The Annual Bulwer-Lytton writing contest is based upon the much stolen beginning line by Snoopy, “It was a dark and stormy night…” The contest is run each year by the Department of English at San Jose State University. The award is given to the worst lead-in to a wretched story. This is by David F. Nolan. It was his entry in the 1999 Bulwer-Lytton contest. It seems to me it might also work as a Star Trek parody.

As he stared at Evangeline’s lifeless corpse, Inspector Bozeau could not help but brood on the fact that this was the third murder in as many weeks which could be traced to violence on television, and wonder if, when Lee deForest invented the vacuum tube way back in 1906, he could have possibly foreseen that this is where his creation would lead — which prompted him to make the remark, to nobody in particular, “This is deForest’s prime evil”.