Today in Rock History: Ozzy Osbourne Updates His Diet Plan

Thirty years ago today—January 20, 1982—the shambling, incomprehensible wreck once known as Ozzy Osbourne inexplicably bit the head off of a bat that was (also inexplicably) thrown onstage during his concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

No, it wasn't this kind of bat. We just like
having fun with Photoshop.

Depending on the version of the story you hear, the bat was 100% alive, totally dead, or presumed to be fake. It’s likely that we’ll never be sure of the full story, since the odds are good that at this point even Ozzy—or perhaps especially Ozzy—is a bit hazy on the details.


Other questions that likely never will be answered include:

1. What kind of nut throws a fake bat onto a rock-concert stage?
2. What kind of nut throws a real bat—live or dead—onto a rock-concert stage?
3. What kind of maniac five-star über-nut sees a bat fly through the air (which is, in fact, how live bats generally travel) and land on his stage, assumes it’s fake, and figures the best way to test his theory is to bite its head off?

Exhibit A: maniac five-star über-nut.

. . . actually, now that we think about it, those questions aren’t actually unanswerable at all:

1. A nut.
2. at least two kinds of people would do this: (a) an only moderately-nutty Ozzy Osbourne fan, or, if we didn’t know for sure that he was onstage at the time of the incident, (b) Ozzy himself.
3. The very same kind of nut that, only a few months earlier, bit the head off an unmistakably live dove in front of a room of CBS record executives. 

Completely coincidentally, it was right around 1982 that some folks started to suspect that there was something slightly unusual about Ozzy Osbourne.

Dreaming of Insomnia

Dozens of scientific studies by a wide array of experts have shown that 4 out of every 3 Americans have occasional or frequent bouts of insomnia, a condition that can lead to depression, memory problems, weight loss or gain, stress, mental disorders, and an inability to properly calculate the number of Americans who struggle with insomnia.

Very broadly speaking, insomnia comes in three categories: sleep-onset insomnia, in which the sufferer has trouble falling asleep; nocturnal awakenings, in which the sufferer has difficulty remaining asleep through the night; and terminal insomnia, which fortunately doesn’t use “terminal” to mean “deadly,”¹ but rather to indicate that the sufferer’s night of sleep terminates too early. While these categories are distinct, they are by no means mutually exclusive—lucky insomniacs can mix-and-match from all three kinds, alternating them successively or even experiencing all at the same time.

If this is you, being sleepy is far from your biggest problem.

 
Causes of insomnia, when they can be identified at all, vary widely, and can include but are not limited to:

excessive use of caffeine, alcohol, or drugs (prescribed and illicit); excessive noise or silence; too much or not enough exercise; the neighbors’ insufferably noisy dog; softly dripping faucets; wondering if there’s anything good in the fridge; and the beating of that old man’s hideous heart, buried under the floorboards.²

Potential cures for insomnia vary as well, and can include:

excessive use of caffeine, alcohol, or drugs (prescribed and illicit); noise; silence; warm milk; more or less exercise; your own insufferably noisy dog; finding something good to eat in the fridge; and murdering the old man with the creepy vulture eye.³

Given the frustratingly high degree of similarity between the causes of and cures for sleep loss, it’s hard to believe that there are subcategories of insomnia even less well-understood than the condition itself. However, researchers are only barely delving into a phenomenon they call sleep state misperception, which, although not nearly as bad as fatal familial insomnia (see notes, below), provides still more evidence to the sleep-deprived that, yes, their brains really do hate them and want them dead.
 

One suffering from sleep state misperception commonly underestimates (or, much more rarely, overestimates) the amount of sleep he or she gets. While observation and objective measurement would show a healthy seven or eight hours of sleep on a given night, that sleeper might mistakenly recall having been awake for, say, three or four of them. So despite being in good physical health, this poor jerk gets to feel as exhausted, cranky, and disconnected from reality as if he or she actually had slept like crap.

