Endearing bungling; more Dark Knight

To Birmingham, and the news that the council there has printed up 720,000 leaflets to thank the residents for their diligence in recycling, but unfortunately illustrated them with a picture of the wrong Birmingham — the West Midlands city's redneck American counterpart of Birmingham, Alabama.

Sparing literally no expense whatsoever, they also appear to have lifted the image of the Birmingham, AL skyline directly from the aforelinked Wikipedia article:

Here's a picture of the Birmingham, UK skyline for comparison purposes:

Hmmm, yes. You can maybe see their point. Personally, i'm wholly in favour of this sort of thing; you can't fault their commitment to recycling stuff, at least.

However, the most charming bit about the whole story was the authorities' initial insistence that nooo, of course they hadn't made a mistake! Y'see, they were planning to display, ummm... a generic skyline "intended to symbolise an urban area"! Yeh, that's right! Any old skyline, that'll do! And... erm... it was just unfortunate coincidence that the skyline in question was from a city with the same name as theirs while also not being the right one. Yeh! Coincidence!!

That line of reasoning lasted for nearly a whole 5 minutes, until presumably everybody who'd heard it had been fully incapacitated with laughter and told the Council to stop pretending they hadn't been going in the biscuit tin, as everyone could plainly see the chocolate plastered around all their mouths. Sterling effort.

In other news:

Dear All My Friends,

I would very likely have come to see The Dark Knight with you if you'd told me Maggie Gyllenhaal was in it.

YouTube: Gang Starr — "Nice Girl, Wrong Place"