Ozzy Osbourne - Trust Me, I’m Dr. Ozzy

• If you think it might be the booze, it’s the booze .

• No-one’s family is perfect. Worry about real problems, not about what other people think.

• If you find a lump— any lump—don’t prick it with a pin, hit it with a mallet, look it up on the internet, or ask Dr. Ozzy if you should wait until it grows into a second head. Get it checked out, now. (And get a physical every year.)

• Your genes don’t decide who you are— you do. If the Prince of Darkness managed to get clean and sober after 40 years, anything is fucking possible.

• People who make you feel bad about yourself ain’t your real friends.

• Most of us are fucking lunatics, one way or another. Some just hide it better than others.

• If you write to Dr. Ozzy to ask if something is right or wrong… you know it’s wrong.

• All drugs are basically the same—booze, pot, cocaine, heroin… whatever. They’re just different ways to escape from life. So before asking me if “a little bit” of this or that is safe in moderation, here’s my answer: do it if you want to, man, but don’t kid yourself. You ain’t kidding anyone else.

• Always get a second opinion—even if that means calling your doctor on a cell phone from six feet underground to ask him if he’s 100 per cent sure you’re dead.

Write to Dr. Ozzy:

askdrozzy@sunday-times.co.uk

Award yourself one point for each correct answer, add up your total score, then see how you did here…

b). I ain’t kidding—you can even look up the British Medical Journal paper online. The scientists said they wanted “to assess the effects of didgeridoo playing on daytime sleepiness… by reducing collapsibility of the upper airways in patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and snoring.” And I thought my job was fucking ridiculous.

a). They turn the poor old frog into juice by dropping it in a blender (they kill it and skin it first). They also spice it up with “white bean broth,” honey, raw aloe vera, and maca (an Andean root thing). If throwing up gives you a raging boner, it probably works a treat.

c). Makes sense, I suppose, ’cos bats have amazing night vision. Still, as one of the few people on this planet who have actually swallowed bat’s blood, I can vouch that it doesn’t have any special powers—otherwise I wouldn’t have needed cataract surgery in 2010.

a). This a terrible myth, ’cos it’s been used to justify rape, and it makes the disease spread much faster.

b). Not much of a surprise, this one. In the 1960s everyone tried to cure everything with LSD.

a). They call it “fat” for a reason. One tablespoon of the stuff has about 120 calories, compared with 112 for ghee and 101 for butter (according to Nutrientfacts.comand Fitday.com).

All three. Or at least that’s the advice of a weird-sounding organisation called the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse. It says you can swallow less air by not chewing gum, eating your meals slower, and making sure your false choppers fit right.

a). The poor fucker who did the field work to come up with this number deserves the Victoria Cross, if you ask me (he works for the NDDIC, as above). But thank God this kind of information exists, ’cos next time I’m feeling intimidated by someone, I’ll remind myself that they burped or let their arse cheeks blow 14 times in the previous 24 hours.

b) and c). If you overdo it when you’re training, you can end up feeling like you’re wading through molten lead. When that happens, you’ve gotta slow down and see a doc, or you can do yourself some serious damage. Pregnant women and overweight people can also get heavy legs—as can anyone who stands or sits in the same position for too long.

b). The guy was so tough-as-nails, he never even warmed up before exercising. “Does a lion warm up when he’s hungry?” he once said. “No! He just goes out there and eats the sucker.” (Unlike LaLanne, Dr. Ozzy recommends frequent stretching.)

a) and b). If you believe what you read on the internet, Cleopatra also used crocodile turds as a contraceptive. Hence the old Egyptian chat-up line, “Wanna come back to my place and see my dung?”

All three. They were recommended as baldness cures for Julius Caesar, who also tried to compensate for his thinning rug by going out and buying himself a red convertible chariot.

c). Generally speaking, if your car windows don’t have special UV protection, they’ll block most UVB rays—which tan and burn you the most—but not UVA rays, which give you wrinkles and cause so-called “commuter ageing.”

c). The Sultan of Brunei (according to The Sunday Times ). He flew his barber from the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair to Brunei (7,000 miles) and gave him a private suite on Singapore Airlines to make sure he didn’t catch swine flu on the way. Seems perfectly sensible to me.

a). Which shouldn’t exactly come as a fucking surprise if you’ve ever been to the Czech Republic. The first “beer spa” opened at a brewery in Chodovz Plana, near Prague, back in 2006.

b). His brothers did it ’cos they were jealous. They also nicked his coat and threw him down a mineshaft. They didn’t let him play their Xbox, either.

c). The mother was supposedly a Russian peasant, married to a guy named Feodor Vassilyev (her first name has been lost to history). According to Guinness World Records , she pumped out sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets between 1725 and 1765. Only two of the babies died in infancy. Feodor—otherwise known as the man with the Golden Balls—went on to re-marry and have another twenty kids.

a). According to news reports at the time, the victim (who wasn’t named) didn’t realise what had happened until she noticed a wet feeling under her shirt, pulled it up, and her nipple fell on the floor. She put it a bag and took it to hospital. It’s now back where it belongs.

c). “Marriage should be about losing arguments and winning relationships,” according to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a leading relationship coach.

c). Lina Medina’s parents took her to hospital, thinking she had a stomach tumor. It turned out she was seven months pregnant. She’s now in her seventies and lives in Peru. The reason Lina was able to have a kid was her very unusual case of “precocious puberty”—her first period came when she was still a toddler—although of course it’s beyond tragic that any man would impregnate her in the first place. The father was never identified, and the baby, a boy, was raised as her brother. He died in 1979 at the age of 40.

a) and c). The guy with the forked tongue—Erik Sprague—had it done on purpose, ’cos he wanted to look like a lizard. He had his teeth filed into fangs, too. He’s available for babysitting.

a) and c). The woman who injected lubricant into her face told ABC News: “By the following day [my whole face] was just completely inflamed. [The lubricant] expands, it’s like rubber, and your own collagen forms scar tissue around it… it looked like horrible blisters.” People who do this kind of thing to themselves suffer from a condition called “body dysmorphic disorder”—which means they drive themselves nuts about one particular part of their body, to the point where they’re willing to self-operate.