What'! Moriarty Actually Chose A Winner For The HITCHHIKER

Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

Hey, you would have dragged your feet, too. When I first announced this contest, Harry sent me an IM. “You are fucking crazy,” he said. I told him that I was going to enjoy the judging process.

I was wrong. Dear sweet God, I was wrong.

For one thing, I didn’t anticipate that I would get over 4,000 entries. You try reading 4,000 Vogon-style poems sometime. Most of the past three months has involved people trying to wrestle guns out of my hand as I tried to end the horror and put myself out of my suffering.

Now, though, finally, there is a winner. I have to say, there comes a point at which terrible poetry becomes pretty much the same. All of you sent in godawful, miserable, stinking, foul, ungodly poems, so you can feel good about that. You all suck. I mean that most sincerely. But someone has to suck the most, and that person is...

Josh Ebeling.

Now, according to Josh, he didn’t technically write his own poem, but I’ll let him explain it to you:

I should begin by saying that the nature of this contest has compelled me to forward the following, even though I am not technically supposed to have it. The fact that it is even in the possession of a human being, let alone on Earth itself, is a violation of a staggering number of interplanetary treaties, codes of ethics, country club membership rules and general common sense guidelines. Perhaps some explanation is in order.

This poem was written by a succession of the Yuilg family of Associate Assistant Vice-Prostetnics of the Galactic Civil Service Core. Such bureaucratically wasteful positions are, for the Vogons, the equivalent of hereditary royalty titles, and when the original Associate Assistant Vice-Prostetnic Yuilg died in what appeared to be an accident during a routine ear canal wax excavation, the position was passed, in receivership, to his eldest son. At the time of his 23rd birthday, the eldest Yuilg began filing the necessary paperwork to inherit his father's title and, soon after his 57th birthday, assumed the position and claimed his full inheritance. In what at the time was considered too much irony for rational thought, he died the next day, leaving the estate and title to his younger brother. When the same thing happened to him 34 years later, the day after the middle son claimed his inheritance, an exploratory committee was formed to determine the need for a preliminary investigation into the matter.

Before they could reach a conclusion, the youngest Yuilg son filed his paperwork in a record 32 years, and discovered what had perpetrated the deaths of his family: a short poem his father had been working on. Naturally, the youngest Yuilg began to make some improvements to it. So began a cycle that would continue for the next millennia, whereupon the death of the father Yuilg from the ever-improving poem, it would be passed in succession through his children until it reached one hardy enough to survive it and improve upon it. As the poem continued to grow more vile, so did the children, with only children able to survive the poem continuing on to reproduce, and thus making the Yuilgs ever-more immune to its "lyrical elegance." Eventually, however, the poem was improved to the point that an entire generation of Yuilg children died, and through an oversight in someone's will, became available to a Vogon publisher. It was summarily banned from public consumption soon afterward (not due to any hazard the poem itself presented, but because the various creationist cults objected to it as proof of evolution, and thus, deemed it offensive).

Despite the outright banning supported by the full weight of the Vogon bureaucracy, the poem managed to leak out to several sources, and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of sentients throughout the galaxy. Recognizing the problem (in a dramatically quicker fashion than was the norm), the members various galactic governing bodies set out to prevent the dissemination of the potential weapon-poem throughout the universe while, naturally, attempting to secure a copy for the use of their own representative governments. So it was that the poem eventually settled into an equilibrium phase of being locked in the deepest vaults of every governmental organization, having killed anyone so bureaucratically inept as to actually have read the poem. Periodic testing through intergalactically transparent control operations ensured (through the countless deaths of Renkarnian Log Sloopers, agreed to be the lowest evolved, but still technically sentient, being in the galaxy, just below the Terran Human) that the poem possessed by these governments was the real McCoy.

How the poem came into my possession is the simple confluence of the heart-stopping nightmare of every government official charged with keeping the Yuilg Poem secret. Since time immemorial, spies have sought a way to ensure complete secrecy during their communications with others. (Despite the relative socio-political-economic equilibrium status of the various governing units throughout the galaxy, espionage is still employed by all of them through the same sort of instinct that causes middle aged beings to begin expressing their diminishing sexual prowess through the purchase of ever-larger internal combustion machines.) It is well known the best defense against the unwanted overhearing of classified information is to simply bring a recording of the Yuilg Poem on a playback device to the desired meeting, completely isolate ones auditory nervous receptors, play the poem, then proceed with the meeting. Any being not directly killed by this procedure has most likely had the Babel fish residing in their ear turn into a yellow paste-like substance, rendering the being unable to understand the ensuing conversation. (This Babel fish-byproduct is most commonly shipped to a secret distribution house located on Earth, which places it in a can and markets it as a room temperature artificial cheese product.)

During one such espionage mission to Earth, whereupon the spy in question was attempting to determine the extent of the nuclear capabilities of a particular government through, in what surely makes sense in that particular beings culture, the interviewing of a series of traffic lights. Upon his death, his possessions were passed to me and a small group of associates, under the ancient and universally accepted dogma of "finders-keepers." Without further ado, then, here is the poem we discovered:

Oh rightly satcheled suture sieves,

oh grundled grebes of yore,

upon my petti-coated-clippings

of finger and toenails.

I see the future in my past,

The past upon my bathroom floor,

when after severe stomach pains,

I vomit my entrails.

Zlacked limbs adorn my kitchen,

vaunted Rons await at my door,

but in my tub I stay and watch,

and decipher excrement trails.

AAAAIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

YOKO!!

AIEEEEE-YAAAAAIIEEEE-YAAIIE!!

Let no one move me from my task,

I must read these illecution'd more

lest I miss the meanings of

these waste product Holy Grails.

You may now be asking yourself, if the poem was indeed not written by me, why I deserve any sort of prize for its submission to this contest? Rest assured, then, that the poem did not come easy – in fact, all the aforementioned associates who discovered it with me have met with rather gruesome ends. The poem, as described, is quite lethal, and the translation of the poem into English, while mildly reducing this effect, is still a very dangerous undertaking. Therefore, what you read here is not truly the Yuilg Poem (as I have very little chance of collecting such righteous swag as the grand prize of this contest if you are dead), but instead the closest abstraction of the concepts of the poem into our language as may be attempted without causing more than a mild headache and, very occasionally, a sharp jabbing pain behind the eyes and sinuses. For such a heroic undertaking (and to ease the loss of my friends, though I will admit that I didn't particularly enjoy their company to begin with, but none the less), I deserve at least some credit, especially since, if it's not as bad as some other entries, it's because I've done my job too well.

- Josh OOOWAH