Trust the Prince of Darkness – when it comes to health-matters, Ozzy knows what he’s talking about, and I say that with only a slight hint of sarcasm. The man who once cleaned four bottles of cognac each day, dumped a library of pharmaceuticals into his system, and was banned for a decade from San Antonio, Texas, for drunkenly urinating on the Alamo, is today a vegetarian on a diet of rice and beans, a regular exerciser, and sober, sober, sober. For the last year roughly, Ozzy (with the help of Chris Ayres who co-authored his memoir, I Am Ozzy) has been writing a hit column for Rolling Stone and the Sunday Times, answering questions about everything from hangovers, bedbugs, bad breath, love, and parenting with ribald humor, frankness, and lots of personal experience to reference.
In a new book, Trust Me, I’m Doctor Ozzy: Advice from Rock’s Ultimate Survivor (Grand Central 2011, Hardcover, $26.99), Ozzy and Chris Ayres collect the best of those columns, and on Saturday, Oct. 22, at 3 p.m., the Prince of Darkness himself comes to Booksmith in Upper Haight for a book signing. Bring on the doom!
Trust Me, I’m Doctor Ozzy is full of other zany stuff, too, like charts, quizzes, historic facts (“longest-ever attack of hiccups went on for 68 years–68 fucking years man!..”), and longer memoir like chapters such as the one about Ozzy getting his genome mapped. In 2010, an editor at the Sunday Times called Ozzy to tell him some scientists wanted to map his genome, because he was a “medical miracle.” Ozzy supposedly agreed after learning a disease might get named after him. Ozzy learned a few things after his genome was mapped, like that he was close cousins to Stephen Colbert, related to Jesse James, and they found 300,000 variations that they hadn’t seen before, like a gene that rapidly metabolizes alcohol.
So what does advice sound like from Ozzy Osbourne? Well, if you wanted to know how to, say, recover from jet-lag, Ozzy suggests “staying at fucking home.”
Sat/22
3 p.m., Free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
415-863-8688
www.booksmith.com