t was Barack Obama’s birthday on Wednesday, so we celebrate his turning 49 with five facts about The Most Powerful Man In The World.
JOE readers are a knowledgable lot, so you probably already know that he collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics, and that he once owned a pet ape. You probably also know that he’s the President of Guam, but here are five other facts that if you don’t already know, you really should.
1. His friends used to call him Barry
We have it on good authority (well, someone here in the office knows someone who went to college with El Pres) that he used to be know as Barry until he asked to be known by his full name. Fact.
2. Obama loves the fags
He’s tried to give up, sure he has, but Obama is still a smoker. Best he doesn’t try hypnosis to kick the habit, though, in case the hypnotist subliminally gets him to do something really bad. Like invade a predominantly Muslim nation on the premise of their being weapons of mass destruction there, for example. Although, if he did do that, he wouldn’t exactly be the first American President to do so.
He tends to hold his ciggies in his left hand, on account of him being left handed (there, an extra fact we threw in for nothing).
3. He used to be a druggie
He took both marajuana and cocaine in his adolescence. If that’s not true, he can sue us. But it is true, so he can’t. Ha!
Our source is the great man himself. In his book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance he had this to say about his recreational drug use: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man… I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind.”
In the book he acknowledges that he used cocaine as a high school student but rejected heroin. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though,” he says.
4. His sporting ability is something of a mixed bag
He can bench press 200lbs, he has plans to install a basketball court in the grounds of The White House and he was known as O’Bomber at high school on account of his prowess at hoops.
When it comes to ten-pin bowling, however, he’s a disaster. And when he plays baseball, he throws like a girl (albeit, a very strong girl who can bench press 200lbs and has the access codes to a huge nuclear arsenal).
5. He’s up there with Madonna and Michael Jackson in the award stakes for his abilities as a recording artist
Like many a pop and rock god, Barack Obama is the proud winner of a Grammy Award. He got it in 2006 in recognition of his reworking of Madonna’s hit Papa Don’t Preach. Oh wait, we misread that, it was actually for the spoken word audiobook of his aforementioned bestseller Dreams From My Father. But if he ever did decided to rework Madonna’s 1986 hit, we’re guessing it’d be ace. The man can do anything. Yes he can.
Nick Bradshaw
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