a competitive and funny contest for "a dark and stormy night"

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (out of San Jose State University) recently announced this year's winners. First place was awarded to Jim Gleeson, a 47-year-old hospital IT specialist from Madison, WI. His entry was praised as a "syntactic atrocity" that displays "a peculiar set of standards or values."

The winning entry: "Gerald began -- but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash -- to pee."

The contest has its origins in this painful opening line by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton in his 1830 book, Paul Clifford: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

A local friend of mine, Randy Wilson, won a (dis)honorable mention last year. Congrats again, I guess, to Randy! ;-)