Latest news with #Esquire
Daily Mirror
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Ozzy Osbourne's wild prediction for his gravestone epitaph and thoughts on life after death
Before his death, rock legend Ozzy Osbourne opened up about his thoughts on the afterlife, as well as what he believed to be his unavoidable epitaph when the time came The late, great Ozzy Osbourne wasn't one to shy away from the darker topics in life - and this included the subject of death. As you might expect from a rockstar nicknamed The Prince of Darkness, Ozzy, who died at the age of 76, appeared to have an interest in what would happen after he died, and even predicted what would be written on his tombstone when the time came. Of course, the Birmingham-born rocker had more than a fair few brushes with the Grim Reaper over the years, most famously after a horror quad bike accident in 2003, after which his heart even stopped beating. In a previous interview with the Mirror, devoted wife Sharon Osbourne, 72, shared how her husband "stopped breathing for a minute and a half", before a security guard thankfully resuscitated him. The Black Sabbath frontman, who lived with Parkinson's Disease, also suffered an agonising fall at his LA home, as well as a series of botched surgeries which left him in agony. Ozzy himself even expressed surprise that he'd lived as long as he did, when so many of his friends had passed on. However, there was one thing he was sure of - how he'd be remembered. In a 2004 interview with Esquire, Ozzy remarked: "I know what's going to be on my tombstone, and there's no getting around it: 'Here lies Ozzy Osbourne, the ex-Black Sabbath singer who bit the head off a bat'." Ozzy was, of course, referring to a now notorious incident which unfolded back in the winter of 1982, back when he was promoting Diary of a Madman. While on tour, the former abattoir worker got into the grisly habit of chucking raw pieces of meat into the audience, and it wasn't long before they started to retaliate with their own grim offerings. On the night of January 20, a fan threw what Ozzy initially believed was a rubber toy bat onto the stage. It wasn't until he ripped the head off with his own teeth that he realised the toy was bloody and twitching. Recalling this historic moment in his 2010 autobiography, I Am Ozzy, the Brummie star wrote: "Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid. Then the head in my mouth twitched. "Somebody threw a bat. I just thought it was a rubber bat. And I picked it up and put it in my mouth. I bit into it." By the time Ozzy realised he'd been chomping into a "real live bat", it was far too late. Of course, with his myriad of professional and personal accomplishments, Ozzy will no doubt be remembered for far more than this gory incident. However, that infamous gig did help to solidify Ozzy's 'satanic' image in the eyes of music fans, who reacted with a mix of horror and morbid fascination. Ozzy also had a few thoughts on what was waiting on the other side of the grave. In a 2009 interview with The Telegraph's Celia Walden, Ozzy grumbled: 'Hell. Even if I do make it to Heaven, you can bet your life that the toilet will stink.' As he navigated serious health issues, Ozzy didn't appear to fear death. In 2023, during an interview with Rolling Stone, he admitted: "I said to Sharon that I'd smoked a joint recently and she said, 'What are you doing that for? It'll f*****g kill you'.' I said: 'How long do you want me to f*****g live for?!' At best, I've got 10 years left, and when you're older, time picks up speed!" Ozzy went on to clarify that while he didn't "fear dying," he didn't "want to have a long, painful and miserable existence." He also reflected on how many of his pals had already passed on, remarking: "Sometimes I look in the mirror and go, 'Why the f*** did you make it?!' I'm not boasting about any of it because I should have been dead a thousand times. I've had my stomach pumped God knows how many times."
