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Computer Analyst Wins Best Worst Writing Contest

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dark-and-stormy-nights dept.

pmadden writes "Dan McKay, a friend from years ago, has won a prestigious literary award. I've enjoyed technical manuals over the years, but never like this. Who would have guessed that such great writing would come from the grad of a small technical school."

5 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Dark and Stormy... by UCFFool · · Score: 2, Informative
    From TFA:
    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."
    Ok, I get the redundancy of 'dark' and 'night', but I don't find this as horrific as comparing anatomy to car parts *Though Jay Leno may disagree*
    --
    "The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
    1. Re:Dark and Stormy... by swilde23 · · Score: 5, Informative
      I was a little confused as well. Being in the Engineering department, I don't venture over to the English side of things. However, wikipedia seems to clear things up.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bulwer-Lytton, _1st_Baron_Lytton

      His name lives on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants have to supply the openings of terrible (imaginary) novels, inspired by his novel Paul Clifford, which opens with the famous words:
      "It was a dark and stormy night"
      or to give the sentence in its full glory:
      "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."
      The shorter form of the opening sentence was popularized by the Peanuts comic strip. Snoopy's sessions with the typewriter usually began with it. Entrants in the contest seek to capture the rapid changes in point of view, the florid language, and the atmosphere of the full sentence.
      --
      There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
    2. Re:Dark and Stormy... by hawkeye_82 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Stolen directly from the fortune databases:

      Whenever Snoopy starts typing his novel from the top of his doghouse, beginning "It was a dark and stormy night..." he is borrowing from Lord Bulwer-Lytton. This was the line that opened his novel, "Paul Clifford," written in 1830. The full line reveals why it is so bad:

      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.

  2. Re:Does he mean Strombergs, or SUs? by hayfever · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, his Triumph Spitfire would have had Zenith-Stromberg carbs. In the early to mid 60's (before the formation of British Leyland) there were 2 primary auto manufactures in the UK, British Motor Corp (BMC) and Standard-Triumph. As I've heard it told BMC owned SU who made the carbs and decided to stop selling them to Standard-Triumph, who quickly came up with a design that wouldn't violate the SU patents by using a diaphragm to control piston motion and convinced Zenith/Solex to manufacture it as the Zenith-Stromberg (Stromberg was the Standard-Triumph person behind the design). In the late 60's/early 70's British Leyland was formed by the merger of BMC & Standard-Triumph but Triumphs (like his Triumph Spitfire) kept using Zenith-Stromberg carburettors. Incidently the Z-S 175CD (most common) and SU HS6 (most common) are directly interchangeable as are other models I believe.

  3. Re:Does he mean Strombergs, or SUs? by seanadams.com · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a pic of the SU carbs:

    http://www.vord.net/cars/mgb_mods/engine/weber500- carburetor.htm