Apropos of Something...

... and just for fun. The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Grand Prize winner:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

The winner of 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. A contest recidivist, he has formerly won the Western and Children's Literature categories.

David McKenzie is the 27th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) (ed: that's Ol' Edward George at left). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Most entries are submitted electronically through the Contest's Web site: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/. 

And what exactly, you may ask, is this post apropos OF? Well, that would be Blog-Bud Morgan's self-admitted abuse of his Main Squeeze... that further being he forced her to read "Atlas Shrugged." Oh, The Horror!  Which, of course, made me think immediately about the B-L award, in that Ms. Rand could have been a perennial winner of said award had it existed in her day.  There is no more turgid prose in existence in 20th century literature anywhere, except perhaps for that written by ol' George Edward hisownself (were he a 20th century... as opposed to 19th, of course... author).