While the causes of sleep state misperception are unclear, it’s reasonable to assume that one of the top candidates is dreaming—specifically, dreaming of not being asleep.⁴

Certain dreams, of course, make it quite clear that you’re no longer in the real world. If you find yourself teaching John Lennon how to play guitar, or beating zombies to death with a pool cue in the halls of your old junior high,⁵ odds are good that (1) you’re dreaming and (2) you’ll realize you’re dreaming.

You mustn’t forget, though, that your brain is not only much smarter than you are but also trying to kill you, so a dream designed to look like a sleepless night will be much more difficult to detect. Even these, however, will contain understated nuances that, to the trained eye, will differentiate it from a frustrating but mundane sleepless night.

So in the interest of furthering knowledge, we humbly present the following examples of the subtle differences between the real world and a diabolically crafted insomnia dream. Included are our notes on the details that might otherwise escape the novice:

YOU COULD BE AWAKE: There’s a television in your room, but it’s broken. This is not necessarily at all out of the ordinary.

. . . BUT YOU’RE PROBABLY ASLEEP: there’s also TV repairman in the room . . . at 4:30 a.m. You don’t recall letting him in, and while you can’t be sure of this because the room is rather dark, you suspect he’s dressed as one of the Mario Brothers. And in the real world, of course, plumbers dress like this, not TV repairmen.

YOU COULD BE AWAKE: looking out of your window into the distance, you see a vast and overwhelming expanse of water. Potentially very normal for the several billion people that live in coastal areas.

. . . BUT YOU’RE PROBABLY ASLEEP: when you went to bed you were in Colorado, roughly one thousand miles from the nearest ocean. Also, the water outside your window is vertical—a tidal wave several hundred feet high, but completely motionless, hanging ominously in some sort of suspended animation. This hardly ever happens outside of shitty movies.

YOU COULD BE AWAKE: WNBA All-Star and former Colorado resident Becky Hammon is standing just outside the window, enthusiastically mooshing her boobs against the glass.

. . . BUT YOU’RE PROBABLY ASLEEP: when you went to bed, your room was on third floor of your hotel. Hammon, while a basketball player, is only about 5'6" tall, and thus would have an extremely difficult time staring into a third-floor window without a ladder or some sort of hovering skateboard, neither of which exist in real life. It’s this kind of subtle detail that allows the trained dream observer to separate the near-realistic dream from waking life.

We’ve never followed women’s basketball before, 
and can’t figure out why we’re suddenly interested.

YOU COULD BE AWAKE: When the alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m., you get out of bed surly and exhausted, just like normal.
. . . BUT YOU’RE PROBABLY ASLEEP: When the alarm goes off, the TV repairman, the tidal wave, the basketball player—and her boobs—all vanish at the same instant, leaving the room safer and quieter but considerably less interesting.


The drawback to this dream-analysis technique is that, if successful, you’ll be fully aware of your full night’s sleep, which means you’ll no longer be able to shuffle through your day in a blackhearted funk, snapping at everyone you encounter, floundering through eight fuzzy-headed and mistake-prone hours at your job, and sucking down caffeinated drinks like they were oxygen.

Well, sure, of course you can still do that, and knowing you, you probably will.⁶ But you won’t be able to blame it on your sleepless night. You’ll just have to admit that you’re kind of a jerk.

NOTES

1. There is, however, a fatal form of insomnia. Appropriately named fatal familial insomnia, this extremely rare affliction affects a tiny handful of people—approximately 100 worldwide—and, upon its onset, involves a seven- to eighteen-month descent from normal life into total sleeplessness, insanity, catatonia, and death. If we were to pick the worst possible way to die, this would  be our choice.

2. It seems like a good idea to point out that this is an Edgar Allan Poe reference. We hope this keeps our more skittish readers from calling the police.

3. Relax, it’s just Poe again. Man, are you jumpy today.

4. Why would you dream of being awake all night? One reason only, as far as we can tell: your brain hates you, and wants you to die. If you have a better explanation in mind, we would love to hear it.

