Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage 151
ByOhTek writes "CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed. The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage. What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why,' he wrote."
Bah (Score:5, Insightful)
Ozzy's DNA: GACCTAACGATGCTAGC...
Lemmy's DNA: GODGODGODGOD...
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Ozzy's DNA is more like:
actgactacgactg
i-i-i
acggactatacccagg
i-i-i
caccttgaggca
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Listen to Crazy Train, you'll get it.
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'Shark (78448); (#34070322)' got it right, in one.
I saw Black Sabbath at the Capital Centre [wikipedia.org][1] in
1973.
The band came out on stage...Tony Iommi plugged in, Geezer Butler plugged in, Bill Ward ran out and dropped behind the drums*drumroll!*...Ozzy staggers out between two speaker stacks
*falling twice* with a fifth/quart liquor bottle clutched in his right hand, wrestled the mic/stand into submission, and asked:
"Is everybody high?"*takes large drink from bottle*
"I said, is everybody high!?"
Chaos ensued there af
Rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Ozzy, this isn't hard to figure out. You're alive because you're rich. You can afford a comfortable lifestyle as well as medical treatment when you need it.
Now, please stop fighting with Iommi and make another Black Sabbath album already.
Money buys good quality drugs. (Score:1)
Ozzy, this isn't hard to figure out. You're alive because you're rich. You can afford a comfortable lifestyle as well as medical treatment when you need it.
Now, please stop fighting with Iommi and make another Black Sabbath album already.
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So you cite Keith Richards and Ozzy Osborne and just ignore any of the wealthy musicians who have access to high quality drugs who have still managed to kill themselves?
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So you cite Keith Richards and Ozzy Osborne and just ignore any of the wealthy musicians who have access to high quality drugs who have still managed to kill themselves?
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those are the only 2 musicians I could think of that have lived a lifetime of drug abuse.
Musicians that abuse drugs aren't exactly rare.
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Only users lose drugs!
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Of course with your selected dataset we can come to the conclusion that rampant drug use definitely has a very large impact on one's ability to speak clearly.....
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Better quality would make it easier to overdose, I would imagine.
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Not to be a pain, but doesn't this situation also describe Elvis and Michael Jackson?
Ozzy, for all his wealth, came out of it with being able to get decently clean*, decently healthy, decently sane, etc... That's actually a fair bit of luck and probably good genes.
*I'm not about to suggest that he doesn't still use recreational drugs, whether they be legal, illegal, or prescribed.
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MJ was allegedly killed by interaction of meds. This is a growing problem and it may indeed be the biggest killer in the USA today but it's difficult to track because hospitals don't want to admit mistakes. So no, MJ was (again, allegedly) killed because he received too much medical "care". This has been happening to celebs a lot lately, because they can afford to go get all this fancy shit prescribed to them. And it happens at least in part because FDA approval for derivatives of existing drugs is especial
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From what I've heard MJ was under the personal care of what was essentially his full time doctor.
He shouldn't have needed to got to multiple doctors, hell he shouldn't have been taking what he was taking to sleep. They were essentially putting him under anesthesia every night.
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Ronnie James Dio is dead. I wouldn't count on ever seeing a real Black Sabbath album again. :(
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That's possibly one of the most blatant troll attempts in history, right up there with the people who think that Roger Moore is the real James Bond.
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Dio, dead? [browardpalmbeach.com] Looks like reincarnation, right there!
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I can't figure out why Iommi and Butler would even want to bother with this burnt out shell of a rock star? That last album they did with the late great Ronnie James Dio outshone anything Ozzy's done since the early 1980s. I know Ozzy (or more properly than nasty piece of work Sharon Osbourne) somehow have managed to mount some sort of litigation over the use of Black Sabbath (despite the fact that they tossed Ozzy's drunken
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"You're alive because you're lucky" would be a better response.
He already pointed out that he is rich.
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Other people who put shit in their bodies for decades end up on the street. Not only is Ozzy rich, his wife is also his manager, so he has a babysitter and a record label who will always make sure he's taken care of.
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Do we really need to list all of the super rich musicians who have died from putting really dangerous stuff in their blood streams?
Being rich does not save you from an overdose. It might improve your odds of not ODing but it still happens to plenty of wealthy people. The ones that it doesn't happen to are lucky... or perhaps they actually have some pre-disposition to surviving heavy drug use.
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It's completely logical and obvious that a druggie who is rich is more likely to survive than a druggie who is not. Ozzy's big vice, especially in the 80s, was alcohol, but unlike most alcoholics, he could afford to be one and afford the treatment to become sober.
