Few road-trips to the the northern regions of our fine Imperium are complete without a trip to the crater where Gorlax may have landed on Earth. A ways up the road from warm and lusty Gillam, Manitoba, the hole now known as Hudson Bay is well-known for its water, and its Hudsons, but less known for its intergalactic unstoppable monsters with no sense of shame. For it is here, local Winnipao legend says, that Gorlax landed on Earth, streaking across the Nord-Skij in his scabrous, repulsive Honey-Baked Starleaper. Wibbles Hugo and I are no fools, for we know that the official explanation provided by known royalist Michaelle Jean is that Hudson Bay was merely created in 1745, to shore up Canada's precious ice reserves and have something to gloat about to the more southerly colonies. Although the Bay was certainly used for this purpose, there are records which show that some kind of body of water may have existed in the region of Canada prior to 1745; a telegram from Kaqchikel Mayan King Tucohatatapetatl to a Cree merchant living in the Hudson Bay area, dated 1472, reads "YO STOP HANGIN APOSTROPHE WITH MA FRENZ IN IXIMCHE STOP HOW Y APOSTROPHE ALL APOSTROPHE S GIANT BODY OF WATER DOING QUESTION MARK". The reference to a pre-Michaelle Jean-era Hudson Bay is clear. We decided to find out for ourselves. Although Hudson Bay was drastically and irreversibly irradiated in 1956, after a testing accident on the Bay crippled the Voss Nose Thrustopheles V sailboat prototype, impoverished fisherman still venture out onto the Bay to try their hand at catching a sea-snake or snapodile. Wibbles and I teamed up with Captain T. Fangs Richardmong for the day, and set out for the center of the Bay to see what we could see. "I knows Gorlax was here," Richardmong says. "My daddy always said this here lake was special, wasn't made by no royalist, and he had schoolin' so I knows it's right." Since the locals don't really have much else going for them, the Gorlax Theory is very popular in the region. It also provides a genetic explanation for the horrifying mutant DNA that seems to be dominant among the inhabitants (although, that said, the much-vaunted "Son of Gorlax" promoted as an attraction in the province was later verified to be a whale carcass, which Gorlax had merely molested). There is no doubt among these noble northern weirdos that Gorlax has walked among them. On the other hand, His Majesty the R. H. Mr. Harper noted, in his weekly visit to the home of every Canadian simultaneously, that theories for the creation of Hudson Bay that involved extraterrestrial intervention were counter-revolutionary, and that to say otherwise was counter-revolutionary. This "see no Gorlax, hear no Gorlax, speak no Gorlax" attitude persisted in government circles for about seventy years, until Gorlax ate the R. H. Minister from Kentish Okotoks, gained his legal powers, and was ascended to the House of Lords. In accordance with Gorlax's governmental position, it is now acceptable to acknowledge his role in Canadian history, but the origin of Hudson Bay remains a touchy subject nonetheless. As we neared the center of the irradiated body of water, it dawned upon me that we had brought no means to verify either side of the story. What were we doing here? Does that mean that the Gorlax Theory is true? Probably. It is a pretty big Bay.

I'm back in the game!

I got a new camera, and I thought I'd rant about it despite its inherent, ungodly oldnewsishness.

