Gary Dahl, an advertising executive from Los Gatos, California, conceived the idea of selling rocks to people as Pet Rocks, complete with instructions. The 1975 fad only lasted about half a year, but that was enough to make Dahl a millionaire. In 2000, Dahl won the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the San José State University sponsored competition that awards authors for crafting particularly bad "purple prose." Dahl's winning entry: :The heather-encrusted Headlands, … Wikipedia
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