Fake Bulwer Lytton Winners

Any day now the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results should be announced. This "worst opening line to a fictional novel" contest can be really hilarious sometimes. Even though there was nothing new on the contest's website, I decided to google "Bulwer Lytton 2005". I was surprised to discover a list of winners that appeared on several blogs. They seemed familiar and since they also didn't show up on the official site of neither the competition nor the SJSU English Dept. which runs it, I became suspicious. A short inquiry led to the revelation that it's some hoax that has come up every year and presented as the new winners. Since almost every blog said something like "I got this from..." I assume the bloggers are innocent chain-mail victims.

Anyway, though they aren't the real winners, they are no less amusing than the ones in the real thing. So here they are:

* As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it.

* Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens.

* With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.

* Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: "Andre creep... Andre creep... Andre creep."

* Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved.

* Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from eking out a living at a local pet store.

* Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do.

* Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor.

* Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the meaning of the word 'fear'; a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death -- in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies.

And the [fake] gran prize winner:
* The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly, "You lied!"