Category: Curios & Humor

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

There is a priest who I often run into at Mass who always preaches homilies that have exactly the same format (I suspect he is using a homily service). I don’t know his name, so I think of him as Fr. "You Decide!"

The reason is that these are the closing words of each and every one of his homilies. He always starts with a joke, then comes something of a discussion of the biblical text, this builds up to a moral question of some kind that has an obvious answer, and having posed the question he says "You decide!" and walks back to his seat.

(NOTE: These are rhetorical questions. It’s obvious that he means one of the possible answers to be the moral one; it’s just a question of whether you make the decision to be moral.)

Fr. "You Decide!"’s jokes aren’t always that funny, but occasionally he comes up with a really good one. I particuarly liked the following two (with which I have taken slight liberties in the telling):

A couple of hunters are out in the woods and they get lost. When they realize that their situation is hopeless, one says to the other: "Look, we’re going to die out here if we don’t get some help. Let’s fire three shots in the air and see if anyone comes to our rescue." (NOTE FROM JIMMY: This is a bit of actual hunter lore. They teach you in hunter education class to fire three shots in the air as an emergency signal.) So they fire three shots in the air and wait for somebody to come. Nobody does. After a while, they fire three more shots. Again, nobody comes. Finally, the first hunter says, "Well, I guess we better try again." To which the second replies, "Okay, but we’re down to our last three arrows."

This Sunday he told the following joke:

A woman immigrates from Eastern Europe, but upon arriving in America, she discovers that she’s having trouble with her eyes. The people she’s saying with take her to an optometrist, who has her look at an eye chart, which reads "C Z R T J Y L S P D X." "Can you read it?" the eye doctor asks. "Read it!?" say the incredulous lady. "She’s my neighbor!"

Not bad for Sunday homily humor!

There is a priest who I often run into at Mass who always preaches homilies that have exactly the same format (I suspect he is using a homily service). I don’t know his name, so I think of him as Fr. "You Decide!"

The reason is that these are the closing words of each and every one of his homilies. He always starts with a joke, then comes something of a discussion of the biblical text, this builds up to a moral question of some kind that has an obvious answer, and having posed the question he says "You decide!" and walks back to his seat.

(NOTE: These are rhetorical questions. It’s obvious that he means one of the possible answers to be the moral one; it’s just a question of whether you make the decision to be moral.)

Fr. "You Decide!"’s jokes aren’t always that funny, but occasionally he comes up with a really good one. I particuarly liked the following two (with which I have taken slight liberties in the telling):

A couple of hunters are out in the woods and they get lost. When they realize that their situation is hopeless, one says to the other: "Look, we’re going to die out here if we don’t get some help. Let’s fire three shots in the air and see if anyone comes to our rescue." (NOTE FROM JIMMY: This is a bit of actual hunter lore. They teach you in hunter education class to fire three shots in the air as an emergency signal.) So they fire three shots in the air and wait for somebody to come. Nobody does. After a while, they fire three more shots. Again, nobody comes. Finally, the first hunter says, "Well, I guess we better try again." To which the second replies, "Okay, but we’re down to our last three arrows."

This Sunday he told the following joke:

A woman immigrates from Eastern Europe, but upon arriving in America, she discovers that she’s having trouble with her eyes. The people she’s saying with take her to an optometrist, who has her look at an eye chart, which reads "C Z R T J Y L S P D X." "Can you read it?" the eye doctor asks. "Read it!?" say the incredulous lady. "She’s my neighbor!"

Not bad for Sunday homily humor!

Two teens who sold a week of their time on eBay learned, to their evident disappointment, that the winner of the auction was the mother of one of the amateur entrepreneurs. Determined to save the kids from more than they may have bargained for, and seeing possibilities in buying their time, Mom has worked with the other teen’s mother to draft plans for this duo:

"[C]ollege-bound students Chip Davis and Chris Pullen learned the identity of their eBay ‘buyer’: Davis’ mother, Mary.

"’Like I’m going to let some pedophile or whatever win? I don’t think so,’ she said Friday. ‘I would have paid $5,000 for the safety of those two — no question.’

