Bugs and Lust....

I'd been looking for some good reason to post these pictures, some "hook" to make them relevant. Finally, Natalie Bennett found a candidate for worst poem ever written in English, an elegy to a rotting -- yet oddly desirable -- corpse.

To add insult to elegy, The Little Professor alerts us to the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners, those awful first lines for novels you're mostly glad were never written. As always, I pick my favorites from the runners up:

• "It was a day, like any other day, in that Linus got up, faced the sunrise, used his inhaler, applied that special cream between his toes, wrote a quick note and put it in a bottle, and wished he'd been stranded on the island with something other than 40 cases each of inhalers, decorative bottles, and special toe cream." -- Chris Harget, Campbell, CA
• "Christmas Eve fell upon the piazza, and the pealing, the tintinnabulous pealing, (perhaps not a pealing but an incessant tinkling, albeit an appealing incessant tinkling) of the street performers reached my ears, masking the shot, which would have rung out had not the tintinnabulations raised such an incessant tinkling that the sound died as dead as the musician who fell like Christmas Eve at my feet - his bell having been rung." -- Ben Ross, Lexington, NC
• "Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking." -- Dan Winters, Los Altos Hills, CA

Finally, I note the nearly 200th Carnival of Vanities, very ably hosted (and I'm not just saying that because he liked my post!), though the cavalcade of business posts at the front suggests to me that there's a bit of spamming going on in the CoV and it's likely to get worse.