THE GREATEST LOVE

Someone put out a new Ozzy biography earlier this year which we've been flipping through during shits. Most of the good drug stories in it were already in

The Dirt

and other band bios, but nestled in amid the snorting lines of fire-ants and stealing swimsuits from 80-year-old women is an account of Ozzy's first encounter with pizza that is more endearing and inspirational than Andrew WK's entire tweetography. Now whenever bullshit's got us down, we just close our eyes, think about how much Ozzy liked pizza, and all the stress just melts into the air. Consider this our desiderata for 2010: "I thought America was fabulous. Take pizza for example. For years I'd been thinking, I wish someone would invent a new kind of food. In England it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips… anything and chips. After a while it just got boring, y'know? But you couldn't exactly order a shaved Parmesan and rocket salad in Birmingham in the early 70s. If it didn't come out of a deep-fat fryer, no one knew what the fuck it was. But then, in New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide fucking open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day. And then, when I realized you could buy a great big pizza all for yourself, I started ordering them wherever we went. I couldn't wait to get back home and tell all my mates: 'There's this incredible new thing. It's American and it's called pizza. It's like bread, but it's better than any bread you've tasted in your life.' I even tried to recreate a New York pizza for Thelma once. I made some dough, then I got all these cans of beans and pilchards and olives and shit and put them on top--it must have been about 15 quid's worth of gear--but after ten minutes it just came dribbling out of the oven. It was like someone had been sick in there. Thelma just looked at it and went, 'I don't think I

like

pizza, John.' She never called me Ozzy, my first wife." -

I Am Ozzy

, Sphere Books 2009.