"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell down in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
Anyway, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest became so popular that Penguin published a collection of the best/worst submissions from across the country.
I think that J.R.R. Tolkien, the author and perfecter of our faith, deserves the tribute of a similar parody, based instead on the famous opening lines of his first masterpiece, "The Hobbit:"
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort."
Here are a couple parodies I came up with:
1. The “Possible Spoiler” Hobbit Opening
Bilbo Baggins (who in this book finds the One Ring of the Dark Lord and later confers it upon his nephew Frodo, who casts its into the fires of Mount Doom, unmaking said Dark Lord and allowing King Aragorn of Gondor to lead the men of Rohan and Minas Tirith against the hosts of Mordor, thus ending the Third Age and hastening the departure of Elves from Middle Earth) lived in a comfortable hole in the ground.
2. The “Politically Correct” Hobbit Opening
Inside an eco-friendly subterranean residence lived a vertically challenged person with pro-corpulent tendencies. Now this residence displayed neither the material opulence of the socially privileged nor the spartan austerity of the economically disadvantaged. It was a housing unit, and that meant a roof over one’s head.
[ 05-26-2001: Message edited by: EMINEM ]
