Trifter

Last week I attended the Australasian Evolution Society 2009 conference. The venue was at the Australian National University in Canberra. Great university, with plenty of research projects going on, lots of competent and very smart people, and all that. The city, however, sucks. This ditch should never have been conceived of in the first place. It was basically the result of a bitch-whinge between Sydney and Melbourne over who would get to be the capital city. So they came up with this place, away from the coast (for WHAT? This isn’t Switzerland). It has no soul, no activity, no…well, it doesn’t have much of anything. I presume there’s not even that much crime. I certainly didn’t see any taking place, and I suspect that if it did happen, it would be political crime (BORE-RING!). The atmosphere of the place made me awfully cynical, and by the time I got to the last talk, it felt like people were just there to hear the sound of their own voices. Which is really unfair, given that there was some great work on display, with some highly original ideas about how to test evolutionary hypotheses and so on (or at least I think so; I only absorbed, like, two talks because I couldn’t stop thinking about how wonderful Sydney is – a place I was busting to get out of the week prior). But please, People Who Decide These Things, make it a rule to always choose a city or town that’ll get people excited about going; don’t throw in the odd hole that you know would otherwise be avoided like the plague. For the record, I gave a talk on the research I’m doing into the evolution of insect genitalia (that’s right. I might write about them some other time). By the time I was done, I didn’t give a crap anymore. Thanks Canberra. Ruin a perfectly fascinating research topic with your germ-free atmosphere and pristine architecture, your secluded “charm” (whatever), and your crap food. It was crap both at the uni and outside it. What the CRAP? Just give me what the politicians eat. They look smug and aloof, and we all know it’s not because of the endless praise heaped upon them by the Australian people.

(personally, I think that Sydney and Melbourne should just rotate the title of capital city every, say, eight years. Canberra should be levelled and allowed to turn into a gigantic shrub garden, never to be spoken of again under penalty of torture. Oh, and while I’m bitching about it, the place is frigid, so it probably consumes massive amounts of energy just for for heating. The levelling of Canberra is something the Greens should take up. They’d have my vote, even if they were calling for the conscription of senior citizens into the army or for the culling of all household cats).