pastime. A commitment to capitalism makes our economy strong. Respect for free speech gives our democracy vitality.

If Dean Chiungos was paid to write the paragraphs in question, what does that say about the American Empire?