(R)adelaide Rules

It's in. The Economist has published its annual list of most awesomely radical cities and the winner is some Canadian place that I've never been to. It's probably cold up there so exactly why The Economist saw fit to put it at the top of the list escapes me. But check it. CHECK IT. Number 6. Adelaide. Or, as we locals like to call it, Radelaide. So rad. And Adelaide is perched there one rung above the so-called jewel in Australia's gleaming crown, Sydney. Suck on that Sydney-siders! How does it feel to be trumped by dour, boring Adelaide with all of its human carcasses stuffed into barrels of acid and general love a decent grizzly or unexplained murder? Somehow the eggheads who compiled this completely bogus and inconsequential list figured that living in a city that touts a "freeway" that only goes in one direction in the morning and has to shut down, clear the traffic and then reverse the flow for the evening is a really, really good idea. I'll bet you twelve Aussie dollars that even Bogota hasn't concocted such a busted-arse transport concept and tried to pass it off as a success, and they're scraping the bottom of the barrel on this list.

An old mate of mine once explained his disposition towards Adelaide in a way so elegant that I've never heard it matched. "Adelaide," he said, "is a lot like pissing your pants in corduroy: it's really warm and relieving but you're still pissing your pants." The interesting thing is that he's right, and I knew it. Stay there long enough and you'll either wind up floating down the Torrens after a late-night attack or you'll just slowly feel any drive and ambition ebb from your body. You'll rationalise that being tucked away in the capital city of a who-cares state in a country most citizens of the world think is located somewhere near Hungary isn't so bad. You can still get a reasonably priced yiros down the road and there's plenty of Farmers' Union iced coffee available to mollify the symptoms of the inevitable depression and anxiety brought on by your slow descent into anonymous mediocrity.

But hey, Melbourne's nearly at the top of that list. I hear that place is okay. Their cricket stadium is heaps bigger than the one in Adelaide and they like footy there too. Not like Sydney. They hate footy in Sydney. Wankers.