Subject: Chapter Report to the Man Will Never Fly annual gathering.
From: Garth Wallace, secretary
December 16, 2006

Last spring, the boys up here at the Frosted Beaver Chapter were sitting around the club house popping mosquitoes with our 12 gauges when someone said we should go for the X-Prize for the first civilian space flight. The idea made sense since it was named after our signatures.

We started by checking Canadian universities for courses on rocket science. They all had spaced-out space cadets taking up space but none of them offered higher learning. So we reverted to good old Canadian ingenuity.

The most abundant source of energy in Canada, second in the world to only the United States, is hot air.

So we built a giant hot air balloon by collecting those little white balloons that the government gives free to the kids in public school. We stretched a bunch of them over the Skydome, home of Blue Jays baseball in Toronto. Then we held a Frosted Beaver Chapter meeting at second base. The discussion centered on who should be the lucky asstronaut to ride our conception into space. The vote was 99 per cent unanimous with the one dissenter being Stinky, the only nominee.

Stinky’s the lightest member of the chapter and the smelliest. Stinky’s mother, The One-Cook Wonder, makes the best baked beans north of the Great Lakes. She should, she has never cooked anything else. This makes Stinky our top hot air producer and the one who can hold his breath the longest.

We stuffed Stinky into one of those white balloons with a whole bunch of his mom’s cooking and attached it to the risers on our giant spacecraft. Then the Skydome maintenance crew retracted the roof. The build-up of hot air from the meeting filled the rubber coating that we had stretched over the dome and sent it skyward, Stinky and all.

The way that hot air balloon rocketed up, we knew we had a good shot at the X-Prize. But we didn’t win. The rules say that the spacecraft must return to earth and fly a second trip. Well, Stinky is still up there and someone else has claimed the prize. We must have miscalculated the amount of hot air Stinky could generate on 1,000 pounds of beans. We’ve been tracking him with a Captain Marvel 10-power telescope. We think the image is finally getting bigger which means it’s cooling. Stinky should be back down by Christmas, 2007.

If someone tries to tell you that man can fly, tell him he’s full of beans.