“Everybody messes up once in a while,” said Alfredshire III, wincing at the melody of a jovial nursery rhyme echoing from a youth camp in the distance. “And yeah, perhaps my little hiccup killed maybe 1 or 200 people, but it’s not like my bridge was the only bridge to ever fall. I don’t hear schoolchildren singing mean little rhymes centuries later about Giuseppe Ricci’s bridge that collapsed or Francoise Toussaint’s bridge that exploded. Why am I the one singled out?”

“There was a lot going on in my life at the time,” continued Alfredshire III, pouting past little children skipping in a figure eight. “From my endless dysentery to the birth of my sixteenth child, I obviously was a little overloaded to devote all of my attention to my bridge design.”

“Nobody seems to want to sing about my extremely still-vertical Theater of DuPont Cheri, or my very intact Wimbleburyson Tower,” added Alfredshire III. “It’s time for people to move on and find someone else’s disaster to sing about. I have some ideas: ‘Tippy-tippy Titanic tapped a little ice’ or how about ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch-BOOM Chernobyl.’”

At press time, the architect of the Leaning Tower of Pisa was insisting that he meant for it to look like that.