People are apparently attaching themselves to the cute idea that Ozzy is genetically special because he survived his drug abuse. I don't know if you've seen him, but he has clearly suffered long-term effects that would hamper the lives of non-celeb
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He's not some mutant superhuman.
Of course not, hes a Neanderthal!!
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"I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive."
Is it because I'm in my 30s or because I'm a nerd or both that makes me think, "loser" when I read that?
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I dunno.
I'm in my 30s and a nerd and I think it's fucking awesome. I love it that there are people out there that lead lives that are just so different in every possible way. It's all about the diversity.
I'm sure there are those that look at our lives and think, 'losers'.
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harmful? Cough syrup? Morphine? Cocaine? Probably the most harmful stuff he's consumed is alcohol and tobacco, and he's no more or less lucky than any other consumers of those particular drugs.
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Yeah except that with street drugs (in particular heroin and morphine analogues) you can get dramatically different doses. Shoot up an especially pure substance and you can immediately OD. No one buys a bottle of wine and dies because it's extra potent.
The same can be true of purity of stimulants. Cocaine and amphetamine overdoses can cause cardiac arrest.
Besides if you are partying like Ozzy you probably don't just use one substance at a time. Using cocaine and alcohol at the same time can be very dangerou
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Is the alcohol content marked?
I have a bottle of Absinthe, and you'd be stupid to drink it undiluted. It -does- say 150-proof after all...
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Cocaine and amphetamine overdoses can cause cardiac arrest.
It's also called a partial Jeffery. Now excuse me while I go stroke some fury walls.
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it's not just what you take but how you take it.
it's almost trivial to OD on caffine if you're swallowing tablets of it.
but it's almost impossible to OD when drinking coffee because after 10 cups or so your hands get too shaky to hold the cup and it starts to taste like death.
similarly it is perfectly possible to drink enough neat alcohol to kill you before it knocks you out but it's almost impossible to do the same with 5% beer.
not counting choking on your own vomit of course.
change the way something's con
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By the makers, yes, but at the same time cutting the drugs is part of the process once they enter the local market. The problem usually isn't high purity itself, but inconsistent cuts - perhaps the actual drug is smaller and denser than the cut, so bags made from the top of the stash are much weaker than bags made from the bottom, even though they are the same drugs from the same source. Criminalizing drugs has never been about harm reduction though, and often actively seeks to increase harm.
Wasn't there a study... (Score:2)
In 2010 that suggested that somewhere around 1-4% of everyone's DNA is Neanderthal ish?
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In 2010 that suggested that somewhere around 1-4% of everyone's DNA is Neanderthal ish?
My cousin must have a decent 20% or 30% percent. It's the only explanation I've got for some of the things he does.
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Everyone seems to have that "cousin." I wonder if it's the same one?
It's Europeans who are part Neanderthal (Score:2)
The studies showed that Europeans, whose ancestors lived alongside Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, have a few percentage of Neanderthalish DNA that Africans don't have, and later some of them took off for Asia where they may have also mixed with other human species. Africans have the most genetic variation among Homo sapiens genes, because only some of them moved up to Europe, and only some of the people in Europe headed to Asia, but the people who stayed in Africa didn't get the Neanderthal b
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I don't see how Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis could interbreed & produce viable children. Wouldn't it be like breeding a horse and donkey (which produces a sterile mule)??
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There has been a few cases of a mule reproducing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule#Fertility [wikipedia.org]
Re:Wasn't there a study... (Score:5, Informative)
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The species level is intended to be roughly the level of genetic similarity where animals breed true. So if we classify them as a subspecies, our *best guess* is that we'd breed true with them.
Furthermore, this has evidently been an ongoing debate in the scientific community (I was operating from memory of college anthropology earlier, but I went and did a little poking around just now), and the school that classifies them as Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis is absolutely saying that interbreeding is possible
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If Neanderthals and Humans could interbreed I'd say we both were subspecies of our common ancestor. I can't see how can they be a subspecies of us when we didn't exist yet. So either rename homo rhodesiensis to homo sapiens, or hss and hn to homo rhodesiensis sapiens and homo rhodesiensis neanderthalensis respectively.
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The problem with classification is that we're basically trying to simplify a very complex system of a massive amount of variation even amongst individuals of a species into a finite set of groups. There isn't always this rather binary split between species in reality.
The problem is largely in cases like this, that species don't just diverge- through interbreeding they can converge back together again, then split, and converge and so on with varying ratios of each species involved each time which with each c
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Interspecific (two different species) are very often but not always sterile. If it is indeed the case that homo sapiens contain Neanderhal DNA than either they're not really different species or they're one of the 'not often' case of interspecies cross breeding.