"The auction concluded Monday. Davis, 18, and Pullen, 19, found out Mary Davis’ secret on Thursday, dashing any hopes that they would at least get to travel because of the auction.

"’After finding out the winner was from St. Joseph, I was disappointed,’ Chip Davis said. ‘But now I’m even more disappointed to find out it was my mom.’

"Mary Davis used a screen name the two would not recognize, and checked the family’s computer in secret to make sure she had the winning bid.

"She said she planned to get her money’s worth out of the two, who will start classes later this month at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

"’It’s a legal contract,’ she said, ‘so the longer they put it off, the longer the list of work will get.’

"The list, compiled with Pullen’s mother, Janet, already includes lawnmowing and room-cleaning duties."

GET THE STORY.

I hope the two mothers save clippings of the newspaper article. Sounds like a good story with which to embarrass these two to their own teenagers fifteen or twenty years from now.

If there is disagreement about J.K. Rowling’s literary legacy, she should at least be given credit for inventing something really fun, and the people at Jelly Belly are to be commended for bringing her idea to life.

Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans are sure to bring your family, friends or co-workers hours of fun at one another’s expense.

For those who may not be familiar with Bertie Bott’s Beans, they are (in the Harry Potter stories) basically jelly beans that have a magical property that makes them able to take on the flavor of, well, almost anything. They are unpredictable, and the only way to tell what flavor one may be is to taste it and see. A green one might be Lime Sherbert (yum), or it might be Broccoli or Slime Mold – there’s no telling.

In the muggle world they are real jelly beans that come in a bizarre range of flavors inspired by the candies in the books. They are available in candy stores nationwide.

Our family had a great time sitting around daring one another to try different flavors (this is more fun if the flavors and corresponding color schemes are not known to the taster, but not absolutely necessary).

Some flavors are just interesting (Bacon, Grass…), some are not as bad as they sound (I found Vomit mercifully toned-down and Booger just kinda salty…) and some are wickedly nasty (Sardine would not go away and Rotten Egg was truly revolting).

How a candy company like Jelly Belly goes about manufacturing and testing such a product is a mystery. I am not sure I really want to know how they decided what Booger was supposed to taste like. How do you know when you’ve got Earthworm just right?

We enjoyed them, if you could call it that, and not all the flavors are gross. Buttered Popcorn was pretty good. Still, I will be a little more cautious from here on out if offered jelly beans.

I’m just gonna go brush my teeth… again…

If there is disagreement about J.K. Rowling’s literary legacy, she should at least be given credit for inventing something really fun, and the people at Jelly Belly are to be commended for bringing her idea to life.

Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans are sure to bring your family, friends or co-workers hours of fun at one another’s expense.

For those who may not be familiar with Bertie Bott’s Beans, they are (in the Harry Potter stories) basically jelly beans that have a magical property that makes them able to take on the flavor of, well, almost anything. They are unpredictable, and the only way to tell what flavor one may be is to taste it and see. A green one might be Lime Sherbert (yum), or it might be Broccoli or Slime Mold – there’s no telling.

In the muggle world they are real jelly beans that come in a bizarre range of flavors inspired by the candies in the books. They are available in candy stores nationwide.

Our family had a great time sitting around daring one another to try different flavors (this is more fun if the flavors and corresponding color schemes are not known to the taster, but not absolutely necessary).

Some flavors are just interesting (Bacon, Grass…), some are not as bad as they sound (I found Vomit mercifully toned-down and Booger just kinda salty…) and some are wickedly nasty (Sardine would not go away and Rotten Egg was truly revolting).

How a candy company like Jelly Belly goes about manufacturing and testing such a product is a mystery. I am not sure I really want to know how they decided what Booger was supposed to taste like. How do you know when you’ve got Earthworm just right?

We enjoyed them, if you could call it that, and not all the flavors are gross. Buttered Popcorn was pretty good. Still, I will be a little more cautious from here on out if offered jelly beans.

I’m just gonna go brush my teeth… again…

Just to give you a taste of the shrill vocalizations of the howling Mars toad, consider the following story from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). Note that the title of the piece was put on it by the news agency itself.

