Baba Bieber?

My run on reading autobiographies continues apace. I finished Keith Richards's "Life," and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  I know, I keep telling you that! But you'll have to read the book to find out what really happened when Keith fell out of a palm tree (it wasn't a palm tree, more like a horizontal branch of some other tree, and he was wet from swimming: hence the fall) and if he really snorted his father's ashes (no but he did accidentally inhale some.)

Also checked off: "Dream Boogie," the life of Sam Cooke, as talented a singer and as ambitious a performer as you'll ever find, but also a man of unbridled carnal appetite, and that was to be his undoing. 

You feel that, Mr Bieber?

Baba Booey! Baba Booey!

And lesser-known but still important in things as I see them was "They Call Me Baba Booey," the life story of Gary Dell'Abate, Howard Stern's radio producer and frequent butt-of-joke.  It was twenty-one years ago that Boy Gary made the mistake of calling Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Baba Looey "Baba Booey."  He thought the guys would stop picking on him the next day.

He should have known better.  Women might get cute nicknames when they are young. I recall a friend of my sister being called "Muddy," and not in any tribute to the blues singer Muddy Waters.  But you can bet next month's issue of "Marie Claire" that they don't call her that any longer.

Whereas, if you're a dude, and you twist your ankle playing volleyball in sixth grade and have to limp back to class, your friends just might call you "Hoppy" for the rest of your life. 


You know the hotshot lawyer who successfully defended you in that lawsuit filed when the mailman tripped over your kid's skateboard, landed in your unfenced mulch pit and was set upon by Jack Russell, your Jack Russell terrier?  No matter his many successes in the courtrooms of our land, he will forever be known, to the friends who saw him at a college mixer dropping dry ice down his pants, as "Numbnutz."


And that surgeon who operated on your duodenum the other week?  His friends from high school still call him "Shitferbrains."

Just so you know.