Burlington Liars Club

This is a longstanding, annual year-end tradition in Wisconsin. For the first time this year, all the winners were from here, from which I am trying to draw no conclusions. Also, no comments from the peanut gallery, please, about the fact that a journalist won.
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How futile is it be to be a backup to Brett Favre?

A tale about players waiting to replace the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, who's started 272 consecutive NFL games, earned honorable mention in the 77th annual Burlington Liars Club championship lie contest.

"At the Packers spring minicamp this year, two backup quarterbacks were playing catch using a clock instead of a football," wrote Dave Moscinski of Appleton. "When a coach asked them what they were doing, one replied, 'Well, with Favre around, we were just passing time."'

In contest results announced this week, the top prize went to Greg Peck of Janesville, the new world champion liar.

Peck, editorial page editor of The Janesville Gazette, wrote: "The Wisconsin River was so low this year that the local government started taxing us for more property on our riverfront lot."

Mardy Neresian of Caledonia, the 2004 contest winner, won honorable mention with a lie about golf - a game he took up after retirement from Racine Horlick High School.

"I had so many divets this past summer, the government named three golf courses federal disaster areas," he wrote.

Other fibs winning honorable mention:

- "My cooking is a problem with my new stove. I cannot double my recipes, my oven will not go up to 700 degrees F." - from Tom Balza of Appleton.

- "I'm so lonely I drive down one-way streets the wrong way, just to get someone to wave to me." - from David Laing of Milwaukee.

- "A full moon and a hot summer night prompted me to take my boat out on the Fox River to go cat fishing. Bam! A hit right away. I could hardly hold onto my pole, he took the line out, pulling me and my boat behind him. He then circled my boat, spinning it around and around. Snap! He went under my boat, breaking the line, but not before I got a glimpse of a 60-pound catfish with so many lures attached to him, that I could hear him clanging through the water, as he swam away." - from Dusty Thew of Wind Lake.

John Soeth, retiring after 27 years of helping to run the Liars Club, said there were about 300 entries this year. Local insurance man Joel Weis is the new club president.

The club got its start in 1929 when Burlington journalists Otis Hulett and Mannel Hahn fabricated a news story about a lying contest between the Burlington police and fire departments in which the winner was the police chief, who denied ever telling a lie.

Hulett closed the club in 1979, and the Burlington Area Chamber of Commerce revived it the next year.
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