I just love the wild swings in style within a single sentence, like "Nothing but balderdash can be heard from this guy and no one, therefore, would lend an ear to his tongue wagging."

The translator obviously has a unique grasp of English. High flown terms like "balderdash" and "tongue wagging" right next to colloquialisms like "this guy." Love it!

Here goes . . .

KCNA Blasts Hwang Jang Yop’s Hysteric Remarks

    Pyongyang, December 9 (KCNA) — Hwang Jang Yop in an interview with the Japanese Sankei Shimbun malignantly slandered the political system in the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; i.e., North Korea], according to its Dec. 5 issue. He let loose a string of hysteric outcries that "it is the only solution to the nuclear issue to overthrow north Korea’s regime" and the "dictatorship of north Korea should be toppled".

    They are the thrice-cursed crime as they were mouthed by the man who has inveterate bitterness toward the inviolable political system in the DPRK.

    He is human scum and a mentally deranged old man who fled to south Korea after abandoning his wife and children and unhesitatingly betraying the country that protected his political integrity for the sake of his personal luxury. Nothing but balderdash can be heard from this guy and no one, therefore, would lend an ear to his tongue wagging.

    This ugly looking man is completely unable to judge what is going on. Yet the south Korean authorities are using him for their sinister purpose.

    We can not but call this dishonest behavior to question. They only betrayed their awkward position by instigating Hwang to cry out for the so-called "solution" to such crucial political issue as the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the United States.

    In a word, the U.S. and the south Korean authorities only laid bare their true colors by letting this good-for-nothing talk nonsense.

    Hwang committed too hideous crimes that he was afraid of taking a back alley. Recently he toured the U.S. and is strutting about, having interviews with foreign media. This was possible only under the protection of the present south Korean authorities and thanks to the prearranged script of the U.S.

    The present south Korean authorities transferred him to a new place from the Intelligence Service in a bid to goad him into letting loose anti-north vituperation with bitterer grudge.

    It is shame on the nation that such human scum as Hwang is still at large. To patronize and use him is an anti-national criminal act of bedevilling the inter-Korean relations and going against the nation’s desire for exchange, cooperation, unity and reunification.

    It is a common sense that a failure to see through everything from a national stand and properly deal with it would result in playing into the hands of foreign forces and the traitors to the nation and bringing the inter-Korean relations to a collapse.

    All the facts go to prove that the south Korean authorities are neither interested in the improvement of inter-Korean relations, nor have any willingness to have dialogue with the north and settle the nuclear issue but have the same wrong way of thinking as Hwang’s.

    They should behave in a responsible manner from a national stand.

    It is nonsensical to talk about dialogue, contact, reconciliation and cooperation while letting renegade and traitor Hwang defile the system and dignity of the dialogue partner and cry out for "overthrowing" the system in the north.

    We will never sit idle in case the south Korean authorities allow Hwang to slander again the system.

Here in the U.S. we have a species known as the barking moonbat, which–as far as species go–has a surprisingly high rate of Internet access. The barking moonbat is known for its extreme views on all manner of subjects, but it is not the most extreme critter to be found in the wild.

In North Korea they have an animal so extreme in its views that it can only be referred to as the howling Mars toad (left). Like the barking moonbat, the howling Mars toad has a surprising degree of Internet access, particularly in view of how little Internet access there is in North Korea.

A major habitat for the howling Mars toad is apparently the North Korean news agency known as the KCNA (Korean Central News Agency), which is the official propaganda arm of Kim Jong-il’s government.

I’ve seen statements made by the howling Mars toads employed at the KCNA before on the web. Now I’ve found a site that makes it easier than ever to have hours of entertainment listening to the shrill vocalizations of the howling Mars toad.

The site is WWW.NK-NEWS.NET, and I ran across it because of a story by the news agency Reuters, which is a major habitat for the barking moonbat. According to the story, nk-news.net is run by a San Francisco graphic artist named Geoff Davis.

"Their propaganda is often unintentionally hilarious and I couldn’t find an existing searchable database of the KCNA on the Web. Thus, NK News was born," Davis told Reuters.

Launched in May, www.nk-news.net boasts of having nearly every KCNA article since December 1996 — "over 50 megabytes of hard-core Stalinist propaganda … each article written in the unique and indelible style of the KCNA."

