A retired mechanical designer for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is the winner of the 24th running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A resident of the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, Jim Guigli displayed appalling powers of invention by submitting sixty entries to the 2006 Contest, including one that has been "honored" in the Historical Fiction Category. "My motivation for entering the contest," he confesses, "was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia."
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is the essence of simplicity: 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 "pursuit of 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."
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has annually attracted thousands of entries from all over the world.
While the Winner parodies hard-boiled detective fiction, the runner-up toys with perhaps the most famous piece of dialogue from Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" movie. In keeping with the bignitude and high seriousness of the Contest, the Grand Prize winner will receive a pittance. Other winners must content themselves with becoming household names.

It was close, but 40% of the Holabird Advocate Readers who voted in our poll preffer that September 11 be just another day. Both Patriot Day and Firefighters Day got 30% of the vote each. Perhaps we should make Firefighters Day everyday.

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

North of 40: Taking a dive
by Red Green
"If your wife is having fun and you're not,
you're still having way more fun than
when you're having fun and she's not."
One hobby that I've never understood is skydiving. I believe everybody has a voice inside that tells them not to do dumb things. (If you're married, you have two of them. And the loud one isn't even yours.) This voice stops you from doing idiotic things like stepping into oncoming traffic or quitting your job to become a mime. Or jumping out of an airplane.
Skydiving is crazy. But they tell me that if you get a bunch of guys to go with you, it's not crazy, it's bonding. So I suggest you go skydiving only if you can get a bunch of guys to go with you.
But first, you all have to ask your wives if it's OK with them. If the wives say "no," the guys don't go. And if the wives say "yes," I'd say their marriages are in serious trouble.