It was a dark and stormy night

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were just announced.

If you haven't heard of the Bulwer-Lytton, it is a contest for the WORST opening line of a (non-existent) novel, named after the guy who started his 1830 book Paul Clifford with this infamous sentence:

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 the following sentence, by Microsoft analyst Dan McKay:

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.

The list of other winners and runner-ups has a lot of sentences I like better, though. This one's my favorite:

Patricia wrote out the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night' exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of 'He's Just Not That Into You' by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room -- not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she'd always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.

But they say the sky's the limit / And to me that's really true...

There's an interesting article about young Emirati women with careers on BBC World, part of their "Young in the Middle East" series. I haven't been to Dubai but I understand it's very like Qatar, and I think the information in the article applies here.

And speaking of Qatar's neighbors, Justin just warned me that Michael Jackson might be moving to Bahrain. Apparently Jackson likes Bahrain because "he can dress in the same way as the local residents and go out without being noticed." Does this seem unlikely to anyone else? I know it's going to give *me* nightmares.


(I just can't get that middle one right....)

EDIT: Justin suggested that I may have been assuming that dressing like the locals meant wearing a thobe. So here's the alternative: