Subject: Chapter Report to the Man Will Never Fly annual gathering.
From: Garth Wallace, secretary
December 16, 2007

We started our Fifth Anniversary Meeting singing the new chapter theme song, "Fifty Ways to Lose Your Liver". We toasted each verse. By the time we got to Number 50, the meeting had become quite spiritual.

Then we pondered the Canadian pumpkin problem. Each year after Halloween, we are stuck with leftover Jack ’O Lanterns. Up here, at the home of the Frosted Beaver Chapter, pumpkins don’t decompose until next June. So we are left with thousands of orange heads, their gruesome faces frozen in place, littering the landscape. Believe me, nothing looks worse than a dead pumpkin parked beside a shiny white igloo. They really clash with red and green holiday decorations.

You might wonder what this has to do with the Man Will Never Fly Society. I was wondering the same thing.

One of the guys in the chapter mentioned that a local construction site had some unused foundation tubes. A cry rose from the crowd, "Pumpkin cannons!"
Everyone scattered to round up surplus Sonotubes and Jack O’ Lanterns.

The meeting reconvened outside where we jammed the tubes into the snow and pointed them south. We decided that you Americans wouldn’t mind if we scattered our pumpkins over your warm, green countryside where they would quickly rot.
First we sized the Jack O’ Lanterns to match the different diameters of the tubes. We had everything from ten to 20 inches. For propulsion, the boys blew their distilled breath into the tubes. Then a carved pumpkin, complete with burning candle, was jammed into the open end.
"Kaaboom!!"
A volley of frozen pumpkins blasted into the night sky toward North Carolina. Boy, those Jacks made mean missiles!

This was all accomplished in the dark, which it is most of our fall and winter. Our sole illumination was the Northern Lights. They are fun to watch but it’s hard to work under their shimmering display after toasting 50 verses of our theme song. We all lost hair and hearing to the unpredictable time delay between ramming in the pumpkins and the explosions.

We also discovered that filling a five-foot-long, 20-inch Sonotube with bad breath causes hyperventilation and the hiccups. Several singed-faced members were seen madly sucking wind while dancing the herky-jerky in hairless fur coats.

A passerby correctly identified this as a public display of drunkenness by an unknown species of naked beavers. This is an unlawful act in Canada except in the parliament. The cops were called. A fat constable with orange hair showed up. She was mistaken for a Jack O’ Lantern. One of the boys tried to stuff her into the 20-inch cannon. She didn’t fit. He is in jail now hoping the witch finds her sense of humor before his hearing.

The George Bush look-a-like pumpkins flew well. They were small and dense enough that a few probably overshot North Carolina and landed in the Bermuda Triangle where they are doomed to float around in circles forever.

In keeping with the "Martian" theme of this year’s MWNF Annual Kittyhawk Banquet, we are happy to announce that Stinky Breezy-Pants won the best pumpkin launch. Stinky is a Frosted Beaver member who eats beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Stinky farted into his cannon and stuffed it with a pumpkin carved to resemble our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. The explosion launched the Harper Jack into space. It was last seen on a trajectory that could take it to Mars. If it makes it, we can credit Stinky with landing a head Canadian head on the red planet.

So if you have heard reports of men flying over the Carolina hills, don’t believe them. Tell those hillbillies that man will never fly: pumpkins fly, men drink.

Happy landings to all,
Garth Wallace, MWNF Frosted Beaver Chapter