Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

That is some mighty fine awful prose, the kind that might look perfectly appropriate in a Morning File column even if we weren't trying to win a bad-writing contest. But that hot, big-city scene was penned deliberately badly by yet another Western Pennsylvania writer to be proud of -- Moon Area High School graduate Garrison Spik, 41.

Annie Dillard, David McCullough and John Wideman have won prestigious writing awards, but none of them has the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest title on a resume.

Mr. Spik, now communications director for a Washington, D.C., firm, took top (dis)honors last month in the infamous contest based at San Jose State University. A $250 prize goes annually to someone submitting the worst possible writing in the vein of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened a novel, "It was a dark and stormy night." (So it wasn't Snoopy who invented that beginning, after all.)

Mr. Spik was very proud of having the worst among more than 7,000 entries in the contest, which brought him far more attention than money. "I am happy to be the world's worst writer at least for the next year," he told the San Jose Mercury News. "I often told people I aspire to win the contest."

He had spent a decade jotting down poorly crafted, convoluted, purplish sentences, awaiting the day when just the wrong one would win him recognition. The literary professor coordinating the contest credited the manhole cover reference, in particular, as the touch that put Mr. Spik's entry head and shoulders below the rest.

"You don't write a bad sentence intentionally without knowing what a good sentence is," Professor Scott Rice told The Washington Post, as a way of crediting the winner. Mr. Spik's academic degrees are, of course, in journalism, explaining where he learned a lot about how to construct a really horrific sentence.

What does it say about a civilization when it rewards people who are worst at something? Did ancient Romans annually honor whomever showed up in the Senate with the worst-looking toga? Do Mongolians bestow a prize upon the yurt decorated the most garishly for the holidays? Are we having a parade this week for the Pirates?

If such things appeal to you, you'll be happy to know that after a decade-long hiatus, findgreatstuff.com has resurrected its Ugly Lamp Contest. And norwoodmall.com has an Ugly Couch Contest. And a quick Google search reveals other recognition for ugly doors, ugly boats, etc.

There's really only one ugly thing we want to look at, and that's the World's Ugliest Dog. Dogs are one of those rare things --maybe babies fall into this category also that the uglier they are, the cuter they are.

The contest receiving the most attention is held in Petaluma, Calif., in June, at the Sonoma-Marin County Fair. This years winner was Gus, a one-eyed, three-legged, hairless Chinese crested from St. Petersburg, Fla. You can see him and his ugly, funny-looking competitors such as Squiggy and Rascal at sonoma-marinfair.org. Or you can watch Animal Planet next month, when it airs a show celebrating the whole event.

"What started as a little Podunk contest with a couple of local dogs is now this national event with international attention," gushed a fair spokeswoman, Vicki DeArmon.

With all of these feel-good stories about bad things, it almost seems there's no harm in failing at anything. But one thing you don't want to do is tell a bad joke, according to a Washington State University linguist.

Researcher Nancy Bell found that people who tell bad jokes seem to endure abuse of all kinds. She recruited students to slip an awful joke into normal conversations and then record the results. In 44 percent of the cases, the tellers received reactions they classified as impolite, intended to embarrass or humiliate them. Many times, they were even punched.

No research is in yet on reactions to people who try to write funny and do it poorly. The Morning File offers itself up as a case study for that, if a researcher wants to tackle the subject.