"It was a dark and stormy night"

"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."  - www.bulwer-lytton.com

Thoroughly intrigued at the possibility of creating a winning piece of crap, I toiled over a sentence the way a sculptor molds clay, turning and shaping it, adding material and subtracting. Ultimately, I created a line so bad, so ridiculously crafted that it must surely be a winner, er, loser - uh - well...see for yourself:

"Fully armed with sharpened blades and a steely resolve he usually reserved for the most distasteful of duties, Tom cranked the ignition key of an aging garden tractor, the belching, billowing exhaust causing him to smile first at the prospect of reclaiming his property from the unrelenting forces of nature and, secondly, at the irony of filling the dinosaur of a mower with fossil fuel."

Now if that doesn't stink to high heavens, I don't know what does.