Daily Mirror
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Ozzy Osbourne's 'short, sharp' prison stint that saved him from life of crime
Following the sad news of the death of Ozzy Osbourne, the Mirror takes a look at the 'short, sharp' prison stint that would ultimately change the course of the rock god's life Rock icon Ozzy Osbourne led a famously eventful life, with plenty of ups and downs along the way - including a spell behind bars that changed the course of his life. Although he would one day live in a sprawling LA mansion, Ozzy came from humble origins and endured a troubled childhood. He was badly bullied at school, where his then-undiagnosed dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) made learning a chore. However, the self-professed class clown harboured dreams far beyond the gates of his secondary modern in Aston, Birmingham. At the age of 14, he became drawn to the idea of breaking into the music industry, and would later credit The Beatles' 1963 hit She Loves You as providing a ray of inspiration. In a 2008 interview with Esquire, the Prince of Darkness recalled: "When I heard 'She Loves You', my world went up like a shooting star. It was a divine experience. The planets changed. I used to fantasise that Paul McCartney would marry my sister." Mere weeks before his death aged 76, the legendary Black Sabbath frontman, who lived with Parkinson's Disease in his final years, came full circle when he headlined a huge show in Birmingham's Villa Park, titled Back To The Beginning. But its a triumphant end he never could have imagined back when he was locked behind bars... READ MORE: Good Morning Britain hosts 'send love' to Ozzy Osbourne's family after shock death After dropping out of school at the age of 15, the future felt far from certain for the young Brummie, who cycled through various ill-suited jobs from construction site labourer to apprentice toolmaker. At the age of 17, Ozzy worked in a slaughterhouse before turning to crime and burgling a clothes shop. Although he'd shown no aptitude for manual labour, Ozzy's skills as a crook were even less impressive. As well as stealing baby clothes and shirts, Ozzy also tried to take a TV, but it fell on him. Although he'd made sure to wear gloves, these didn't cover his thumbs, meaning the would-be criminal had left prints everywhere. It wasn't long before police officers came knocking, sarcastically telling the youngster: "Not exactly Einstein, are we?" Jobless Ozzy was unable to pay the £40 fine, and his toolmaker father, John, refused, hoping this brush with the law would teach his wayward son an important lesson. Ozzy went on to spend six weeks behind the walls of HM Prison Birmingham, a Category B men's facility formerly known as Winson Green Prison. Although his sentence wasn't lengthy, it was enough to prompt the youth to rethink his life. In a 2014 interview with The Big Issue, Ozzy shared: "I tried to find things I was good at. I tried a bit of burglary, but I was no good at that. F****** useless. I didn't do any major burglary jobs. It was less than three weeks before I got caught. My dad said to me, that was very stupid. And I did feel very stupid. I didn't pay my fine, and I got put in jail for a few weeks. That was a short, sharp lesson. It certainly curbed my career in burglary." His release proved to be a turning point. Dad John, known affectionately as 'Jack', took out a loan to buy Ozzy a PA, a gift that ultimately proved to be the making of the talented musician. According to Ozzy: "Someone recently asked me what the best gift I ever got was, and it suddenly dawned on me that if my father hadn't bought me a microphone when I was 18, I definitely wouldn't be here now. He saw that I was really interested in popular music. My bedroom wall was covered in pictures of The Beatles. Anything with the word 'Beatles' on it was on my wall. "So he bought me a microphone, and it was shortly after that that I met the guys who would become Sabbath. It was the fact that I had my own microphone and PA system that got me in the band. If I hadn't had them, I would never have got the gig."
Indian Express
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
F Scott Fitzgerald's final bow: Lost Pat Hobby story ‘Double Time' published at last
For decades, it sat unnoticed in Princeton University's Fitzgerald Papers, a sheaf of untitled, unassuming pages, misfiled and forgotten. Now, more than 80 years after it was written, a long-lost story from F Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby series has surfaced. Titled Double Time for Pat Hobby, it made its public debut this summer as part of The New Yorker's 2025 Flash Fiction series. The discovery feels laced with Fitzgeraldian irony: a half-forgotten story about a washed-up Hollywood hack, rescued from obscurity long after its creator's death. Written in 1940, just months before Fitzgerald's own curtain call, Double Time bears all the hallmarks of the Hobby stories: grim humor, showbiz sleaze, and faded glamour. The Pat Hobby stories, 17 in total, written during Fitzgerald's late, lean years in Hollywood, were his final sustained body of work. Once the golden boy of the Jazz Age, he had become a hired pen in an industry that barely tolerated him. Arnold Gingrich, his editor