The Worst Opening Sentence of the Year?

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest , a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest is named after the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose line “It was a dark and stormy night . . . ” was made famous by the novelist-beagle Snoopy in the cartoon Peanuts.