It's a Fuji X100, which is pretty well-known to have splendid build quality, splendid controls, and a splendid sensor and lens which takes splendid pictures. It used to have maddening software, although now it doesn't, and it didn't have a zoom lens, which it still doesn't, and the lens isn't interchangeable, which it never will be, at least not on purpose. If you like wide, fast, awesome lenses on little cameras made out of metal, it is supreme. Anyway, mine came broken. The aperture was sticky; you might turn the aperture ring to f/16, and the camera would slow the shutter way down, to expose for f/16, but your picture would be like staring into Buddha's headlights because the aperture never actually closed past 2.0 or 2.8. Apparently this was the result of rushing back into production after last year's earthquake/tsunami in The Japans. I'm pretty sure Fujis are made in Kanagawa or Odawara, well south of Tokyo, so I'm not sure how that would have affected just the aperture blades, but whatever. Tolerances or something, yo. So mine had this problem, and I figure the seller was just trying to offload it. Got it real cheap. It's a $1200 camera, but I paid less than two-thirds of that. No damage at all, except the aperture issue and a couple tiny little scratches in the metal. I called Fuji, and they were as classy as any bunch of New Jersey-dwellers that Rhodesia has ever seen. Mail it here, they said, and we will fix it, and then overnight it back to you. You need not a warranty card, my liege, they said, nor an original receipt, for we are classy. They even had a special X100 hotline. So they fixed it. And goddamn, sirs! It is a fine thing. My first camera, when I was in middle school, was a Zeiss Contaflex, then I got the first Digital Rebel later. So I haven't used a camera with proper controls in ages. There's a ring for the aperture and a dial for the shutter. Both have values on them, as well as an "A". If both are in "A" it's in program-auto, if one or the other is it's in shutter and aperture priority, and if neither are it's in manual. After using Canons for years, and screwing around with the Av/Tv/M and the jog dial and wheel, and then the total incomprehensibility that was how Sony does it, the Fuji seems so, so reasonable. It's like coming home to the Contaflex, and it makes using my old Canon feel remarkably stupid. There's just no need for the inhuman mode thing and the dial, in a sensible world. The Fuji even has a jog dial that does nothing of use, just to rub it in. It barely even matters that the pictures are as spectacular as they are; it's just impossibly more fun to use. Between the exposure control and the intriguing "heads-up display"-kinda OVF, it is three barrels of laffs, using the Imperial measure. The only dumb thing is ISO. There's a function button next to the shutter that you can set to change ISO, but auto-ISO isn't in there. You have to go into the menus to turn that on. Then the function button is useless. It would be more sensible if the exposure compensation dial was ISO, and the jog dial that does nothing did exposure compensation. I usually leave it in auto-ISO with a set ceiling of 1600 anyway, but it's just weird. It's also a very slow focuser in low light-macro shots, but that's usually 'cause I'm trying to focus on a black, fluffy cat who never stops leaping. Despite firmware updates, manual focus is usually too slow to be of much practical use. Anyway, this thing is great, and Fuji is as classy as a palm tree wearing a top hat while it drives a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. My only regret is that I can't go to somewhere cool like Alberta or Siam, because Davis is not very interesting, especially not in wide-angle.

Oliver is really into walls.

The town of Mayberry, Michigan is a bit irregular. Up until two years ago, it was a thriving town, with seven hundred grain reprocessing mills and a Gap outlet. In a rash election-year decision, however, the town elected the self-styled insane person Dr. Ploxenhaus as their new mayor. Insane Mayor Ploxenhaus, as he demanded to be known, immediately conscripted half the town and embarked on a bemusing quest to drive deep, wide tunnels through the Tarbyhao mountain range, which surrounds Mayberry. Deep caverns were dug under the town itself, too, as if Ploxenhaus feared some kind of catastrophic attack upon it; it's estimated that there's over 400 miles of tunnels beneath Mayberry, as well as a cavern big enough to hold twenty-six Chretien-class aircraft carriers sitting side-by-side. After this hideously ambitious construction project was more-or-less complete, Insane Mayor Ploxenhaus is known to have commanded his secret police to herd the town's population into the caverns. Ploxenhaus, in his last official act as the mayor of Mayberry, pooped in the urinal of Bill Fong Chevrolet, renounced his mayorship, and descended into his subterranean fiefdom, taking on the title of Lord Protector of the Underfunk. Nothing has been heard from him or the residents of the town since. I went to Mayberry, and walked down the abandoned, dilapidated boulevards. The town has not been touched in the two years since Ploxenhaus' Exodus, and exists in more-or-less original condition. Due to the immediate nature of their deportation to the caverns, the belongings of the town's residents are largely as they left them, lending the town an eerie aspect. Store shelves are stocked with the remnants of rotten fruit, as well as better-preserved canned and preserved goods, and the odor of Insane Mayor Ploxenhaus' last official act still hangs over the lot of Bill Fong Chevrolet. Being a journalist of the fourth type, I decided to try and find an entrance to Ploxenhaus' Under-Realm. The town's many manhole covers lead only to the abandoned sewer system, and a search of Ploxenhaus' abandoned mayoral estate yielded nothing, save for his world-renowned collection of SelectaVision CED discs and office doodads. It seemed as if the town's populace had simply vanished. The search resulted in nothing but dead ends until my photographer, the erudite Wibbles Hugo, found a large camouflaged hatch in the bottom of Mayberry Junior High's flooded swimming pool. After draining the pool of the viscous goo that had been left by local seagull surgeons, we opened the hatch and found a large stairway descending into the dark. As Wibbles Hugo is a fearless man, famous for hunting and being cranially-inhabited by the chupacabra, we followed the stairway to its terminus — a giant, steel airlock door, wide enough for two school buses and a duck to pass through abreast, sealed from the inside. Above the door was the telltale gleam of a security camera lens behind smoked glass, and far below, we could hear and feel the distant hum of giant generators. We knocked, but received no response. It's unknown what became of the residents of Mayberry — whether they still toil in some far, sunken sub-Mayberry — but their town is so-so. The service isn't great, because you will be the only human for twenty miles around, but the parking is just spectacular.

