The dark and stormy Bulwer-Lytton 2003 Results are out and are already being wheyed by those who clabber together sentences for fun and profit. The winning entry is a delicate little morsel that blends passion and fromage in equal proportions:
They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilarfrom the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.The great American responsible for that immortal chunk of literary limburger is Ms. Mariann Simms. Ms. Simms is a citizen of many gifts according to the press release which describes her as:
The wife of an Air Force retiree, the mother of an eight-year-old daughter and a fifteen-year-old herpetologist son, and the doting owner of an Australian Bearded Dragon, Mariann Simms of Wetumpka, Alabama, is the winner of this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.Posted by Vanderleun at July 18, 2003 3:01 PMWhen not stroking the beard of her Pogona vitticeps, she gardens, cooks, and runs an online interactive humor site, HumorMeOnline.com. Like Tony Soprano, a native of New Jersey, she has lived in Alabama since her husband was stationed there thirteen years ago.
Besides becoming a household name, she will receive the contest's traditional prize, a pittance.
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory if not the reputation of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who has just enjoyed his bicentennial. 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) and the phrase, "the pen is mightier than the sword," 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."