at Esquire, later recalled, Fitzgerald treated the Hobby stories as 'a collective entity,' obsessively rearranging them to suggest a loose continuity, writes Nasrullah Mambrol, the founder of But they were ultimately fragmented, episodic sketches, each tale resetting the clock on Pat's slow-motion downfall. Pat Hobby himself is a 49-year-old has-been, a studio-era barnacle clinging to a world that has moved on. He is lazy, bitter, conniving, and autobiographical. If Gatsby was the dreamer and Nick the observer, Pat is the survivor, trapped in a purgatory of bad scripts and worse luck. He does not chase green lights; he scams per diems. In Double Time, Pat lands not one gig but two, a fluke windfall that he juggles with all the grace of a con man on borrowed time. Thanks to a chance encounter at Santa Anita racetrack, he finds himself working (loosely defined) for two studios at once, bouncing between lots, dodging responsibility, and rationing his gin. The ruse falls apart in an ending that is farcical and fatalistic. He is undone not by his incompetence, but by a studio doctor who spots him through a hole in the wall. Fitzgerald famously wrote the Hobby stories for money. He sweated over every revision, telegramming edits even as his health declined and his debts mounted. The result is an uneven but fascinating body of work. Some stories read like polished vignettes, others like hurried sketches. Collectively, they signal a shift in Fitzgerald's style: more clipped, less lyrical, as if anticipating the cool realism of the postwar novel. For years, critics dismissed the Hobby tales as minor works, epilogues to a once-brilliant career. But that verdict is beginning to turn. Recent scholarship has begun to reevaluate them as satirical portraits of the Hollywood machine, or even experiments in self-erasure. Pat Hobby may be a loser, but he is also a survivor, a stand-in for the author who created him, doggedly rewriting his own decline. The credit for Double Time's resurrection goes to Anne Margaret Daniel, a literary scholar and longtime Fitzgerald excavator, who edited a collection of previously unpublished stories by Fitzgerald, I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories (Scribner, 2017). The manuscript had been hiding in plain sight within the Fitzgerald archives at Princeton, where the author began his literary career as an undergraduate. He never graduated, distracted by writing, romance, and war, but Princeton remained an emotional anchor. That Double Time should reemerge here feels fitting. The university has been digitising its Fitzgerald holdings in recent years, including fragments such as the 'Ur-Gatsby' draft (discarded early version of The Great Gatsby) and the corrected Trimalchio galleys (original galley proofs of The Great Gatsby, which were initially titled Trimalchio). Now, Double Time, the missing piece of the Fitzgerald mosaic, joins the ranks. Double Time reads like a noir-tinged screwball comedy, full of misdirection. Pat Hobby is too delusional to be tragic and too pitiful to be heroic. But Fitzgerald gives him dignity as even if success remains elusive, he persists. In 2025, Pat feels relevant. One can sneak glimpses of him in a freelancer faking productivity, the veteran pushed aside by younger talent. That Fitzgerald wrote him in the shadow of his own downfall only sharpens the resonance. Fitzgerald once claimed there are no second acts in American lives. Pat Hobby, and perhaps Fitzgerald himself, show that it is perhaps not true. Double Time may be their last bow, but they remain onstage. Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics. She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks. She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year. She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home. Write to her at or You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More
Boston Globe
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
After 13 months homeless, a R.I. writer finds ‘sanctuary' thanks to 3,300 strangers
Lily — who'd once been starving and mangy, tied to a fence in Texas — seemed to believe him, he said. 'And when we got here — she's loving it," Fealey said on a recent morning as Lily rested on a couch in a townhouse in southern Rhode Island where they now live with Fealey's girlfriend, Lane McDonald. Advertisement Fealey now has a place to call home thanks to Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up In the 9,000-word piece, Fealey, 57, a University of Rhode Island graduate and former journalist, described how police rapped on his car window late at night, how security guards ordered him to leave store parking lots, how he feared for his life when a stranger came up behind him in a vacant lot at 3 a.m. The article grabbed the attention of a Narragansett family, who took it upon themselves to track down Fealey, find him shelter, and set up a GoFundMe page. 