I Want To Be an Official Too!

MADISON, Wisconsin (Reuters) – Some stories don't fly. This one doesn't even breathe.

The city council of Wisconsin's capital voted on Tuesday to designate the plastic pink flamingo its official bird, honoring a college prank committed 30 years ago.
In 1979, University of Wisconsin students planted roughly 1,000 of the pink plastic birds on a grassy incline outside the dean's office.
Alderman Marsha Rummel told the Wisconsin State Journal the council's 15-4 vote ensured the event was "captured in our imaginations forever."

Did you know there are more plastic flamingos in the USA than real ones? Plastic flamingos are widely considered to be the stereotypical example of lawn kitsch – the American’s answer to garden dwarfs. Designed in 1957 by Don Featherstone while working for Union Products, the pink flamingo has gone from a piece of Florida exotica to a symbol of trash culture. Featherstone sculpted his 3-D flamingos from clay, working from photos of the birds in National Geographic.
The species stopped replicating, when manufacturer Union Products went out of business on November 1, 2006. However Faster-Form Corporations now purchased the copyright and plastic molds of Featherstone’s original plastic flamingos and will be resuming production in order to save the plastic flamingos from extinction.