A fortune served up with a random* digital photograph from Flickr. Reload!
 P8023881 by simonrwilkinson |  Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei by Truus, Bob & Jan too! |  Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei by Truus, Bob & Jan too! |
The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest is held ever year at San Jose State Univ. by Professor Scott Rice. It is held in memory of Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), a rather prolific and popular (in his time) novelist. He is best known today for having written "The Last Days of Pompeii." Whenever Snoopy starts typing his novel from the top of his doghouse, beginning "It was a dark and stormy night..." he is borrowing from Lord Bulwer-Lytton. This was the line that opened his novel, "Paul Clifford," written in 1830. The full line reveals why it is so bad: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
* The photographs and fortunes are only related to each other by virtue of being on this page together. The views expressed are not those of the operator of this website or the photographers whose works are shown. So how does it work? A fortune or quote is chosen at random and then the frequency of each word is computed. Then one of those words is used in a tag search on Flickr from which random photographs are chosen.
