Ottoman Dietz was born Castor Dietz in Chesterfield county, Virginia, just south of Richmond, on January 1, 1948. His first mention comes in a letter his mother wrote to her mother shortly after his birth in which she said that they had “totally missed the boat on this one,” which led a short while later to his three siblings (Zeiman, Seymour, and The Anonymous Albanian), but Castor did show signs both of the visionary spirit and a determination to misuse that spirit early on, when, at the age of eight, he petitioned Virginia’s eastern district court to allow him to change his first name from Castor to Ottoman. His parents objected, and one can see from their arguments that they were themselves staunch Southern traditionalists. They offered the dual rationales that Castor was a fine, family name and Castor himself was “a boy, and not even out of his short pants.” Castor asserted that he would prefer that his name be associated with a swashbuckling former empire and a piece of furniture that is a visible sign of luxury and relaxation rather than with some old Greek twin in a second-rate myth whose part of the story didn’t turn out too well, anyway, and a medicinal oil that no one associates with anything fun or exotic at all and besides, it tastes “yucky” and used to come from the dried perineal glands of beavers. Virginia’s eastern district court was a feisty bunch; this was the same court that several years later told Virginia’s governor J. Lyndsay Almond to “suck it” [NAACP v. Button, 1963] when he tried to close the state’s public schools rather than de-segregating them, but it was a slow week, and the court, never having heard the part about the beavers, granted the request, with the majority opinion writing, “Furniture and a fez? Sure. Why not?”[Dietz v. Dietz, 1956] Eminent legal scholars have confirmed that the ruling also includes the first recorded use of the word “dickweed” as a pejorative, in reference to the dissenting justice and his opinion.