Did you hear? San Jose State University’s English department announced the 2008 “winners” of its Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, honoring the worst possible opening lines for fiction.

The winner this year: Garrison Spik's intro... “Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.’”

Yeah, that deserved to win, huh?