My Favorite Awards - 2007 Results Are In!

For get the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, and the Tonys. Forget the Heisman Trophy and all MVP awards. My favorite is the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. It's named in memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, with the immortal line, "It was a dark and stormy night."

This year's winner is Jim Gleeson, of Madison, Wisconsin. His 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.

Catch all the winners at the Bulwer-Lytton Contest's official web site.