5. Question: is actually possible to beat zombies—the “undead”—to death? Discuss. Show your work for full credit.

6. We’ve talked to your coworkers. You’re known as Ms. Fussybritches.

Doomsday Turns Out to be Way Less Apocalyptic than Expected

May 21, 2011, Harold Camping’s iron-clad-guaranteed beginning of the end of the world, turned out to be far less apocalyptic than initially anticipated, with a jaded handful non-Raptured skeptics attempting to convince themselves that Doomsday had completely passed them by, and even the stoutest believers in Camping’s predictions going to bed slightly worried at the slim chance that they’d somehow missed out on witnessing the deaths and damnation of several billion people.

When reached for comment on the day’s events, every human on Earth observed that they didn’t feel a single damned thing out of the ordinary at 6:00 local time. “You’d think that a worldwide earthquake signaling the end of all creation would have been, you know, noticeable,” said everybody, “But, then, what do we really know about science?”

The answer there is, of course, nothing. Over the past five hours, expert physicists from the Family Radio Institute of Fantastical Science have meticulously concocted scientific evidence that proves that this absence of any sort of evidence is in fact guaranteed evidence that the apocalypse has indeed begun just as predicted, except for all the things that had actually been predicted to happen but clearly didn’t. According to their official statement released just minutes ago,

“When the entire planet is shaking at the same time, it’s physically impossible for anybody on the Earth to notice the movement. Think of the Earth as a giant hula dancer, its entire surface moving, gracefully and somewhat seductively, in all directions at once. You never actually see the hula dancer move, do you? Of course not. The Earth is just like that, except made out of rock and water, very very large, not particularly Hawaiian-looking, and without the flowers and the grass skirt.

“Therefore, to actually witness the tremor that hit the Earth today at precisely 6:00 in twenty-four different time zones—that is, in a single, perfectly simultaneous instant occurring over the course of a twenty-four-hour period—one would have to view the Earth from a distant, stationary viewpoint such as, for example, heaven, or the moon.  Since no living human is in heaven, and the only human to have visited the moon is Jimi Hendrix, the lack of human witnesses to the apocalypse proves that it did, in fact, happen just as predicted.

“So now that that’s settled, please send your remaining assets, in the form of cashier’s check or money order, to the Family Radio Phenomenally Embarrassing Failure Relief Fund. You will receive your reward in heaven on October 21, 2011, when the end of the world has been, for the first time ever, mathematically guaranteed to occur.”

Yep, everything's swell here. Well, except for all the usual death, disease,
poverty, drugs, murder, hate, pain, bad dental hygiene, and reality
television. But still, no apocalypse, so we're good. Thanks for asking.

Today’s Calendar: Bruins vs. Lightning, 11:30 am; Apocalypse, 6:00 pm

The Boston Bruins look to take a commanding 3-to-1 series lead against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Saturday’s NHL Eastern Conference final. Game time is 11:30 Mountain Daylight Time, check your local listings for cable and satellite availability.

In other news, the Apocalypse is set to make its long-awaited debut at precisely 6:00 pm with a global earthquake that will signal the second coming of Jesus Christ, as predicted and guaranteed by Harold Camping of Family Radio in Oakland, California. Camping is confident in his calculations, having used his in-depth knowledge of the Bible and complex mathematical techniques that have proven to be infallibly correct, unless you count that one time when the world didn’t end at all, not even just a little bit, back in 1994 when he said it would. He took his Doomsday Mulligan on that one, however, and we’re fully confident that we should be pretty sure that he definitely might have it right this time around. Totally.

It has to be true. Says so right here on the internet.

Having made our own calculations, however, we strongly suspect that Camping has failed to take into account the necessary adjustment for Daylight Savings Time, which is a modern-day concept not to be found in the Bible and therefore probably overlooked in during his otherwise rigorous number-crunching. 

And that spells deep, deep trouble for Harold Camping, because when the Rapture happens at 5:00 local time instead of the 6:00 he predicted, boy oh boy, will his credibility be shot.

