It was a dark and stormy night

Recently I heard about the "Dark and Stormy Night" competition, an international literary parody contest, celebrating the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). According to the webpage, "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.'"

This was the winning entry, by Dan McKay, of Fargo, N.D.:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

I emailed some friends about this, providing the link to the runners-up and category winners. One of my friends, Laura Knight, wrote her own "bad opening sentence," and emailed it to me tonight. If she ever gets tired of marine biology, she has a career waiting for her somewhere else. Not saying it would be in writing....

The bespeckled literary oracle scowled and squinted mightily as she examined a tall, yet delicate woman with long brown hair pulled tightly in a bun maintaining a steely gaze back at her while quietly ranting, "This is an outrage!", as she hastily unbuttoned the top three buttons of her blouse and kicked off her Mary Jane shoes in rapid succession and feverishly grasped the hairpin that launched an explosion of cascading tresses alongside her face that was thrashing from side to side till her glasses were unapologetically smashed upon the floor, right in the exact spot where only seconds ago she was peering into her open compact mirror and had observed the approach of a spandex clad David Lee Roth directly behind her as she whirled around and calmly asked, "May I help you?"