N.D. Man Wins Annual Bad-Writing Contest
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A man who compared a woman’s anatomy to a carburetor won an annual contest that celebrates the worst writing in the English language.
Dan McKay, a computer analyst at Microsoft Great Plains in Fargo, N.D., bested thousands of entrants from North Pole, Alaska to Manchester, England to triumph Wednesday in San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
“As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire,” he wrote, comparing a woman’s breasts to “small knurled caps of the oil dampeners.”
The competition highlights literary achievements of the most dubious sort – terrifyingly bad sentences that take their inspiration from minor writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel “Paul Clifford” began, “It was a dark and stormy night.”