Don Cherry: Making Acid Trips Look Mundane Since 1934.

A touch of Spuds MacKenzie is the perfect
accessory for the sophisticated gentleman.

Not much commentary is necessary here, as the jackets worn by Canadian hockey commentator Don Cherry tend to speak far more loudly than we ever could. Be forewarned, though: do not look directly at the jacket. We repeat, for those of you who lack the ability to go back and re-read previous sentences, do not look directly at the jacket.

At first glance, we thought this was a
Canadian-flag pattern, but that
would be tacky.

Every time Chery wears this jacket on TV,
Pepto-Bismol owes him a nickel.

Damn it, we told you not to look
directly at the jacket.

The best part of this jacket is that it
genuinely qualifies as subtle.

In a moment, Cherry will wave his arms
to signal victory at the Indianapolis 500.

You looked straight at the jacket again,
didn’t you?

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.

If you cross your eyes just right, you’ll 
see the Statue of Liberty.

Several of Don Cherry’s outfits follow

a holiday theme. Here he commemorates

Chinese New Year.

It’s good to see that he paid attention to
this jacket’s warning about proper
eye protection. Safety first, kids.

Cherry saves his more subtle ensembles
for weddings and funerals.

We will refrain from describing what this

jacket looks, but it does make us wish

we’d taken some Pepto-Bismol a few

hours ago.

Special thanks to the good folks at Don We Now Our Gay Apparel for unwittingly supplying us with most of the images above.We swear we didn’t alter them even the slightest in Photoshop.

Obama's "Real" Birth Certificate Fails to Prove that Hawai'i Isn't in Kenya

Skeptics also note that the “Birth Certificate” fails to include any traditional form of identification such as a driver’s license, credit card or ATM card, DNA map, retinal scan, or stool sample.

In a disappointing but perhaps inevitable concession to the deafening jabbering of some of the most batshit crazy people in our nation’s history,¹ President Barack Obama released his long-demanded long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011, adding another layer to the colossal mountain of evidence in support of the well-established fact that he was, in fact, born in the United States of America, just as he and the handful of sensible people left in the country—Democrat, Republican, and miscellaneous—have maintained all along.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, in a stunning display of gall that would be hilarious to imagine but an embarrassment because it actually happened, succeeded in distorting his perception of reality to the point where he was actually willing to blame Obama for the distraction this non-issue has caused:

“The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy,” Priebus said. “Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority—our economy.”²

The good news, though, is that now that Obama has finally decided, once and for all, to stop accusing himself of being born in Kenya despite all the common sense and evidence to the contrary, hassling himself for answers to questions that he shouldn’t have been silly enough to raise in the first place, and interrupting reasonable discussions with his half-baked nonsense about conspiracies, he can get down to finding answers to the real questions at hand.

Those real questions are, of course (1) how could Obama possibly have known, forty-six years before his election, that his future presidency would depend on creating a perfect forgery of both the official birth certificate and the long-form version, and (2) how could he have not only produced such a document but also managed to infiltrate the Hawaiian government offices where such records are kept and insert the birth certificate(s) and all the necessary ancillary paperwork without being undetected, just a few days after he was born? What kind of superhuman infant was he?

The fact of the matter is that those birth certificates and records are there, plain to see, and are indistinguishable in every possible way from real ones—so he obviously pulled it off somehow. But before you start going on about how such Machiavellian scheming, complex motor skills, and mastery of language, government paper stocks, and ink mixture are rare even among children born to supervillains with giant, pulsating brains, you should consider the far more reasonable option: obviously, the current-day Barack Obama simply has access to a time machine, and he traveled back to 1961 and explained these convoluted plans to his younger self in a language that only he and others from his home planet would be able to comprehend.

Honestly, use your heads, people. It’s so simple, a child could have figured it out. Especially one with a giant, pulsating brain. Private citizens had access to time-travel technology as early as 1985; a sitting President could easily have gotten his hands on it.

When this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you’re
going to see some serious shit.