Readers can get a taste of that KCNA style from recommended key word searches, such as "burning hatred," which turns up 18 articles. The targets of that hot wrath include Japan, Yankees, "U.S. imperialist ogres" and "class enemies."

"Human scum" yields 25 KCNA reports applying that epithet to U.S.
President George W. Bush, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and diplomat John Bolton. Rumsfeld also keeps company with Japanese officials in the "political dwarf" category.

GET THE STORY.

VISIT THE SITE.

Be sure to check out the pre-set searches on the site. My favorite so far is "human scum." Any time the KCNA calls somebody "human scum," you know that you’re in for some really over-the-top rhetoric.

Some of the other searches are based on inexplicable fascinations the KCNA has with certain things. For example, howling Mars toads are apparently fond of floral baskets and goat farms because these terms crop up enough in KCNA stories to prompt Davis to come up with "floral basket" and "goat farm" searches. (It apparently likes the former more than the latter. There were eight hundred and forty five references to floral baskets but only twenty-one references to goat farms in the database.)

A surprisingly high number of stories are headlined with the words "KCNA Blasts . . . "–as in "KCNA Blasts Japan’s Despicable Political Plot" or "KCNA Blasts Japanese Chief Executive’s Reckless Remarks." Any article headlined with these words is also a good bet for really fiery rhetoric, so I e-mailed Davis and suggested that he add a "KCNA Blasts" search to his list of pre-sets.

Have fun!

"It was a dark and stormy night" is the famous opening of the not-at-all-famous novel Paul Clifford, which was published in 1830 by the not-yet-famous novellist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose opening later inspired the sort-of-famous annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, starting in 1982.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s opening to Paul Clifford is famous for how bad it is–not the "It was a dark and stormy night" part, for that part isn’t bad, but the opening sentence as a whole, which was both much longer and much more bad and which reads as follows:

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 sentence, referred to by the shorthand "It was a dark and stormy night," has become the emblem of bad novel opening sentences.

These days there is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants send in the deliberately bad opening lines of imaginary novels that they (usually) have no intention of carrying through to completion.

And the 2005 results are in!

Now, the entry that won this year (like several of the other entries the judges gave notable mention to) is quite bad, but it is also risque, so Rules 7 and 8 all over that.

Nevertheless, many of the submissions are really hilariously bad.

Some of my favorites:

India, which hangs like a wet washcloth from the towel rack of Asia, presented itself to Tex as he landed in Delhi (or was it Bombay?), as if it mattered because Tex finally had an idea to make his mark and fortune and that idea was a chain of steak houses to serve the millions and he wondered, as he deplaned down the steep, shiny, steel steps, why no one had thought of it before.

Ken Aclin
Shreveport, LA

Captain Burton stood at the bow of his massive sailing ship, his weathered face resembling improperly cured leather that wouldn’t even be used to make a coat or something.

Bryan Semrow
Oshkosh, WI

Because of her mysterious ways I was fascinated with Dorothy and I wondered if she would ever consider having a relationship with a lion, but I have to admit that most of my attention was directed at her little dog Toto because, after all, he was a source of meat protein and I had had enough of those damn flying monkeys.

Randy Blanton
Murfreesboro, TN

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.

Kari A. Stiller
College Station, TX

"Why does every task in the Realm of Zithanor have to be a quest?" Baldak of Erthorn, handyman to the Great Wizard Zarthon, asked rhetorically as he began his journey began to find the Holy Hammer of Taloria and the Sacred Nail of Ikthillia so Baldak could hang one of Zarthon’s mediocre watercolors, which was an art critique Baldak kept to himself unlike his predecessor, whom Zarthon turned into the Picture Frame of Torathank.

SSG Kevin Craver
Fort Polk, LA

"Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth–or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn’t, which is why it was heretical to say that it did–and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place."

Alf Seegert
Salt Lake City, UT

"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet."

Devery Doleman
Brooklyn, NY

Our fearless heroine (well, mostly fearless: she is deathly afraid of caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green ones that terrorized her while she was playing in her grandmother’s garden when she was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally, was also when she discovered that shaving cream really does not taste like whipped cream) awakened with a start.

