various businesses in and around Duckburg, caused Duckburg's population to swell, and turned the small town into a bustling city and a global financial centre within a few decades. Calisota Calisota is a fictional U.S. state, created by Carl Barks in his story The Gilded Man (Four Color #422). Duckburg is among the cities located there, as well as Goosetown, a traditional rival of Duckburg, and Mouseton. Although it has many fictional elements and a variable climate, Calisota is probably synonymous with Jefferson, being roughly equivalent to Northern California. Duckburg is located north of San Francisco, with a map in Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck showing Calisota corresponding to the part of California north of the 39th parallel. The name is a blend of California and Minnesota, supposedly to allow all kinds of weather or climate in the stories, although Calisota has very little in common with the latter (a state in the Upper Midwest, far from the ocean) and Northern California's regional weather is variable enough by itself. Brutopia Brutopia (a portmanteau word from brute and Utopia) is a fictional country appearing in several Donald Duck stories. It was created by Carl Barks in the story A Cold Bargain from 1957. Brutopia is a hostile country, aiming for world domination. It is clearly a caricature of the Soviet Union. In the Duck universe, Brutopia occasionally attempts to steal Scrooge's money so as to devastate the American economy, and to fund the creation of doomsday weaponry. Its national coat of arms has been shown either as a dagger or the hammer and shackles. Whether Brutopia is a stand-in for all of the USSR, or just for part of it, varies with the story. Sometimes parallels to Russia are drawn directly. Don Rosa has suggested that Brutopia might instead represent the eastern part of Siberia. The language of Brutopia often looks somewhat Slavic. On some occasions it is written in Cyrillic script. On the other hand, Brutopians seem to speak perfect, non-accented English; and other stories show English language texts being used by Brutopians. In 1957, Brutopia's military spending budget amounted to one trillion dollars plus all the kitchen sinks of its happy people (a number that on closer inspection turned out to be five). Scrooge McDuck outbid the Brutopian government by paying one trillion dollars and six kitchen sinks for a sample of the recently discovered