I Scooped the Washington Press Corps

You read it here first!

Through fantastic reporting, I have obtained Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration speech. Obviously I can’t reveal how I got it, except to say that brilliant reporting was involved.

So while the entire world waits with eyeballs glued to televisions you, dear readers, have the speech now. Here it is:

My Fellow Americans. And, of course, your lovely ladies as well.

Happy 2017 to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Sad! Very sad!

Welcome to you fans who have come from all corners to witness this historic day. Great people out there. Like Vlad Putin, in the second row, He’s a great guy and his girlfriend Alina Kabaeva has great legs.

Vlad is a leader. You know, unlike what we have in this country.

One thing, though. He is not as good looking as me.  I mean do I look like a president? How handsome am I, right? How handsome? You betcha!

           

I think it’s important that I say something never said here before: Many scores and years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Well, they got that wrong! Nobody is created equal. You have to know the right people and work the dollars to get that way.

I’m going to work at making a lot more people more equal. Nobody can do it better than me.

I have a great temperament for getting that done. My temperament is very good, very calm. Everything I’ve done virtually has been a tremendous success. In fact everything I have done actually has been tremendous.

I’m going to help the poor, because they need a lot of help. I mean if they have been poor for so many generations, how smart can they be? Basically they are morons and they need help.

I’m also going to do foreign affairs. Foreign affairs, without the help of the State Department. The level of stupidity there is incredible. I'm telling you, I used to use the word incompetent. Now I just call them stupid.

I’ll be consulting myself a lot. Speaking with myself – No. 1 – because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.

I’ve already seen how our free trade is terrible. Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have stupid people.

There has been a bunch of snivelling about having too many rich men, and too few women, in my administration.

I want to make clear that I cherish women. I want to help women. I’m going to be able to do things for women that no one else could do. They are going to love it.

(Pause as the President summons an aide to bring him a pair of ear muffs).

That feels better. I didn’t want my ears to get frostbitten on my first day as president.

You know all this global warming talk was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. Now any and all weather events are used by the global warming hoaxsters to justify higher taxes to save our planet!

And of course there’s the carbon footprint thing and the hole in the ozone thing. They say, don't use hair spray, it's bad for the ozone. I want to use hair spray. I’ve got a fantastic head of hair and I want to keep it in place. What’s more important, my hair or the ozone?

Hey, it really is getting cold outside. I see Hillary sitting out there in Row 236 and can hear her teeth chattering. She’ll warm up when we get her locked up.

So that’s about it. I want to cut this short because it really is getting cold. Half the country is in a deep freeze. It’s a major freeze. Weeks ahead of normal.

Our planet is freezing. Record low temps, and our scientists are stuck in ice.

Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!

Catch ya on Twitter!

Email: shaman@vianet.ca

Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y

The Cabin at Ghostly Point

Summer without campfire stories? No way! Here’s one of mine that we will publish in three parts over the next three weeks.

Grey twilight fell across the far shore of Shkendang Lake, obscuring bit by bit the brooding shoreline, the thick-waisted white pines, and the old cabin standing alone on the rocky point. The cabin’s washed out red tin roof, and the rough hewn log porch below it, were barely visible now from the Garrison family cottage directly across the bay. 

Shainie Garrison leaned forward and squinted fiercely. Her slender 13-year-old fingers squeezed the chair armrests with a force that threatened to snap them. Lights and shadows from the campfire danced in her intense brown eyes while the faint band of freckles below them coloured with excitement.

“There it is!” she cried, propelling herself from the chair and pointing over the fire and across the lake. “It’s there again. The light.”

Shainie’s father Paul dropped an armload of split firewood and bent low to peer out over the water. Nothing. Nothing but a dark far shore and more darkness spreading across the half-kilometre of water separating them from Ghostly Point.

“Shainie,” her father sighed with exasperation. “We’ve been through this before. There is nothing there.”

“But dad there was. There was! I saw it! A light was on. Then it went out. Just like the other times.”

Paul Garrison stepped into the campfire circle and placed his hands gently on his daughter’s slim shoulders, which trembled from excitement. “Honey, no one has stayed at the cabin in decades. It’s probably the last rays of the sun glinting off a window or the roof.”

Shainie looked into the gentleness of her father’s grey eyes. Oh, how she wanted to believe him. But he was wrong. It wasn’t sunlight. It was a campfire or  lantern light. She just knew it.

Her parents were becoming concerned at her insistence that she had seen the light at Ghostly Point several times. It seemed to possess her, drawing her to sit by the campfire every evening waiting for it to reappear.

Marcella Garrison understood that her daughter was a creative child with a vivid imagination, but worried that the phantom light story was becoming more than a young girl’s fantasy. She wondered if tall tale story swapping between Shainie and her grandfather, a renowned storyteller, had anything to do with her daughter’s fantasizing.

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell her all those stories, Dad,” Marcella told her father one morning. “She needs to stop with these stories about a light at the cabin.”

“The girl has a wonderful imagination,” said Ira Desilets, a tall sun-toughened outdoorsman who had built Shainie a small cedar-strip canoe that she could take out by herself, on the strict understanding that she wear her life jacket.

“And who knows. . . maybe the girl is seeing something.”

He had encountered some genuine mysteries in his many years in bush country. Every tale of the woods, no matter how outrageous, was based on some truth. Even the story of how the lake got its name.

Shkendang is ‘grieving’ in the Ojibwe language and the Ojibwe who had lived in the area named it after a tragedy a century before.

Every spring before the Europeans arrived, the Ojibwe came to the lake to catch the lake trout that were plentiful just after the ice melted. They camped at

Ghostly Point and at night their campfires illuminated the waters surrounding the rocky point. Their chants joined the wood smoke drifting skyward to Gzhemnidoo, the great spirit, in respect and thanks for the nourishment they took from Mother Earth.

Their Gimaa, or leader, had one daughter who he affectionately called Moong, meaning Loon Who Brings Happiness. She was beautiful, happy, and skilled in the woods as a hunter, fisher and gatherer of food, much like the loons with whom they shared the lake.

Early one morning Moong canoed out to fish alone. She planned to fill her canoe bottom with trout to impress and please her father, ignoring the warning of an old man who cautioned about dark skies building on the western horizon.

Next week: Part 2 - The tragedy

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y