The sun rolled slowly, like a fiery fur ball coughed up uneasily onto a sky blue carpet by some giant unseen cat.

This is but one of hundreds of the best worst opening sentences that San Jose State University professor Scott Rice has collected over the past twenty-five years. Rice is the creator of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which collects and judges some of the most pretentious, over-the-top, inadvertently hilarious sentences ever written in English. He has collected some of them in a volume titled It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, named after the now infamous first line, penned originally by Mr. Bulwer-Lytton himself.

Listen to the full interview here, and take solace in the fact that the first line of your novel isn’t nearly so bad.

Intrepid nice guy and environmentalist David de Rothschild’s The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is the latest in the parade of Green literature, and perhaps the most informative, too. Published to coincide with the Live Earth concert this summer, de Rothschild’s book offers 77 ways for the common household to combat the ever-looming threat of global warming, ranging from the obvious — start a compost pile, go vegetarian — to the downright bizarre: mutate, burrow underground.

The Today Show, perhaps the greenist of all the morning shows, hosted de Rothschild this morning, and the results are stunning. Watch the interview.

What do you mean, you’re not green? Being green is the new anti-drug! Do you hate the environment? You’re lucky Al Gore doesn’t kick you in the shins!

Even though scientists say we have roughly a decade to effectively deal with global warming, it’s still not too late to check out Elizabeth Rogers’ and Thomas Kostigen’s newest, The Green Book. The authors stopped by The Today Show to demonstrate a few of the dozens of simple things American’s can do to cut down on its massively disproportionate energy consumption.

For instance, cook your food with a microwave, which is roughly four times more efficient than a traditional electric oven. If every American used a microwave for every meal, the authors point out that we would save as much energy as the entire continent of Africa consumes in one year.

For more greenish tips, including ones from Cameron Diaz and Will Ferrell (!), watch the interview and read the excerpt.