If one finds oneself in eastern Ohio, as we so often do, you can't avoid seeing Glorious Stingle, the City by the Things. Glorious Stingle is well-known as the ice cream capital of the province, having won nearly every award for the confection there is. Indeed, the prefix "Glorious" was awarded to the town of Stingle by Harper himself, after he stopped by the province and tasted some "Mint Chip Surprise" in a local eatery. The secret of the town's delicious ice cream, residents tell me, is their giant cow Steve, an escapee from the HydroDoris research farms. Steve was created by HydroDoris as a prototype of a giant race of cows made to provide top-quality dairy supplies to off-shore oil concerns. But HydroDoris (a subsidiary of the Mexican Unigrow conglomerate) did not realize the sheer power of their prototype until it was too late; by the age of 50 (two in human years), Steve was able to walk through transparisteel without difficulty. Try as HydroDoris might, they could not contain Steve, and she wandered throughout the Provinces, settling at last in Stingle, as Stingle's residents were the first ones who didn't try and make giant steaks out of her. A comfortable agreement was reached; Stingle would protect Steve from steak-seeking interlopers, and Steve would provide the residents with top-quality dairy supplies. And thus, Glorious Stingle's ice cream legend was born. To walk down Glorious Stingle's main street is to be swathed and doused with ice cream as one might be swathed and doused with odorous oils in the most perverted of Turkish salons. You cannot escape Glorious Stingle without eating at least forty scoops of their private reserve-caliber dessert, nor would you want to. There are over 750 distinct ice cream-selling entities within the confines of Glorious Stingle, and double that amount of ice cream distilleries for export only. Glorious Stingle is a haven not just for Steve, but also for the world's ice cream lovers. As with many eastern Ohio towns, Glorious Stingle is not immune to the recent danger of attacks by the venomous, feral Amish, but the residents have fought them off before, and claim that another attack is of little concern to them. I spoke to Reebus Poprin, a local toppings specialist, who lost his arm after a bite from what the townspeople refer to as "a Silas". "Yes, I concede that the venomous, tricky Amish used to be a pretty major concern around here," Reebus said, "but between Steve, our system of waffle cone punji sticks, and our constitutionally-protected right to bear sharpened ice cream scoops [which are ever-present in Glorious Stingle], I'm not worried. We're a lot better-prepared than we were when I lost ol' grabby here." The Amish seem to be the town's only concern. Ice cream futures rose over a thousand percent last year alone, and continue to rise. "It's a good, stable currency," remarked town councilman H. J. T. Pieterhoops, "as long as you keep it between about negative twenty and negative five fahrenheit." And, as Steve is in excellent health, there's no reason why the town's dominance in the field can't continue. As it stands, Glorious Stingle is an excellent little place, and I can't recommend a visit highly enough.