The Cabbage Patch

It’ll be called: "Queer as Chucky"

Hello World.

A starship captain who is secretly gay has a baby with a parolled murderer who’s a mannequin come to life. Stars Marion Ross and Kelly Ripa. Genre: Action

This is the concept for a new TV show as proposed by The TV Show Pitch Generator.

It is interesting to hear concepts presented in this way, because as bizarre as they sound, they’re really not that different from what is actually on television:

A city girl, whose estranged father dies, moves to the country to ride horses with mysteriously good-looking farm-hands.  After a few years, there will be no one called McLeod remaining on the show. Stars Generic Replaceable Blonde Actress and Generic Replaceable Brunette Actress.  Genre: Crap

– [via TVSquad]

Tags: Web Sites

Dob in an Idiot

I love a sun-burnt country.  I love this country.  I love the blistering sun and the dust bowl we call our agriculture sector.  I love unfettered bushfires destroying the native growth the greenies spent years trying to save.  I love men and women dobbing in their neighbours.  I love the wedding invitation stuck to the fridge with a “be alert not alarmed” magnet.

I’ve noticed that the Anti-Terrorism ads have had a renaissance lately - there must be an election coming up soon.  I’ve also noticed that the left-wing radicals over at The Sydney Morning Herald have been describing these ads as a waste of tax money.

Whoever claims that the anti-terrorism campaign is a waste of money is a fool.  In the four odd years it has been up and running the hotline has already exposed a dozen juvenile delinquents that have so far evaded being locked away.  It is a sure and short path from prank calls to blowing up innocent people.

Dial-in-a-terrorist should be extended.  Whenever you hear someone extolling the virtues of a risotto - that is, cheese saturated rice stuffed with water - you should be able to call 1800-WANKER.  Whenever you hear a laboured word pun being made, dial 1800-LOSER.  Whenever you enter a shop and are confronted by ambient chill music, ring 1800-DICKHEAD.

Can anyone actually tell me what ‘chill’ music is?  A generation is growing up on the tracks that New Order rejected.

It seems that anyone nowadays can loop a couple of bars of flute, add a doof doof beat, put a photo of a sunset and a martini on the cover and have every mentally pubescent twenty year old rushing to the CD shop in the hope of becoming cool and gaining a personality by association.  Music died the day Genesis broke up.  Sadly it wasn’t saved by their revival.

We are a patient, decent people to a fault and now is the moment we decide to stop softcocking around thinking everyone in the world has a right to exist.

TomHB.

Spelling adn gramer is 4 loosers!!!!!!!!!!

Hello World.

Over on the blog for the previously-mentioned language geek site Wordie, user “uselessness” has posted an article about the ever-increasing destruction of the English language.  He refers specifically to the online writing site Ficlets, which I have never used, but his arguments are equally applicable to many web-forums, blog comments, and the mobile phone of any teenager.

Of concern to the author is that there appears to be a trend amongst (presumably) young writers to celebrate and promote bad English:

In the good old days (ha ha) the serious writers would rank garbage as garbage: one star out of five. The hope was that people would get the message and step it up. Unfortunately they didn’t, and they now outnumber the rest of us. To add insult to injury, the kids consistently rank the worst stories with the full five stars so the entire ranking system is useless. Most of the good writers have apparently fled in terror by now.

There’s an underlying attitude here, I think. It’s apathy toward all things grammar, or more. Sometimes I detect outright contempt for it. It’s never capitalizing anything. It’s never breaking text into paragraphs. It goes beyond not knowing how to spell; it’s not caring how to spell. It’s waiving the single- or (already extreme) double-exclamation points in favor of eight or ten or fifteen of them.

I’m concerned that SMS and “IM-speak” is bastardizing communication amongst the youngest generation.

I thought this was appropriate after some of the recent discussion on this very site (after which I am sufficiently versed in both the singular and plural forms of Latin nouns, thank you very much).

As a writer, both recreationally and potentially professionally (try saying that ten times fast), spelling and grammar are always of great interest to me.  I am an awful speller, but I make an effort to get it right as much as possible (or at least hit the spell-check button).  I am of the belief that I shouldn’t need to be a cryptologist to read an SMS message, and neither should anyone else.  It would seem this belief is decreasingly shared by others of my generation.

– [via Errata]

Tags: Writing

Wankers and Fools

If Eskimos have 75 words for snow, we should have at least 100 to describe dickheads.

Take my Neighbours - not the ones near the intersection but the other ones - they are ill-educated troglodytes that don’t know the difference between a muffin and a friand. I hardly need to add that they’re renters.

The bloke, 25 or something, came home in a souped-up car with the number plates LOVR69 - obviously FUKWIT had already been taken. His common law strumpet struts around in tracky-daks with matching stilettos and thinks the Dalai Lama is an ice-cream shop. I bet they wouldn’t even be offended if they read this … ‘dickhead’ has two syllables, which is one beyond their comprehension.

There is a myth in modern Australia that people like these have a right to live in my street. It’s called egalitarianism, which was a cunning ideology devised in the 19th century to fool workers into thinking that they have a purpose beyond serving the ruling classes. To my infinite credit, I recently decided that it might be worth a try and started travelling in the front seat of taxis.

So for the last month, every time I’ve got in a cab (on the company’s dollar) I’ve been regaled by half evolved life forms who think they are de facto correspondents for the Department of Meteorology, or worse still, the only people in the world who actually understand what’s happening around us.