Alison Heft
Lititz, PA

Billy Bob gushed like a broken water main about his new love: "She’s got long, beautiful, drain-clogging hair, more curves than an under-the-sink water trap, and she moves with the ease of a motorized toilet snake through a four-inch sewer line, but what she sees in me, a simple plumber, I’ll never know."

Glenn Lawrie
Chung-buk, South Korea

Sandra had waited and wished for Gary to come sweep her off her feet, feeling just like Lois Lane waiting for her handsome, masculine Superman to come fly her away from the humdrum of everyday life, but Gary had never come, and so she’d ended up with Herman, a man as bald as Lex Luthor with worse eyesight than Clark Kent and the maturity level of Jimmy Olsen.

Mary P. Potts
Bradenton, FL

The double agent looked up from his lunch of Mahi-Mahi and couscous and realized that he must escape from Walla Walla to Bora Bora to come face-to-face with his arch enemy by taking out his 30-30 and shooting off his nemesis’ ear-to-ear grin so he could wave bye-bye to this duplicitous life, but the chances of him pulling this off were only so-so, much less than 50-50.

Charles Jaworski
North Pole, AK

As soon as Sherriff Russell heard Bradshaw say, "This town ain’t big enough for the both of us," he inadvertantly visualized a tiny chalk-line circle with a town sign that said ‘population 1,’ and the two of them both trying to stand inside of it rather ineffectively, leaning this way and that, trying to keep their balance without stepping outside of the line, and that was why he was smiling when Bradshaw shot him.

Keriann Noble
Murray, UT

Derwin Thoryndike vowed to place a 14-carat engagement ring on the finger of Glenda-Sue Ellington, so now all he had to do was save up enough money to buy the ring, get it inscribed, and then locate a person named Glenda-Sue Ellington and convince her to marry him.

Harvey McCluskey
Vancouver WA

A warning to the reader: Tom dies in the end of the story so don’t get too attached to him.

Sam Gerring
Lexington, KY

Anyone with a less refined air of unabashed insouciance would not have been able to so easily slip through the security cordon, charm their way past the armed guards, breeze through the marbled reception area and blithely enter the inner sanctum of the UN Security Council and there successfully negotiate an end to all conflict in the Middle East, but that was the sort of man Nigel Simpkins was.

David Lindley
Sheffield
England

The wheel of love had left its treadmarks in his chest once too often, like a knobby mud tire on a monster truck, or like a really big ponce wheel, the kind that tailors use to punch little holes in patterns and that would leave lots of nasty little welts if you were to run it up and down your arm.

Peter Loughlin
Santa Rosa CA

GET THE REST. . . .

. . . and use the combox to add your own bad opening sentences to imarginary novels! (Only keep it clean.)

"It was a dark and stormy night" is the famous opening of the not-at-all-famous novel Paul Clifford, which was published in 1830 by the not-yet-famous novellist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose opening later inspired the sort-of-famous annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, starting in 1982.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s opening to Paul Clifford is famous for how bad it is–not the "It was a dark and stormy night" part, for that part isn’t bad, but the opening sentence as a whole, which was both much longer and much more bad and which reads as follows:

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 sentence, referred to by the shorthand "It was a dark and stormy night," has become the emblem of bad novel opening sentences.

These days there is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants send in the deliberately bad opening lines of imaginary novels that they (usually) have no intention of carrying through to completion.

And the 2005 results are in!

Now, the entry that won this year (like several of the other entries the judges gave notable mention to) is quite bad, but it is also risque, so Rules 7 and 8 all over that.

Nevertheless, many of the submissions are really hilariously bad.

Some of my favorites:

India, which hangs like a wet washcloth from the towel rack of Asia, presented itself to Tex as he landed in Delhi (or was it Bombay?), as if it mattered because Tex finally had an idea to make his mark and fortune and that idea was a chain of steak houses to serve the millions and he wondered, as he deplaned down the steep, shiny, steel steps, why no one had thought of it before.

