Bulwer-Lytton 2005

The Bulwer-Lytton contest winners as in " It Was a Dark and Stormy Night..."
These are the 10 winners of this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest AKA Dark and Stormy Night Contest (run by the English Dept. of San Jose State University), wherein one writes only the first line of a bad novel:
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10) As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever tobreak wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it."
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9) "Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens."
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8) "With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, atanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description."
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7) "Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as hecrept along the East wall: "Andre creep... Andre creep... Andre creep."
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6) "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge ofnarcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved."
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5) "Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keepher from eeking out a living at a local pet store."
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4) "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but thenpenguins often do."
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3) "Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottagecheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor."
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2) "Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know themeaning of the word 'fear'; a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies."
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AND THE WINNER IS..
1) "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, creptalong the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly, "YOU LIED !"

"Life is sweet and small. The rest is just talking. Let everyone live."
Dimitris Ouzounidis