We Hope to Do This Every Year

Each year, San Jose State University conducts a competition for the Bulwer-Lytton Prize for the most turgid writing submission. The winner submitted this:

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.

Read more at this Web site.

There, you'll find dozens of atrocious entries. Yours truly earned dishonorable mention in the years preceding my relocation to festive, clean, and just New Albany, Indiana.

Obscure footnote: We won!