YOU KNOW YOU'RE IN BRISBANE WHEN...

People around you start wearing scarves, coats and jackets the first time the temperature drops below 20 degrees in April and steadfastly refuse to stop dressing like Londoners in December even if the temperature climbs again;

The spiders that invade your house are big enough to back your cat into a corner;

If you want a major print news alternative to the ultra-parochial, conservative News Corporation-owned rag masquerading as a newspaper that rules the roost here..................... you're a long way from Kansas, Toto;

Being outdoors at sunset in summer after a bushfire is like watching a movie scene in the sky;

Almost every major public event / festival / celebration you come across is sponsored by a mining company cheerfully claiming to be part of our "green future";

Northern suburbs residents suddenly lose all navigational skills and coherent driving ability upon crossing the river in a southerly direction, and vice versa for southern residents;

If you light up a cigarette in the CBD mall you run the risk of being sconed with a shopping bag (and then fined while you lie dazed on the pavers);

The local national championship-winning sports team sees its crowd attendance drop by 90% if they lose their first two games of the following season;

People at every party you attend grimly tell you how glad they are not to be living on the Gold Coast;

Growing your own vegies is sometimes like being in charge of constructing the D-Day defenses on Normandy's beaches due to the plethora of nibbly beasties who seem to have evolved to subsist on plants grown only within your property boundary;

You watch a cockroach the size of a sunglasses case carry off your lamb cutlets before you've finished defrosting them on the kitchen bench;

You get road-raged by wildly-gesticulating 20-something females with infants in baby seats in the back for driving as slow as 100km/hr in a 100km/hour zone;

The newer buildings look like they were designed by Soviet architects after smoking their first spliff and the older buildings look like they were designed by Michaelangelo's Australian nephew;

Local mates talk about the city's far southern suburbs as if they're referring to the Bronx in the early '80's;

You can spend a warm subtropical evening gazing up at the CBD lights from an inner city riverside park while hand-feeding the bull sharks;

Catching public transport involves packing a good book, 4 bus timetables, a seat cushion, antiseptic surface spray, motion sickness tablets and a day's rations;

You get tail-gated, road-raged and swerved at by an over-caffeinated labourer in a ute going at 95 clicks an hour through the speed-camera-infested Inner City Bypass tunnel;

Locals continually bemoan the fact that there are no good dining-out/cafe/bar options within the city limits whatsoever...... thereby highlighting the fact that they've not paid a visit to Toowoomba, Ipswich, Caboolture, Redcliffe, Logan or Beenleigh lately;

You get tail-gated and road-raged while going through a MacDonald's drive-thru;

You can write "Swerved to avoid scrub turkey" in the "Cause of Accident" section of your car insurance claim and actually be granted a pay-out;