Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - reminds me of some writing I have done!

The winner for the best bad opening sentences to a novel...but check them all out.

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.