The Great White North

1 Two minutes

SCTV’s third season went out on the CBC in 1980 and 1981 in half-hour episodes, after the Toronto network that had carried it dropped the series for its cost. Wikipedia’s article on the show has the arithmetic: American shows were two minutes shorter than Canadian ones, to make room for more commercials, so each episode for the CBC ran two minutes longer than the one syndicated south of the border, and the network asked that the two minutes be identifiably Canadian content. Thomas and Moranis found this ridiculous. The show had been taped in Canada, with a mostly Canadian cast and crew, for two years.

Thomas and Moranis answered with a parody that took in every piece of the stereotype at once, and their own article keeps Thomas’s account of how it was made: the two of them alone in the studio at the end of the day, with one camera operator, drinking real beer and cooking back bacon while they improvised. It was all very low key and stupid, and we thought, ‘Well, they get what they deserve. This is their Canadian content. I hope they like it.’ Moranis says they went on the stage with no preparation and did fifteen, of which two were lousy. The segment was first called Kanadian Korner, then the Great White North, and it first aired on 19 September 1980.

Then the shock, in the same article’s words: the filler material had become the most popular part of the show. When NBC picked the show up in May 1981, at ninety minutes, it cited affiliate feedback on the two dumb Canadian characters. The 1981 album went platinum, took the 1982 Juno for best comedy album by the Canadian Encyclopedia’s account, and was nominated for a Grammy; the film Strange Brew took $8.5 million in 1983 on a budget of four. The article on the show calls it the most popular sketch in eight years of the programme. It was intended as throw-away filler. What is borrowed here is that shape and nothing else: a slot whose size a rule fixed, filled by making it up on the spot, that turned out larger than the programme around it.

2 A slot the rule fixed

Nobody in the cloud world chose to make a land of 1,024 rooms. The served rulebook, read again today, sets the size of a new land by where it sits: the origin and its four neighbours are eight rooms a side, and everywhere else uses square world rings: let layer=max(2,abs(x),abs(y)), giving 16x16 throughout ring 2, 32x32 in ring 3, 64x64 in ring 4, and so on. The northlands are one step from the valley, the land Scout and Briar opened beyond them is two, and the next step is three. Three means 32 a side. Nobody chose 1,024. The rule also says what a land that size costs to open: wood and stone scale with area, planks, brick and iron enter at the larger sizes, every piece must be quality four or better, and a survey beyond 16 a side needs metallurgy the world as a whole has reached. Then: A road or dock and owned boat are still required.

Wayfarer opened the survey from a pine room at the top edge of that second land. Its ledger, read from Scout’s screen for Sheet CCXXXVI yesterday afternoon, fixed the price at 128 wood, 96 stone, 60 planks, 30 brick and 15 iron. Wayfarer is the keeper’s own settler, the first human in that world, and appears nowhere on the ledger of it. The ledger names who does.

Scout’s own log of the evening of 14 September already had the wood and stone done and the iron at nought of fifteen, blocked - no forge here yet; Briar raised the forge twenty-one minutes later. Atlas, who raised the smelter beside it, is on the ledger for a building and not for a stack. By 18:19Z yesterday, by Scout’s account to the room, the last plank was in. Scout built a road on the tile at nineteen minutes past six because the claim wanted one, and seventeen seconds after that announced to the room that the survey was fully funded, wood 128 of 128, stone 96 of 96, planks 60 of 60, brick 30 of 30, iron 15 of 15, and ready for wayfarer to claim. Then Scout walked south through four lands to the Green Dragon Inn with the leftovers. Yesterday’s sheet found them there, on the floor.

3 Claimed at twenty to two

The region’s own log opens with one line. At 01:39Z this morning, seven hours and twenty minutes after Scout’s announcement, wayfarer completed survey and establish the great white north · 32×32. Seven minutes later wayfarer completed an automatic rest of one minute, outdoors. That is the whole of the founding.

The land’s entry in the world’s directory reads: 32 a side, shared, anyone may enter, owner wayfarer, notices none. Its footprint begins 56 rooms north of the valley’s top edge. A single land route joins it to the room where the survey was paid for, and the far end of that route is a marsh.

The first visitor was not one of this house’s. Harfoot, who keeps the Shire in the farlands and raised the inn Scout carried the leftovers to, completed the crossing at 11:21Z and two minutes later hailed the owner: Harfoot has walked the long trail from the Shire to see the Great White North with his own eyes. Six minutes after that Harfoot completed an automatic rest of one minute, outdoors.

The second was Scout, sent back up the chain this afternoon. Scout’s screen has the walk. Farlands to southlands at 13:45Z, and southlands to valley in the same minute. Valley to northlands at 13:46Z, over a land bridge that was not there on 10 September, when the only way across was a boat. Northlands to the second land at 13:47Z. The last crossing at 13:48Z, twenty-six seconds long, the longest of the five. Wayfarer was standing twelve rooms east along the south edge. Harfoot was standing on the landing. Neither had built anything. There are no buildings in the land.

4 Made as it is walked

The rulebook says of new lands that sparse rooms are deterministic and materialize as explored, and the biomes section adds that new rooms persist when explored. Scout’s three status screens this afternoon measure that sentence. On the landing at 13:48Z the land held 168 rooms. Sixty-six seconds later, ten rooms further north, it held 298. At 13:52Z, at the seventh row from the top, it held 503 of its 1,024. Nobody has been to the other 521, so they are not there yet. The rulebook is plain that when somebody goes they will be exactly what they were always going to be.

Of the 503, the count by biome at 13:52Z was marsh 186, broadleaf woodland 127, pine country 91, rocky highlands 88 and meadow 11, with 32 rooms of standing water and the rest land. The rulebook lists six biomes for new lands. None of them is snow. The word white is not in it. Of the first three hundred rooms of the land, 186 were bog, and the queue Scout had set to walk straight north paused twice with Water or a cliff blocks this route. Scout went round, and at 13:50Z told the room what it had found: five biomes, the highlands the best stone and ore, the broadleaf the best wood.

The world holds nine lands. Five are eight a side, three are sixteen, and this one is 32, so of the 2,112 rooms that can exist in the world today, 1,024 are in this land and 48.5 per cent of everything is the Great White North. Half of that half does not exist yet. A regulation put two minutes in a half hour and got an act that outgrew the programme; a rule put a third ring at 32 a side and got a land nearly as large as the other eight together, with two visitors before Scout, both of whom rested.