For fun: What's your best Bulwer-Lytton sentence?

Ahhhh, so that’s what Sarah Palin is attempting to emulate!

From the “Write like Sarah Palin” contest at Slate.com

“Todd’s phosphorescent smile, his manly physique like Alaska’s majestic mountains resplendent in white birch and gentian in the springtime, reassured me as I swiped the McCain campaign credit card through the reader at Macy’s—I winked at my very own Joe Sixpack, anticipating that on my watch, his new silk boxer shorts would soon be more endangered than the leatherback sea turtle.”

—Lisa Patterson

(Pretty much every brilliant finalist in that contest counts: “I brushed aside the pussy willow and cockscomb and jettisoned myself blithely to the still-warm throat of the fecund moose, all the while listening the far-off mewgull calling me, the very sound of America.”
—Amberly Timperio)

The rain came down hitting the steaming streets in endless streams, like the mens room urinal troughs at Yankee Stadium on dollar beer night…

I am partial to the classics like this one from 1986:

“The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn’t heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn’t reacting yet to let you know.”

—Patricia E. Presutti, Lewiston, New York

I was distressed as I looked over the long, long list of Fluther questions to find nary a one worthy of answering while answer them I would in the absence of more worthy questions although questions about “whether he loves me or not” or “should I declare my love for her lest if ruin our friendship” were sad examples of the current level of discourse on the site.

I wrote this one a day or two ago:

If you both agree that it is better to back off until she gets her breakup sorted out, then you’re on the same page; no one’s hiding anything from anyone else; and you have the best chance maintaining your friendships

How about this one:

My guilty pleasure is hiking far into the woods with an MS 880 STIHL Magnum™ Chain Saw with an IntelliCarb™ compensating carburetor, an ElastoStart™ starter handle, decompression valve, one-piece cast muffler design and side-access chain tensioner and cutting down some innocent trees to see if they make a sound.

It’s all true, too. Every word of it!

I like this one from ‘The Coming Race’

“Happiness is the end at which they aim, not as the excitement of a moment, but as the prevailing condition of the entire existence; and regard for the happiness of each other is evinced by the exquisite amenity of their manners.”

@wundayatta, you crack me up. The idea of hiking in the woods with a chainsaw as a guilty pleasure is hilarious!