NOTE

1. To be fair, not everyone that wondered about Obama’s birthplace is necessarily batshit crazy. It’s quite possible that a great many of them were sane, but too intellectually lazy to do the very few minutes’ worth of online research required to throw plenty of light on the fact that the claims put forth by birthers have been uniformly ludicrous. Really, we’re trying to be serious here. We know several decent, reasonable people who had their doubts about Obama’s citizenship—friends, some of them, although they might have changed their minds after reading this—and still others who joked about it but, we suspect, didn’t actually buy it . . . and yet we still have no idea how this line of thought is possible in a reasonable person.

2. “Obama releases birth form, decries ‘silliness,’” Denver Post, April 27, 2011.

More Evidence—as if You Needed It—that the World Isn't Fair

   
1. John Lennon, a flawed and often self-contradictory but sincere advocate for peace, love, and kindness, is dead.

2. Fred Phelps is not.

A world without war and a God that despises His own creations and even revels in their destruction may both be products of their particular creators’ imaginations, but it should be pretty clear which one is an admirable dream and which is sick, cruel, and blasphemous.

How Crazy Are You?: A Guideline for Motorists

First published on September 6, 2010

“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds . . . but at least the

cigarette makes me look cool.” —Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, known in some circles for some kind of esoteric and irrelevant fiddling with atoms—which most people can’t even see, for God’s sake—is perhaps best known to the general public for his groundbreaking work studying the proliferation and significance of bumper stickers on American roadways.

It’s almost certain that the technical details of his work would not be of interest, but the gist of it is that Dr. Oppenheimer—with the help of a two-billion-dollar budget and more than one hundred thousand government scientists and mathematicians—proved the direct correlation between the number of bumper stickers on any given car and the likelihood that the driver of said car is either an asshole, a lunatic, or both.

Oopsie.

Unfortunately, because of a disastrous paperwork mixup, the precise results of the good doctor’s bumper-sticker study were accidentally vaporized at the White Sands Proving Ground on July 16, 1945.

The loss to science was devastating, and since then no one has been able to replicate Dr. Oppenheimer’s work, and he himself was too busy becoming Death to give much thought to starting over again. Thus, despite nearly seventy years of our best efforts, we remain unable to identify the precise point at which a driver’s bumper-sticker accumulation indicates guaranteed insanity. The best we can do, with our tiny nonscientific brains, is apply his basic principles and make our best guesses as to which categories a particular driver belongs.

Compare your bumper sticker situation to the following examples to find out just how severe your problem is:

Mundane

One single bumper sticker doesn’t make you crazy.

But pride IS still a sin, isn’t it?

Sane, But with Some Assholic Tendencies

Eight bumper stickers puts this car in a grey area, but they refer to
more than one subject and only one of them is of the
Bush-is-a-big-fat-idiot variety, so this car falls precariously on
the asshole side of the sanity line.

Slightly Nutty, Mostly Harmless

A bit surprisingly, the blue Subaru above—rather than
the tree-hugging reality-questioner right here—is the
one from Boulder, Colorado.

Crazy and Messy

Crazy but Refreshingly Organized

If I were to add three hundred stickers to my car—and the
thought has crossed my mind—this just how I’d do it.

We Don't Even Have a Category for This

Double-Toilet-Flush, Tinfoil-Helmet, Paul-is-Dead Crazy

Fuck.

I’m sorry, but thanks to the guy above, this just isn’t fun anymore. It’s one thing to make fun of the harmlessly weird, slightly goofy everyday assholes that make up the bulk of our society. This angry, hateful fucker, on the other hand, with his genuine and probably dangerous no-bullshit madness and casual bigoted inhumanity, pretty much torpedoes the light mood I was in and replaces it with a hollow worry for the future of the human race.

If you can’t read what his stickers say, you’re not missing out on anything insightful and I’m not even going to type it out because, frankly, I think it’s too goddamned disgusting to repeat. If you have to know, though, you should be able to find a list here.