Warp factor ten

Ozzy Osbourne's memoir excerpted at the Sunday Times:

1982. Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman show involved the hanging of midgets, a giant mechanical arm, and a catapult that fired raw meat into the audience. But on this occasion it was a prop supplied by the audience that stole the show.

On January 20, 1982, we played the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines.

The gig was going great. The God-like hand was working without any hitches. We’d already hung the midget.

Then, from out of the audience came this bat. Obviously a toy, I thought.

So I held it up to the lights and bared my teeth while Randy played one of his solos. The crowd went mental.

Then I did what I always did when we got a rubber toy on stage.

CHOMP.

Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong.

For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin.

Then the head in my mouth twitched.

Oh, f*** me I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a f***ing bat, did I?

So I spat out the head, looked over into the wings, and saw Sharon with her eyes bulging, waving her hands, screaming: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S REAL, OZZY, IT’S REAL!”

Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room.

Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get rabies shots: one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm. I had more holes in me than a lump of f***ing Swiss cheese.

The allure of eggs and nests

A nice piece at the Science Times that includes a good plug for what is undoubtedly one of the most lovely and fascinating books I have read for some time, Rosamond Purcell et al.'s Egg and Nest, which I first heard about at Gwenda's blog.

Miscellaneous other light reading: George R. R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag (very enjoyable, but not a patch on Lewis Shiner's extraordinary Glimpses); Cornelia Read's Field of Darkness; Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine (slight but pleasant); Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, an irresistible reread in preparation for The Graveyard Book (lovely, lovely writing); and Tana French's The Likeness, which I liked very much indeed.

Thumbs down on Pineapple Express. Thumbs up on the Mythbusters episode with the water heater rocket - this show is excellent, causing me to be ashamed of my near-total ignorance of the pleasures of television....