'My kids love Rhode Island, and they said, 'Oh, my God, Mom, this could be any of us,'' Janice Mathews Advertisement As of Thursday night, 'We are happy that he has a roof over his head and that his life is better,' Mathews said this week. Fealey said, 'It just shows you how many good-hearted people there are out there. It's very heartening and just positive because in these times — with the things that are going on and we're living in a totalitarian democracy — that there's people out there who give a s--t." The Esquire article came out at a time when when 653,104 people were experiencing homelessness across the United States, according to the The number of homeless people in Rhode Island had risen to 2,442 people ― according to a Fealey said the response to his article reflects a widespread concern about the housing crisis. 'Everyone's being affected by it, except a certain higher realm,' he said. 'People know that they're not living as well as they once did, or as they expected. And there's whole generations that are not going to get houses, the way things are going.' Fealey and McDonald moved into the townhouse, which they began renting in May. On a recent morning, a bouquet of sunflowers burst from a vase, and container of sea glass rested on the kitchen table. McDonald said Fealey wakes up early and writes, she paints and works from home, and Lily enjoys walking on nearby trails and beaches. Advertisement McDonald, who'd been struggling to afford rent in Narragansett and living with her parents, said that if a fortune teller had looked into a crystal ball a year ago — showing them living 'in this beautiful place,' no longer worried about whether Fealey is safe — she wouldn't have believed it. 'It's still unbelievable,' she said. 'It's a dream. It's coming out of a nightmare, and it's a dream.' Lane McDonald, left, and Patrick Fealey take Lily for a walk near their home. David L Ryan/ Globe Staff Fealey said he finally feels at peace. 'When I was homeless, I was on high alert all the time,' he said. 'I now feel safe and more at ease, calmer. I think most people feel good when they come home from whatever they are doing. Home is, or should be, a sanctuary. I have that now and am so grateful.' But Fealey is concerned about his health. After contracting Lyme disease, he underwent tests and was told he was close to kidney failure. He attributed that to psychiatric medications he has been taking for years and the stress of being homeless. Fealey has said he was stricken at age 29 with what he describes as 'a violent and disabling onset of manic depression.' For the next 26 years, he got by on a mix of eight medications, traveling the country while banging out literary fiction on a 1939 Smith Corona Clipper typewriter. Fealey said he relied on Medicaid for those psychiatric medications. 'That was my lifeline,' he said. 'I have medications I need, or I will basically kill myself. They are keeping me alive.' Now, Fealey said he is worried that millions will lose Medicaid since Advertisement " That's gonna be more really sick people in the street," Fealey said. 'What's happening in America?' Patrick Fealey is now living in a townhouse in Rhode Island. David L Ryan/ Globe Staff When he was living in his car, Fealey wrote the Esquire article while using the back of his Paul Reed Smith acoustic guitar as a desk. Now, he has a desk in a sun-filled room. Fealey said he has written a nonfiction book about his experience of being homeless, and over the years he has written 14 novels. He said talked to one agent but it wasn't the right fit. So he is now looking for an agent. He said he needs to sell his books so he doesn't end up homeless again. Meanwhile, a play is being written about Fealey's experience. O'Brien, who lives in Los Angeles, said the Advertisement 'Like so many, I was deeply moved by Patrick's essay in Esquire,' O'Brien said. He said he felt 'lots of points of connection' with Fealey's story, and having the essay about his brother in the same issue 'seemed like serendipity or kismet.' O'Brien said he 'kind of staggered' by the quality of Fealey's writing. 'His essay makes personal and human a subject that is too often ignored,' he said, 'and I've always felt compelled to write plays about taboo subjects — problems a culture would rather deny or vilify than reckon with." With housing costs skyrocketing and more people becoming homeless, the situation seems unsustainable, O'Brien said. 'It will be a political play — not at the expense of telling a human story — but it will impart a lot of reality and instigate a desire to change things," he said. O'Brien said there's talk of how empathy is in short supply these days. But, he said, 'His story kind of forced us, or me at least, to feel empathy rather than being overwhelmed or having my eyes glaze over with statistics. That could be me or someone I know and love.' Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
More than Human review – a utopia of self-weaving grass and psychedelic dolphins
