LI Celebrity Alert: Howie Mandel

The world's foremost germophobe, Howie Mandel, has written a celebrity TMI bio, Here's the Deal: Don't Touch Me, detailing his history of health-oriented weirdness.

Photo by Matt Ottosen from Wikipedia

Naturally that includes lactose intolerance, as told to the Toronto Globe and Mail.

"I've had a very fractured, weird career," the 54-year-old performer says from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his family and suffers from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. "It's very ADHD of me," Mandel says with a laugh, "my appeal being so distracted."

With the amount of press he's doing, the focus on the bald comic will be narrowed – he'll be the guy talking about his childhood, a highly awkward stage of his life that, as we learn in the first chapter of his book, involved a lactose-intolerant, colour-blind boy so unfocused that he'd forget to go to the bathroom, which resulted not only in his wetting his pants, but in his throwing himself into puddles to cover it up. He also had a fear of laundry hampers, his skin was a nesting ground for sand flies and he needed 100-per-cent attention.

Thanks, Howie. We needed that.