"Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently...."

"... as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ’permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee."

Writes Jim Gleeson, a Madison man. And congratulations to him, because, with that sentence, he's won the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

“It’s like you take two thoughts that are not anything like each other and you cram them together by any means necessary,” Gleeson said. He claimed he took time off from his current project, a self-help book for slackers titled “Self-Improvement Through Total Inactivity,” to pen his winning entry.