The Cabbage Patch

Maybe I’m just an ageing fogey…

…but somehow, Dave’s last post has struck a chord with me.

MySpace is a disgrace. To make matters worse, all of the 13 year olds have begun the emo-diaspora and are making their way over to Facebook which was once the exclusive play-pen of the Undergraduate classes of society. Bringing with them, not just teen angst and, like, shit grammar. Like. But (see, I started the sentence improperly. Like, totally ROFL-copter) also the same flashy, gaudy on-screen shit that MySpace became so notorious for. It’s almost like all of the programmers and developers eking out a living in Estonia or some other newly established country in Eastern Europe have realised there is an as-yet undervalued market for all things flashy and gaudy amongst users of Facebook and have focussed their attention on giving everyone virtual kittens and virtual emoticons. Indeed! Virtual emoticons… apparently because they aren’t used in real-time, they’re not real, and thus, are virtual.

Now, I do use Facebook. First of all, for poker. I’m bloody crap at it, but I can’t just can’t stop. Plus, seeing as it’s betting the online equivalent of matchsticks, there’s no harm in it. Secondly, I use Facebook as a diary and let people dictate to me when and where I should turn up with a bottle of grog and say “Happy birthday!” or “I’m sorry for your loss!”. It is also amusing to see just how small a social circle we, the bourgeoisie, move around in. For example, Courtney Tight, a friend of mine from Uni, went to a 21st birthday party at the weekend which was also attended by Rowan Spitt Witt, a boy I went to school with. That interested me for all of 8 seconds, however, it was a welcome distraction from my overdue essay and the tepid Butter Chicken I had bought for lunch.

While, following enough peer pressure, I will succumb to the latest juvenile fancy (at the moment, Facebook), I like to maintain an air of dignified, out-of-touch superiority over the plebs. It’s kind of like how Bentleys don’t have Satellite Navigation yet. If your chauffeur doesn’t know where he is going then you need a new chauffeur. To this end, I refuse to use emoticons, I haven’t exchanged money for a video game since Doom 2 came out, I long for the simplicity of Windows 98 and I couldn’t be bothered to work out the difference between Windows Vista Ultimate and the other version… is it Penultimate?

That’s not to say I don’t understand it all. Back in the days of yore (as in, before your time sonny) I sent an sms to myself just to see what happened. It was 1997 and nobody knew what it was, or why you’d use it. “Sounds alot like a pager to me” or “25c? Just to say hello?” were common reactions. Now, everyone’s on the bandwagon. They’re even having sex on it. Back in my day, sex was something you coerced from someone with statements such as “I love you” or questions like “Will you marry me?”. At worst you negotiated a cash price with her boyfriend on a corner in Kings Cross. Now you just text ’slunt’ to 19 55 11 for a bevy of beautiful babes on your mobile now! ‘Now’ is invariably 2:30am and the ‘beautiful babes’ seem to look a lot like that guy from Big Brother. Or is it just because in the drunken haze you mistook ‘Up Late with HotDogs’ for ‘Girls Gone Wild’ ?

Anyway, I’m going to go and put a blanket in the dryer for 20 minutes so I’ve got something to warm myself with when I sit down to watch Lateline on the ABC.

You Know it Makes Sense.

I’m TomHB.

Tags: article, rant, TomHB

Grey Ghosts

What an efficient group parking inspectors are. So efficient it’s hard to believe they work for local council. I can’t count the number of times I’ve slipped into a newsagent or a two hour lecture and come back to find a yellow envelope flapping under the Peugeot’s wiper blade. Looking back over my receipts, I realise in the month of August for example, I spent $480 on parking fines. September? $310. In October, $290. I haven’t bothered to pay November’s fines yet.

So a big congratulations to the parking inspector. Now if only you were doing something useful rather than impeding business…

Why don’t you chase real criminals–illegal immigrants, heroin addicts–or find a cure for cancer, rather than skulking around in the shadows with your dyke haircuts and ill-fitting uniforms waiting to stuff the day of busy people doing important tasks?

Look. I’m as broadminded as the next person and I’m sure that there is such a thing as an attractive lesbian, but what is it about parking inspectors and bad uniforms? It’s like they’re taking it out on the world because they’re too short to join the police force. Once I would have said too stupid, but let’s face it, there’s no such thing as too dim for today’s police force.

And don’t they like a fight? You might as well use logic and a well-formed argument on a brick. At least with a brick you’d have something you’d be happy to take home. I struggle to think however of the sort of home which welcomes a Parking Inspector. Not only are they professional narks, but they wear beige 5 days a week and the tool of their trade is a piece of chalk on a long pole. I’d rather clean the private booths at $2 peep-shows.

