I just didn't feel like there would be a lot of opportunities for me in Birmingham.
I have spent every New Year's Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It's a place with meaning for me.
My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay.
My father is Emmit and my grandfather is Emmit, but I wanted something extra so I could separate my Emmitt from the rest of them. Even though on my birth certificate it has one T, I just added the extra T for me.
I'm not saying my mother didn't like me, but she kept looking for loopholes in my birth certificate.
If someone accuses me of not being born here, I can go -within 10 minutes - to my filing cabinet and I can pick up my real birth certificate and I can go, 'See? Look! Here it is. Here it is.'
One year they asked me to be poster boy - for birth control.
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
At my age flowers scare me.
Sinatra invited me once to his birthday party in L.A. I was young, and I felt great about it. But when I got there, the Rat Pack were all in the kitchen laughing their heads off.
My first paying job might have been doing a play, actually. My mom paid me to dress up as a flounder at my sister's 'Little Mermaid' - themed birthday party when I was little.
I don't really remember, but I'm positive that whenever I cried, my mother gave me something to eat. I'm sure that whenever I had a fight with the little girl next door, or it was raining and I couldn't go out, or I wasn't invited to a birthday party, my mother gave me a piece of candy to make me feel better.
I used to be good with kids, but as I get older, I'm grumpy and terrible with them. As for doing a gig at a 6-year old's birthday party, you couldn't pay me enough.
I don't want to be dragging myself on stage, year in year out, until someone else tells me it is time to go. There are certain birthdays that make you revalue your life.
I may have managed to build a successful technology startup that had gone public by the time my three kids hit their 13th birthdays, but don't think that bought my wife and me any special respect from our teenagers.
Whenever I think of my birthplace, Walton-on-Thames, my reference first and foremost is the river. I love the smell of the river; love its history, its gentleness. I was aware of its presence from my earliest years. Its majesty centered me, calmed me, was a solace to a certain extent.
I learned how to take other people's mechanisms of promoting their stuff through me as opposed to promoting my own stuff, as far as getting Snoop DeVilles, SnoopDeGrills, Snoop Doggy Dogg biscuits, Snoop Dogg record label, Snoop Dogg bubble gum, Snoop Youth Football League.
I'm good at anything that's country - biscuits, gravy, chicken-fried steak. Look at me, for God's sake. I cook what I like to eat.
This really is a merger of equals. I wouldn't have come back to work for anything less than this fantastic opportunity. This lets me combine my two great loves - technology and biscuits.
What I've learned, traveling the country and doing book signings, Mama's biscuits - you know, somebody in Montana's got their version of Mama's biscuits, somebody in California's got their version - so it made me realize that we're not as regionalized as we think we are.
