Worst lines

The winners of the 2024 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Awards have just been announced, and many of them (and the (dis)honourable mentions and runners-up) are pretty good.

Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. 

As someone once said: “Deliberately bad writing requires a special talent.”

It’s true. But interestingly, I have no special talent at all.
All the stuff on this blog is entirely accidental. Just variable fortune and the occasional evening filled with Castle Milk Stout with which to distractedly guide my typing fingers.

Anyway, back to the BLFA, and, as you might expect for the highest (only?) awards for this particular genre, they’re bad.

You’ll need to have your brain fired up and be in the right mood (receptive and ready to work through some mental calculations) to enjoy the lot of them before you click that link, so I recommend taking it a bit at a time.

They’re not going anywhere.

And I could list them all here, but I’m not going to. Still, here are a couple of favourites to get you in the mood.

Cthulhu awoke from loathsome dreams of gangrenous decay and the foul stench of congealing viscera, lifting his pulpy, misshapen head to find what foolish supplicant had roused him to yet another age of fear and creeping dread, but found his bloodthirst unslaked, having been brought to consciousness not by horror-filled screams of human sacrifice but by his little sister’s overly dramatic wail of “Cthulhu’s touching me!” from her side of the family station wagon’s back seat.

If broken hearts were made of simple syrup, and shattered dreams were made from white rum, and agony and despair came from ¾ ounce of lime juice, freshly squeezed, and three mint leaves respectively, then Mary Lou just served up a mojito cocktail straight from the ninth circle of hell when she told Ricky the baby wasn’t his.

And these weren’t even their best in class. So click through and enjoy.

Data is beautiful, conspiracy theorists are not

Just a quickie today, but it’s a goodie too.

Rate of occupancy of AirBnb establishments in the USA today (red is high, blue is lower):

Path of solar eclipse across the USA tomorrow:

One of those times where correlation is probably entirely equal to causation.

Of course, there are those who think the solar eclipse is a Masonic/Jewish/Government plot to… do… something:

On Telegram, one well-known conspiracy influencer known as the Health Ranger, who has 75,000 subscribers, wrote that the eclipse “sure would be the perfect cover story if our terrorist government wanted to take down the power grid and cause mass chaos while blocking all citizen communications. Kinda convenient if you want to declare martial law and unleash a dictatorship before Trump can win in November.”

Yeah, we’ve met the Health Ranger before on 6000 miles… He’s a twat.

Sovereign-citizen guru David Straight has also posited a wild conspiracy called Operation Balloon, claiming that the government, using the eclipse blackout as cover, will deploy balloons filled with poisonous gas. Straight didn’t, however, explain why the government wouldn’t just do this at night, when it’s also dark and people are typically not staring at the sky.

You almost lost me at “Sovereign-citizen”, but I’m actually glad that I carried on reading.
David Straight: what an absolute Health Ranger, hey?

As we’ve discussed before (here and here, for example), because a lot of people are pretty stupid, these conspiracy theorists can be quite dangerous. And I wish we could do something about that. But, given that there’s not a huge amount we can do about their access to the internet (and with that, their access to those stupid people), we might as well just laugh at the bullshit, as the world crumbles around us.

There goes the election…

Many people had thought that the ANC might sink to below 50% of the vote in the upcoming national elections. And to be honest, given their performance over the last n years, that seemed like a very reasonable suggestion.

But that was before the ANC asked… er… the ANC to pray for… er… the ANC “to renew itself”.

I can’t comment on all of the other political parties in South Africa (because there really are an awful lot of them), but I certainly haven’t heard of any of the others asking themselves to pray for themselves.

Oops. Missed opportunity right there.

God isn’t going to be looking favourably at any party – no matter how honest they are or how good their policies might be – if their members haven’t been in touch with Him and prayed for self-renewal, now is He?

That’s just not how He works.

So I guess we might as well just hand the election – and what’s left of the country – to the ANC for another 5 years. After all, we’re not just fighting the last of the pre-1994 generation, but also the Lord Almighty too now.

Oh, and the “renewed” ANC, apparently.

Yeah right.