I say, let’s turn a weakness into a strength; give the Grey Ghosts guns and let them loose on teenage gangs. Neither group will be missed, so whatever happens, we win.

TomHB.

Tags: rant

Apologising Kills

A while back, tobacco giant Phillip Morris Intl. (owner of Marlboro) came out and said that it is a mistake to stop elderly people smoking.  A study commissioned by Phillip Morris had reported that the early death of smokers saves governments millions of dollars in health care, pensions and housing.  The last word?  Smoking is nothing less than a community service.

This is the only reason why tobacco companies want kids to start smoking as early as possible.  The sooner they start, the sooner they can develop lung-cancer and die, thus relieving the taxpayer of the burden of caring for a terminally ill, HECS debt accumulating teenager.

You are no doubt thinking that this is commendable behaviour.

People who know me well are aware of my attitude to old people - they are taking up seats on public transport which could be better used by people who have a job to go to, or a degree to finish.  Old people are space wasting moochers.  So the only stupid thing in this saga as near as I can tell, is that Phillip Morris Intl. apologised.  For what?  Telling the truth?

This ’say sorry’ crap has gone too far.  Everywhere I look, some idiot is telling someone else to apologise for some long forgotten wrong.

I trod on a kid’s foot at the supermarket the other day and the little wimp cried.  His pointy-headed Bolshevik mother had a go at me, telling me I was an oaf and I should say sorry.  How was I supposed to know his booties couldn’t take a light stamp from my size 12s?

I’ll apologise when I do something intentionally or when there’s money in it.  Anything else would be un-Australian madness. Just ask John Howard.

I’m TomHB.

Vote 1: TomHB’s One-Notion

Australia.  A great wide brown land conquered by a generation of heroes and heroines.  Who knows the hardships these men and women faced as they dragged family and beasts across the Great Divide and into the unknown?!

What would they think about the current crop of whingers that inhabit the rural areas of today’s Australia?

Our fearless forefathers saw floods as welcome relief from the boredom of drought, and dust storms as a good excuse to clean the house.  Nowadays it’s always either too dry or too wet.

If the dollar rises it’s a threat to exports, when it falls then diesel becomes too expensive.  If the Japanese refuse to take our beef then they’re guilty of having unrealistic health standards but if we take interstate milk we’re told that Victorians don’t have the same quality controls as we do.  If the bank forecloses on a hobby farm 2 hours from Sydney, they make a mini series about the family struggle, starring Colin Friels.

It’s like listening to a bunch of public servants at morning tea.  Boring.  Bullshit.

Well it’s time for the city backlash.  We in the cities are sick of the over-subsidised, over-represented and over-bloody-emotional country folk.  If a ‘mum and dad’ mixed business in the city has to close due to the superstore up the road, you don’t see pollies running to them with buckets of money and rock stars putting on benefit concerts.

So in this election year and to coincide with the demise of the Nationals and the Democrats, I’m starting the TomHB One-Notion Party.  What’s my notion?  Shut up and get over it.

TomHB.

Coming up next: Quince Paste Tossers

On any given television station as many as seven hours a day are completely bereft of any variant of CSI or Law & Order.  And what have these procedural dramas been replaced with?  Cooking programmes – hours and hours of cooking programmes.

You can’t turn on the TV without some ponce waving his spatula in your face and imploring you to smell his wafting aroma.  Well I had a sniff and from where I was sitting, all I could smell was a cockney prat.

Healthy, Wealthy and Tedious; Two Naked Fat Ladies; Jamie Oliver’s ‘How to cook a Gondola’.

All crap.

And the loony programmers get everything arse-up.  One moment we get a recipe for Chateaux de Sheep which takes a week to prepare and the next, Ainsley Harriot spends 30 minutes buttering toast.

And it’s getting worse.  Cooks have been breeding to the point where there are thousands and thousands of them out there, every one of them frantically searching for quince paste and cool patter to try to get their own show.

These days if you know which side of an egg is up and you don’t have your own cooking programme, then you deserve nothing less than abuse and utter contempt from everybody, everywhere.

I’ve got a bit of advice for television programmers and their treating psychiatrists.  The next time some mincing chef comes to you with an idea for a culinary journey to see some quaint yokels eating bark and transmitting syphilis to one another, tell him to get stuffed.  What else do you think the phrase ‘fuck off’ is for?

TomHB.

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.

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.

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…

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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.