The 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner for worst first line: “For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

Back in philosophy days, one of our professors liked to talk about crabs. No, not those crabs. Real crabs. The kind that end up in a bucket when you’re hunting for them.

And the kind that stay in the bucket when you drop them in.

The deal about crabs wasn’t that they wouldn’t try to escape. Instead, if a crab got a mind to crawl out of the bucket, another crab would reach out and pull him back in.

Crabs, you see, didn’t want other crabs getting uppity.

We heard this story in the mid-Eighties, around the time Saint Ronnie was scolding po’ folk for being po’. It was their own damn fault, you see, and our responsibility as Conscientious Americans was to keep them in the bucket. If we lend them a hand — say, with financial assistance — well, we’re just making matters worse.

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