I have to share this one:
Winner: Purple Prose
The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.
Scott Davis Jones
Valley Village, CA
Jim’s remains the best.
Most of them are just really, really long with stupid metaphors. They’re very, very bad, and hence very good, but most are all the same. Jim’s doesn’t lean on a metaphor and the use of a ridiculously long parenthetical inside “Gerald began to pee” is just wonderfully awful.
The 1997 winner is the other one that really stands out for me, in that it’s so terrible but in a different way from the others.
The 1999 winner isn’t bad at all; it’s hilarious. It reads like Douglas Adams wrote it. I don’t understand why it won.
Consensus here.
Boyo Jim still is the best of the worst.
I submitted two sentences this year, neither of which made it to the finalists.
**Vicki seemed perfect to Steve except for the one little thing he couldn’t get past – her stentorian belches were a little too prideful, as if she was saving them up to periodically announce her presence to the whole neighborhood. **
I’m looking for the other and failing to find it at the moment.
Did I mention that the winner we picked two years ago provided bad contact info and so couldn’t be located? We ended up picking somebody else’s sentence.
The other sentence I submitted…
His abs didn’t ripple nor was he buff; no, his abdomen was as solid and carven as a New England chest of drawers, and should New Englanders build abdomens of drawers, which they should because after all drawers are meant to be worn over abdomens and not chests, his would be one of them, but they don’t; and of his buffness, the less said the better.