Rolled Oats in the Hay

This may be an appropriate time to remind you that, as our tagline says, Amuse-Biatch is devoted not only to "Top Chef," but to "other matters gustatory" as well. Which is actually rather a nice loophole, as it gives us license to cover anything having to do with taste, good and bad, food-related and not.

In that spirit, Amuse-Biatch is pleased to record what is clearly not the first encounter between oats and a Johnson.

As you may be aware, Samuel Johnson, noted English wit, lexicographer, provocateur and bon vivant, famously included this definition in his 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language : "OATS — A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. "

Now we learn, via California Lawyer magazine, that a "naked 69-year-old man who had covered himself in oats was cited for animal cruelty after sheriff's deputies found him at the La Purisima Mission in Lompoc[, California], letting horses lick him clean. The man reportedly told the deputies that this was a sexual fantasy of his and that he had driven up from Los Angeles to play it out."

There. We think that fits nicely through our loophole as being both food-related and in bad taste.