Ken Aclin
Shreveport, LA

Captain Burton stood at the bow of his massive sailing ship, his weathered face resembling improperly cured leather that wouldn’t even be used to make a coat or something.

Bryan Semrow
Oshkosh, WI

Because of her mysterious ways I was fascinated with Dorothy and I wondered if she would ever consider having a relationship with a lion, but I have to admit that most of my attention was directed at her little dog Toto because, after all, he was a source of meat protein and I had had enough of those damn flying monkeys.

Randy Blanton
Murfreesboro, TN

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.

Kari A. Stiller
College Station, TX

"Why does every task in the Realm of Zithanor have to be a quest?" Baldak of Erthorn, handyman to the Great Wizard Zarthon, asked rhetorically as he began his journey began to find the Holy Hammer of Taloria and the Sacred Nail of Ikthillia so Baldak could hang one of Zarthon’s mediocre watercolors, which was an art critique Baldak kept to himself unlike his predecessor, whom Zarthon turned into the Picture Frame of Torathank.

SSG Kevin Craver
Fort Polk, LA

"Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth–or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn’t, which is why it was heretical to say that it did–and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place."

Alf Seegert
Salt Lake City, UT

"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet."

Devery Doleman
Brooklyn, NY

Our fearless heroine (well, mostly fearless: she is deathly afraid of caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green ones that terrorized her while she was playing in her grandmother’s garden when she was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally, was also when she discovered that shaving cream really does not taste like whipped cream) awakened with a start.

Alison Heft
Lititz, PA

Billy Bob gushed like a broken water main about his new love: "She’s got long, beautiful, drain-clogging hair, more curves than an under-the-sink water trap, and she moves with the ease of a motorized toilet snake through a four-inch sewer line, but what she sees in me, a simple plumber, I’ll never know."

Glenn Lawrie
Chung-buk, South Korea

Sandra had waited and wished for Gary to come sweep her off her feet, feeling just like Lois Lane waiting for her handsome, masculine Superman to come fly her away from the humdrum of everyday life, but Gary had never come, and so she’d ended up with Herman, a man as bald as Lex Luthor with worse eyesight than Clark Kent and the maturity level of Jimmy Olsen.

Mary P. Potts
Bradenton, FL

The double agent looked up from his lunch of Mahi-Mahi and couscous and realized that he must escape from Walla Walla to Bora Bora to come face-to-face with his arch enemy by taking out his 30-30 and shooting off his nemesis’ ear-to-ear grin so he could wave bye-bye to this duplicitous life, but the chances of him pulling this off were only so-so, much less than 50-50.

Charles Jaworski
North Pole, AK

As soon as Sherriff Russell heard Bradshaw say, "This town ain’t big enough for the both of us," he inadvertantly visualized a tiny chalk-line circle with a town sign that said ‘population 1,’ and the two of them both trying to stand inside of it rather ineffectively, leaning this way and that, trying to keep their balance without stepping outside of the line, and that was why he was smiling when Bradshaw shot him.

Keriann Noble
Murray, UT

Derwin Thoryndike vowed to place a 14-carat engagement ring on the finger of Glenda-Sue Ellington, so now all he had to do was save up enough money to buy the ring, get it inscribed, and then locate a person named Glenda-Sue Ellington and convince her to marry him.

Harvey McCluskey
Vancouver WA

A warning to the reader: Tom dies in the end of the story so don’t get too attached to him.

Sam Gerring
Lexington, KY

Anyone with a less refined air of unabashed insouciance would not have been able to so easily slip through the security cordon, charm their way past the armed guards, breeze through the marbled reception area and blithely enter the inner sanctum of the UN Security Council and there successfully negotiate an end to all conflict in the Middle East, but that was the sort of man Nigel Simpkins was.

David Lindley
Sheffield
England

The wheel of love had left its treadmarks in his chest once too often, like a knobby mud tire on a monster truck, or like a really big ponce wheel, the kind that tailors use to punch little holes in patterns and that would leave lots of nasty little welts if you were to run it up and down your arm.

Peter Loughlin
Santa Rosa CA

GET THE REST. . . .

. . . and use the combox to add your own bad opening sentences to imarginary novels! (Only keep it clean.)