A sentence that massacres little birds — and the English language — has won top honors in an annual bad-writing contest.

Sue Fondrie, of Oshkosh, Wis., won the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this timeless prose:

“Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”

The contest is named for British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote the classic line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

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For $799,000, you can have the keys to the city — the whole city.

The entire South Dakota town of Scenic, including a food store, post office and two jails, is for sale.

“Scenic used to be quite the little town in its day,” said Leo Stangle, one of eight remaining residents.

In its heyday, he said, the “cowboy and railroad town” had a bank, grocery stores and even a hotel.

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Cops in Abbeville, La. are struggling to solve a 27-year-old mystery.

Workers recently stumbled on the corpse of Joseph Schexnider lodged in the chimney of a bank. He vanished in 1984, ahead of a court appearance for driving a stolen vehicle.

Authorities speculated he’d been trying to rob the bank, but he had no burglar’s tools and no bag to carry away any loot.

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He’ll no doubt be tried in a kangaroo court.

Cops in rural Australia had to use pepper spray to subdue a kangaroo that attacked an elderly woman hanging out her laundry.

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Kenyan scientists have made a medical breakthrough.

They discovered that the scent of smelly socks is perfume to malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and duplicated the stench with a mixture of chemicals.

Workers now sock it to mosquitos by using the chemicals to bait traps that also serve up poison.