Dim Sum Diaries
Tomorrow I am taking my daughter to the local zoo to spend the night. NO, not to visit my relatives, as some smartasses may try to imply. They have this program for families, where you can spend the night in tents (with food provided) and have a tour of the zoo. This is my idea of roughing it. I've purchased sleeping bags that can endure like -1500 degrees Celcius or something like that. Its pretty cool.

I'll be taking some pics, maybe I'll post them to my photoblog later.

The results of the 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is quite interesting. Per the website, its an international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Some of my favorite entries:

She sipped her latte gracefully, unaware of the milk foam droplets building on her mustache, which was not the peachy-fine baby fuzz that Nordic girls might have, but a really dense, dark, hirsute lip-lining row of fur common to southern Mediterranean ladies nearing menopause, and winked at the obviously charmed Spaniard at the next table.
Jeanne Villa
Novato, CA

The legend about Padre Castillo's gold being buried deep in the Blackwolf Hills had lain untold for centuries and will continue to do so for this story is not about hidden treasure, nor is it set in any mountainous terrain whatsoever.
Siew-Fong Yiap
Kowloon, Hong Kong

Sigh. I only hope that one day my prose will be as prose-a-licious as these...