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Ozzy Osborne heralded the ‘Age of Nefarious’ by biting off the head of (depending on the account you read), a live bat! Bear in mind that we’re talking about the same guy that once snorted a line of ants off the side of a pool because he thought they were a line of coke. Either that or he thought he was an aardvark. We don’t associate that with evil, we associate it with impaired faculties.

But bats! Bats are the things of horror movies. Ozzy said that the bat tasted like a Crunchie bar wrapped in a chamois and, given the penchant that he has for ingesting weird stuff, I figure he would know. A Crunchie bar wrapped in a chamois would have to be one of the more moderately exotic things that he’s put in his body. I wonder what would have been said if someone had only thrown Ozzy a goldfish? Would the humble goldfish have been categorised as Satan’s sashimi?

There is an urban myth that recurs with the same repetitive cycles that fashion moves in. An innuendo that conveys the fear of the rock ‘n roll Anti-Christ, that seducer of nations that with one obscene utterance, with one lewd swivel of his serpentine hips, can damn the pliable little souls and minds of a generation that have a hard time saying “no” and meaning it.

I am, of course, referring to the ‘Six Puppies’ myth.

When I was at high school, I remember kids talking about this evil band with an evil name — The Dead Kennedys. The story goes something like this: “My friend’s got an older brother that went to a Dead Kennedy’s concert and the lead singer had six puppies that he took out of a bag and threw into the audience and he said that the band wasn’t going to play until the crowd had ripped the puppies apart!” You can imagine my confusion when I found out that The Dead Kennedys were actually a punk group with heavy political overtones that made diabolical music about such things as environmental issues and human rights abuses.

Fast forward sixteen years or so, and I’m listening to someone in tone of absolute conviction that that androgynous devil-spawn himself, Marilyn Manson, threw — you guessed it — six puppies to an audience and told them that he would not play, and probably not refund their tickets, until the six puppies were ripped apart! Six! Not refund their tickets!

You see what I’m saying here? That’s right, Marylin Manson is totally unoriginal, ripping off the whole ‘Dead Kennedys-six puppies’ thing. The funny thing is that in the Manson story, it was actually the storyteller’s own friend that had been at the gig.

What manner of heinous evil are we dealing with here?

The kind that comes straight from hell, my friends, the kind that is out to kill all puppies everywhere. I propose that we stop wasting time focusing on starving third world children, leukaemia, child literacy and abuse, and we start channeling our awareness into the fact that the devil hates puppies.

I think it’s quite evident today just how close that maniac, Ozzy Osborne, came to subverting us all with his bat-biting ways. If we never had people addressing the real issues at the time, then just think how it could have turned out.

Sometimes, at night, when I turn on the TV and my eyes are transfixed on the nullifying cathode rays, and there’s nothing of interest in that flickering cavalcade of dull dreams, my mind wanders and considers what might have been, had Ozzy not been restrained by the morality police with "Parental Advisory" stickers.

In these darker moments, my fears play out an elaborate scenario where the drug-addled Prince of Darkness is transmitted into our homes, every foul word of his tainted vocabulary right there in my living room. Ma and Pa don’t fear him any more and Junior is laughing at him. “Can’t you people see him!” I want to scream. “Remember? The devil walks among us! He snorts ants and eats bats!”

Then I realise that I really am watching TV in a new millennium. And it is funny. What we thought was the cunning serpent has become the human equivalent of a sea cucumber. If you know the shape of evil then you’ll know it never really shifts.

People, however, are something else. But hey, if I change the channel, maybe I’ll find something to watch.

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