I'm not entirely sure why Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals wouldn't be considered subspecies of the same species rather than distinct species anyway so it's not surprising offspring aren't sterile.
And sure enough according to Wikipedia (which is by def
Species boundaries are fuzzy, not sharp. (Score:2)
If populations stay isolated long enough, they can diverge enough to no longer successfully interbreed, but populations don't always work that way, especially when there aren't major geographical forces separating them, and species boundaries aren't always that sharp. Maybe we were as separate as horses and donkeys, maybe we were only as separate as wolves and dogs, or even only as poodles and Labradors.
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Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc... There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?
Even the idea of good and evil can be theoretically traced to an ingrained concept of "us" and
"them". All the evidence seems to point to us and them living at the same time, most likely interbreeding.
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> Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc...
> There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?
One problem with your theory -- the Neanderthals didn't actually look "Neanderthal" (the way most people think). If anything, Neanderthal genes are probably the reason why humans of north-central European descent are more likely to be blonde and/or have blue eyes. Thin
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The ability to interbreed and produce viable offspring has nothing to do with their classifications. Go read up on it at Think Origin.
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That's alright, I thought it said "Netherland lineage."
I was trying to figure out what the Netherlander peoples had that made them long living and resilient.
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I am not a geneticist and if I was, I am not your geneticist and this is not genetic advice. Having said that...
That 1-4% would be everyone of European and Asian descent, i.e. that small fraction of humanity that left Africa around 50K (iirc) years ago and took over the rest of the world from the previous model of human. Africans don't have Neanderthal genes, except introduced over the last hundreds of years by foreigners, making them more modern (take that, white supremacists) and further have a signific
Wait.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, it only says something about survivability when they were alive. This is an entirely different world so we really know nothing about their survivability in today's world; rock star or not.
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I wouldn't want to pretend I could answer this without a cursory look around, but it doesn't appear as cut and dry as you say. First, double the calorie intake seems absurd on its face, and the figure listed on wikipedia is a more reasonable sounding 100-350 calories. Second, it doesn't sound like it's as simple as it being an ice age. Evidently they're physically well suited to the cold, but might have run into other problems with fluctuating climate. And finally, we get to the theory I had always hear
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Exactly. Which way that absorption went will remain a mystery, unless we develop time travel.
If the stronger neanderthal men (men said as a general term, not a gender) captured significant numbers of cro-magnon men as slaves, farmers, or even just capturing the more attractive women to use for their own purposes, they could have
Re:Wait.... (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly we do. The Neanderthals were clearly all Dark Prince rock gods. Oh to live in times such as those...
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The Neanderthals were clearly all Dark Prince rock gods. Oh to live in times such as those...
I thought I saw lighters on the walls at Lascaux.
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Well, they did survive, obviously. It was only crappy selective breeding over the following centuries that made the neanderthal genes less dominant. Damned the invention of agriculture and the idea of cities and civilization.
At least we know live DNA still exists, so it could be possible through selective breeding, to resurrect the species. We've theorized it could be done for woolly mammoths, why not with viable DNA. It's quite likely that there are some folks with a larger percentage
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Well, they did survive, obviously.
Good point, and by that reasoning, since Ozzie *is* part Neanderthal, my theory that the Neanderthals would disagree with him already has some small percentage of a strike against it.
Re:Wait.... (Score:4, Funny)
The conclusion is clear. The Neanderthals went extinct due to an insufficiency of booze, cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol...
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Ouch, tough crowd. Well I hate to argue over something I was meaning as a witty jibe at best..... but yes, I was aware of that, but the article implies he said it after the fact, so it's a fair extrapolation in absence of further contradiction that he sees this as an answer. It wasn't "I thought I might have something special in my DNA, but then it turned out it was Neanderthal, so I was wrong".
Sure, it's speculation, but it kinda ruins the quip to put a ton of disclaimers on it. Oh well, perils of going
Oh the irony. (Score:1)
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Re:Oh the irony. (Score:5, Funny)
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"Sharon! Where did I put those beeping matches? I'm going beeping beeps off! Sharon? SHARON!!!"
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but maybe if you took ancient neanderthals and threw them into the heavy metal lifestyle, they would have succeeded.
Yeah. They had the first rock band.
Mind you, they were hunting, not making music.
Uh, "Dog bites man" story? (Score:2)
Must have been a slow news day (until the Yemeni package scare). But maybe Ozzie's onto something; perhaps Neanderthals do have greater drug survivability...
