Bulwer-Lytton 2005. Boo, Hiss.

I failed to win, place, show or even gain honorable mention in the 2005 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Here's the winner:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Dan McKay
Fargo, ND

And here's my entry:

He looked up into the sky overhead, where you can see clouds that looked like mounds of mashed potatoes—not the perfectly-formed fake Potato Buds kind but the kind made by his mother, lumpy and often cold—you’d think that his mother, such a perfectionist and maintaining such high standards and disappointed in everything he did, wouldn’t settle for lumpy and cold, but there they were, in the sky overhead.

Naturally, I strongly suspect that fraud or at least nepotism was involved.