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Frosted Beaver Chapter Our motto: "Beavers are good for many things but flying isn't one of them." Subject: Chapter Report to the Man Will Never Fly annual gathering By Garth Wallace, chapter secretary Hi to all you southern ground bounders; Our big project last year was building waterborne recovery platforms for the Canadian Air Force. We fastened sheets of plywood covered with beaver fur to the top of fishing dories. We tested them by launching Ford Pintos off a long dock. The vicious nap of the beaver fur easily stopped the cars. But we discovered that the fur frosted up at night, which is 20 hours long this time of year. Several Pintos skidded on the pelts and were last seen spinning across the frozen harbor, heading out to sea. So this year the boys have been experimenting with various alcohols to see which is the best beaver de-icer. This has taken months since much of the alcohol evaporated before it could be tested on the fur but the verdict is in. Jack Daniels is the best. We pour it on neat and those beaver furs heat up in a flash. We avoid the liquor tax by re-labeling it Type 69 de-icer fluid. The boys like the square whiskey bottles because they don’t roll around on the floor of their pick-up trucks. Since the Federal Aviation Administration is planning to privatize your air traffic control services we have a report on how that’s going up here: Previously, our taxes financed our ATC infrastructure. In 1998, a private company paid the Canadian government billions of dollars (that’s millions in dollars US) to buy that system. Now all aircraft owners pay mandatory fees to that company whether they use the air traffic services or not. It seems a bit over the top to be charged for a system that we already paid for and for which the government has been paid twice. It gets down right onerous when you consider that men will never fly. But now we have an ATC system that has been paid for three times. Should men ever fly, our privatized air traffic controllers are ready to tell them where to go. We get press reports from the United States up here. They come by smoke signals. We can’t read them at night so there is a news black-out for eight months of the year. But we read that hurricanes have pounded Florida again. Maybe if the Wright Brothers had set up camp at Key West instead of Kitty Hawk, they would have had more success trying to fly. Please pass this information on to those guys trying to launch the replica of the Wright Flyer. That’s all for now. We are watching to see if Hilary Clinton gets elected president. She could be the first frosted beaver in the White House. Sincerely, Garth & the boys
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