There’s an entire army of cretins, fired up on cocktails of NoDoz, coffee and amphetamines, sitting on beaded back supports and digging their fingernails into the reinforced plastic steering wheels, who are convinced that if they weren’t so busy doing the airport to city run twelve hours a day, they would single handedly solve the Middle East problem, the refugee crisis and Medicare.

It’s time we realised that egalitarianism is another antiquated ‘ism’ and until cab companies forcibly rip out the larynx of every employee, I’m going to travel in the back seat.

TomHB.

Legendary Music! Crippling Terror!

Hello World.

What do you get when you mix The Beatles, Zombies and “Screaming Girls!”?  Why, A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead, of course.

– [via Brad Sucks]

Apparently, Our Lingus is Quite Cunning Indeed

Hello World.

As of this writing, I have been monitoring The Patch’s stats for nearly two full days.  In that time, we have received around 33 unique visitors (a modest number, to be sure, but not bad for an un-publicised re-launch).  Of those thirty-three highly intelligent Internet consumers, at least five have arrived at this here site by searching for a rather unusual term.  “What is that term?” you may ask.  “Autocunninglingus” I would reply.

What is interesting about this is not that The Patch appears among the first results for this term in a Google search (thanks to reader Oskar’s use of the word in a comment some time ago), but that there are at least 2-3 people searching each day for this exact misspelling of this rather bizarre concept.  One person even used ALL CAPS - I think it must have been important.

Boun-cing-cats-boun… oh, I give up.

Hello World.

This is a contestant from the French equivalent of Australian Idol (French Idol, I suppose…).  He doesn’t sing, instead he shows his talent in the long-lost art of the human beatbox.  Yes, it would seem this kind of stupidity and desire to humiliate oneself in front of millions of slavering viewers by demonstrating a totally useless skill is an international phenomenon.

That being said, he’s actually really good.

I can’t seem to embed the video without it auto-playing, so just click the pic to watch.

– [via Top10Virals]

The Logies and Laziness: a match made in heaven.

We have a new face (voice? text?) here at The Patch - dropped’s very own TomHB!  I’ll let him do the intro:

This post represents the marriage of two rather lazy internet publishing powerhouses (so called because of their size, rather than their kilowatt output) who’ve decided that neither could be bothered going it alone. www.dropped.wordpress.com has now been rolled into www.patchofcabbages.com - we’re now just waiting on old man Rupert to buy us out along with MySpace and Facebook.

As near as I can tell, Dave plans to continue to bring flash games, trivia and Natalie Imbruglia to your computers, while I’ve decided to abandon the sort of pious political moaning that puts the ABC’s left wing bias to shame, in order to bring to you whatever it is that is bugging me at the time of writing. This may or may not include the same left leaning, toffee nosed, middle class whining that you could have read 6 months ago on my old site…

---

I won’t waste any more time…This, readers, is a fork. Nothing spectacular; four prongs, gilded in silver, a slightly salacious curve between the head and the handle. It picks up food well; if you drop it on the table it resonates in E Minor; if you prick a balloon with it, the balloon explodes; if you stab Gretel Killeen in the head with it, she still doesn’t become interesting. For all I know, this could be the best fork in the country, and yet it sits at the back of the cutlery drawer, unheralded, waiting for the next dinner party.

It’ll never win a Logie. It’ll never have the chance to get dressed up, win an award, pick a fight with Kerry Anne Kennerly or get a blow job in the toilets from a cast member of Home and Away. Yet a couple of weekends ago we saw, yet again, the pathetic sight of the small screen’s biggest names, frocked and tense, hoping their lifetime’s work will be validated by votes from the readership of TV Week, a magazine whose average buyer has a combined age and IQ of fifteen.

This is no surprise from an industry that thinks Richard Wilkins is a talent.

I had the misfortune to stumble across a few television programmes the other day. The basis of one was the observation of a group of fatally incompetent morons who together have racked up more than a 100 years of being on their L Plates. It was a cavalcade of self-aware cretins boasting to camera ‘I’ve had my Ls for 17 years and failed 9 times’ or, ‘I find it easier to turn left instead of going straight ahead or turning right’. Does this mean there are more people who, the moment they get behind the wheel, are ostensibly lobotomised to the point where they can only turn in one direction?

The other show was a re-run of ‘Australia’s Brainiest Celebrity’. I think here Channel 10 is using the word ‘celebrity’ in its original form, from the Latin celebus meaning ‘well known’ and ritus meaning ‘prat’. It is simply the dullest grouping of humanity to ever grace our screen.

I mean really, to celebrate an industry which has less cultural significance than your basic cutlery set is just ridiculous. In fact, it’s time the ABA looked at revoking all licenses until there’s something decent to watch.

TomHB. Back in the saddle.

Hump de Bump, indeed

Hello World.

It would seem Alanis Morissette likes her “lovely lady lumps” as much as Fergie does, as she has done a very clever cover of The Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps (not at all new, but I haven’t been posting in a while so give me a break).

– [via Coverville]

The Cabbage Patch: Reduces (as in the plural of Redux)

Hello World.

I’ve re-reupdated The Patch (as I hope you can see).  I’ve gone back to a traditional blog-like format because, as much as I loved the magazine-style layout, it was a little limiting in terms of how much of the site could be seen.

So, I’ve decided to go with a nice template called Mandigo from onehertz.com.

Coming up in the near future - some longer articles on various issues, as well as the same videos, games and links that this site was once famous for.