Bulwer-Lytton remembered

It's not technical writing, although much so-called technical writing might qualify:

A man who compared a woman's anatomy to a carburetor won an annual contest that celebrates the worst writing in the English language.

Dan McKay, a computer analyst at Microsoft Great Plains, N.D., bested thousands of entrants from the North Pole to Manchester, England to triumph Wednesday in San Jose State University's annual Fiction Contest.

"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire," he wrote, comparing a woman's breasts to "small knurled caps of the oil dampeners."

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."