'Even when humans get serious about wanting to talk to dolphins, will dolphins have anything to say to us?' So pondered an issue of Esquire magazine in 1975. 'The only reliable way to find out,' it concluded, 'will be to build a Dolphin Embassy and look for the response.' The pages that followed were devoted to a fantastical vision, created by the avant-garde architecture collective, Ant Farm. They proposed a floating multi-species utopia where humans and dolphins could mingle in a watery fantasy, communicating through telepathy. The triangular vessel featured a land-water living room, with chutes enabling dolphins to swim between floors, as well as a shared navigation pod, where one day an 'electronic-fluidic interface' would allow both humans and dolphins to steer the ship. The hope was that technological advances would make the project buildable by the 1990s. 'Thus far,' the article noted, 'no backers have come forward.' Fifty years on, there is still no delphinid mission, but Ant Farm's acid-induced drawings are on display in the Design Museum, as part of an exhibition about current designers' attempts to work with and for the 'more than human' world. Today's young architects might no longer be communing with their animal clients through psychedelics (alas!), but a whole new generation is engaging with the natural world once again, in the realisation that it's not enough to mitigate the human impact on the planet: we must actively design for other species to flourish. The resulting show is an intriguing, if sometimes opaque, foray into numerous experiments and 'collaborations' with nature, from fungal facades to fabrics grown from grass roots. Some are realistic proposals that have been put into action, while (too many) others occupy the realms of fantasy or conceptual art. But a good deal of exhibits will make you think again, and contemplate your relationship with everything from spiders and seaweed, to wasps and worms. Architect Andrés Jaque, who recently sprayed a school in Spain with a globular coating of insect and fungi-friendly cork, is back with an even more wildlife-welcoming facade. His 'transspecies rosette', a sample of a new cladding system made of pulverised cork and natural resin, features deep clefts and niches to encourage life to take hold, while providing waterproof insulation for the building. Modernism might have led to a wipe-clean world of sleek, seamless surfaces (all that high-rise glass resulting in accidental bird massacres), but Jaque's work suggests that more-than-human-centric design could lead to much more interesting, knobbly kinds of architecture. Does a bio-gothic future await? Nearby, Kate Orff of landscape architecture firm Scape, presents her more pragmatic Bird-Safe Building Guidelines, showing how the differences between human and avian vision could be turned to advantage. By applying films, glass can be made to look opaque to birds, while remaining transparent to humans. This simple measure could save a billion bird deaths a year, in the US alone. There are a handful of practical solutions like this scattered throughout the exhibition, but at several points in the show you feel like reminding the curators their remit is design, not art. There are a few too many space-filling installations, like Julia Lohmann's Kelp Council, which looks like a series of couture dresses fashioned from seaweed, dangling in a circle, set to a bubbling backdrop of oceanic sounds. 'If we consider that all living things have their own needs and agency,' offers a caption, 'we might ask: what does seaweed think of us?' Quoth the kelp: 'Do better.' Other projects seem promising, until you realise they have yet to be tested in the real world. There is a reason so many designers gravitate towards the ethereal realms of installation art and 'research', of the kind that now fills biennales: it's a lot easier to comment on a problem than solve it. The seaweed might be envious of a project around the corner, made in collaboration with its more primitive relative, red algae. Australian designer Jessie French has developed an organic algae-based vinyl as an alternative to synthetic window decals, contrasting the few weeks it takes for algae to grow with the many hundreds of years it takes for man-made plastics to decompose. The museum considered using it for the exhibition signage, but the carbon footprint of shipping it from Australia sadly put paid to that idea. Elsewhere there are some ingenious examples of 'nature-based infrastructure', from 3D-printed coral reefs and sea walls, full of little ridges and holes to encourage marine life, to floating breakwaters that mitigate storm surges, which are also designed as habitats for oysters. Indigenous wisdom gets a look-in too, with baskets woven by the Ye'kuana people of the Venezuelan Amazon, who ask the permission of the forest before using its products, and a film that highlights the Inga people of the Colombian Amazon and their hallucinogenic use of ayahuasca. Just like the Ant Farm collective, it sometimes takes a little something extra before we can fully communicate with our more-than-human cousins. An altered state might help the exhibition-goers, too. In the end, it is (perhaps appropriately) nature itself that steals the show. Each section begins with a group of historic artefacts in vitrines, including a beautiful collection of animal nests. Marvel at the grotto-like wood pulp habitat of the European wasp, or the dainty nest of a hummingbird, fashioned from antibacterial lichen and cobwebs for elasticity, or the tiny clay capsule of the solitary potter wasp, hanging from a branch. The female wasp sculpts these little pots from mud and saliva, before laying an egg inside and stocking it with provisions of paralysed caterpillars. Now there's some more-than-human maternal cunning. More than Human is at the Design Museum, London, from 11 July–5 October.
