Mayor O’Malley Furious Over ‘CitiStat’ Spelling Error

Hires Spelling Bee Champion As Consultant
By: Ed Mund
Crab City Hall Beat

BALTIMORE – Baltimore City Mayor Martin O’Malley was furious earlier this week when he noticed that the word “Citi” on the logo of his well-known CitiStat Program had been misspelled.

“This is absolutely unacceptable!” said O’Malley. “We pride ourselves as being the City That Reads and we cannot even spell things correctly down here at City Hall? Well, that is just plain wrong.”

When asked why it took the mayor several years to notice the spelling of “CitiStat” he replied “I figured that since the program has worked so well for us, we would at least be smart enough to spell it the right way. I mean, it’s not like it’s a tough word to spell, C-I-T-Y, City.”

While nobody inside City Hall can explain how the misspelling occurred or why it took so long for anyone to notice, sources inside City Hall believe that this issue was created by a lack of communication within the O’Malley staff. One source said, “I can’t believe that nobody ever once assumed that just maybe it was spelled like that on purpose. Maybe, since we are such a ‘cutting edge’ city government, we wanted to think outside the box a little here and deviate from the boring and traditional spelling in order to show how cutting edge we are. I mean, what idiot wouldn’t assume that at first.”

Regardless of whether it was a self-created issue or not, the O’Malley administration has responded to this by announcing that it has hired recent National Spelling Bee Champion Anurag Kashyap as a spelling consultant to ensure that no more city government logos are spelled incorrectly anymore.

“To anyone who believes we have not taken action regarding this issue, come on down to City Hall and see if you can spell better than our new consultant, but try not to let the shine of his National Spelling Bee trophy blind you.” a City Hall spokesperson said.

Kashyap was excited to get to work but added “Man, if they are spelling words like ‘City’ wrong, I have a lot of work to do.”

Kashyap comes into City Hall riding high off his National Spelling Bee Championship he won earlier this year in Washington but understands that his spelling advice is going to be crucial to the logos that hundreds of thousands of Baltimore City residents depend on. “Spelling on a stage for sport is one thing, but being able to apply my superior spelling skills in a real-life setting is much more difficult even if the words I need to monitor are idiotically simple words like ‘City’.”

Despite many pleas from the Mayor’s staff members for the Mayor to just say that he has learned that the spelling of City with an “I” was intentional, the Mayor is determined to rid City Hall of all its spelling corruption and clean up the grammatical errors that may be out there on city owned property.

Said the Mayor, “We are forgetting that there may be hundreds, even thousands of city logos that have spelling errors still out there. If they are out there, we will find them and bring them to a state of grammatical correctness”.