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What tipped you off that this Slashdot idle story wasn't overly important news?
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The source... (/. got it from CNN.com)
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whooshter sauce
Slow News day?! (Score:2)
Five years ago this really would have been a surprise. Maybe even more recently than that. Shit, I'll just admit it: to me, it's a surprise, today, right now. Last I heard, the DNA evidence was that nobody alive has Neanderthal lineage -- that they were an offshoot of homo sapiens ancestors rather than being homo sapiens ancestors. Just goes to show that if you're even just a few years out-of-date on anthropology, you can miss some big things. Real news is happening, right now.
More important... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the gene variant they've found in him that has never been found in any other vertebrate.
Ok, maybe not more important, be definately more interesting.
Not that hard... (Score:1)
Neanderthal Diet . . . (Score:2)
'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why,' he wrote."
So, like, were the Neanderthals permanently wasted, or what? Given that Ozzie Osbourne diet, I'm surprised that we found any fossiiled remains of the Neanderthalers.
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Given that Ozzie Osbourne diet, I'm surprised that we found any fossiiled remains of the Neanderthalers.
Yeah, we should look for pickled ones.
There's no way he said that. (Score:2)
Ozzy never did say that. The man can hardly speak! Sure, he's alive but his brain has been seriously fried.
The "Neanderthal" stuff is just another cheap attempt to get publicity. Most Caucasians have those genes.
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Actually what he said was 'Oook ook oook eek ook ook', they're just posting the translation.
who? (Score:1)
What does Ozzie have to say about it?
I dunno, but I thought we were talking about Ozzy?
Neanderthal Hybrid? (Score:2)
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It is cited in one of the articles, but it has been known for some time that many Asians and Eurporeans have some Neanderthal DNA. The director of KNOME has even more Neanderthal DNA than does Ozzy.
That isn't exactly news.
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KNOME
Woah, so the two big desktop environments in Linux put aside their differences and merged together?
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out of Africa is not hurt by this at all and multi-regional is not helped by this at all.
Where did the Homo Sapien Sapien come from to interbreed with Homo Sapien Neanderthal ? Out of AFRICA.
Does this mean (Score:1)
Does this mean that "that" is how neanderthals sounded when they talked?
i knew it! (Score:2)
Calls for some lyric revision (Score:5, Funny)
Am.
(Pre-) Iron (Age) Man
(D)NAna-nana-nana, na na na.
Hard partying? (Score:2)
I don't doubt either the quantity or quality of drugs and alcohol ingested by Mr. Osbourne, however I don't see anything particularly remarkable in having "survived." Most drug and alcohol related deaths are typically either overdoses, or injuries incurred as an effect of intoxication rather than the toxicity of the substances themselves. Of all the drugs mentioned, only alcohol has been shown to reliably cause cumulative organ and tissue damage, although even then, I'm sure there are alcoholics the world
they studied keith richard's dna too (Score:5, Funny)
apparently it's backwards with him:
the neanderthal genome reveals some lineage inherited from keith richards
This explains eating the bat's head... (Score:2)
...it was food after all.
I thought we all came from neanderthals? (Score:2)
Re:I thought we all came from neanderthals? (Score:4, Funny)
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Onion? (Score:2)
I thought this just had to be an Onion article...
Why is this idle? (Score:2)
I find it quite interesting. Come to think of it I think that occasionally putting interesting articles in idle is a trap so that people have to read idle just in case there are glimpses of sanity or interesting stuff, otherwise it'd just be ignored completely by most.
Why he's alive... (Score:3, Interesting)
'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive.
Give me a f**king break! You're alive because you're a well-nourished 62 y/o man who has not (yet) contracted a fatal disease and has avoided fatal traumatic injury in spite of frequent intoxication. Most men in the UK and the US are still alive at 62 yrs.
Ozzy inspires youth (Score:1)
CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed.
That really is great. It's so nice to see a popular icon getting involved in some way with science. Just getting his name along side genetic research goes a long way to popularize science -- after all, we know how much children and teens look up to him.
The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage.
Oh Ozzy, we still love you! Ha, ha!
What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years
Um, Mr. Osbourne, look--the kids--
not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine
--oh, God--
sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol
//turns pale, covers child's ears//
there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.
B-be sure to let us know... //clears throat//
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Popular icon? I'd never heard of him before today
Birmingham, UK (Score:2)
Man, he was born in Birmingham. Don't tell me that it comes as any surprise to anybody in the UK that he has neanderthal genes.