A dark and stormy...

Ah... Spring!

The Wattle's in bloom, the scent of Freisias drifting on a mild breeze and the McCartney Rose has more buds than a beer factory; you know, that beer, which smells of yeast and beer and hops, only it's a flower...

Last week, the Bulwer-Lytton winner was announced. It's a competition of "wretched writing", sourced in the paragraph by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, in his book, Paul Clifford (1830).

The infamous paragraph?

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

This year's winner is Garrison Spik who wrote: Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

Dunno... There are some absolute howlers this year. Like the winner of the Detective section:

Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who'd bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy's trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears.

Or this one, from the Adventure category:

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay -- the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

My favourite? Runner-up in the Spy category:

The KGB agent known only as the Spider, milk solids oozing from his mouth and nose, surveyed the spreading wound in his abdomen caused by the crushing blow of the low but deadly hassock and begged of his attacker to explain why she gone to the trouble of feeding him tainted milk products before effecting his assassination with such an inferior object as this ottoman, only to hear in his dying moments an escaping Miss Muffet of the MI-5 whisper, "it is my whey."

Go on, go and have a laugh!