You're just not going to believe this
but when I was at university, a friend of a friend (honest! really! I can supply names!) who was at another college decided to spend his whole budget for a semester on a nice hi-fi. When pedants pointed out that he might need some money to, say, eat during this 15-week period, he proudly responded that he had thought of that: he had bought a huge sack of oats and was going to live off porridge - the monotonous diet would be worth it, he said, as he had such a bitchin' hi-fi.

Within a few weeks he got scurvy from living off porridge. And then the hi-fi got nicked.

The really interesting thing is that I told this story to somebody I was working with during a summer job a couple of years after. He laughed, and I thought that was the end of it. I ran into him about six months later and was delighted when he told ME the same anecdote, swearing blind that it was a close friend of his who had had the whole scurvy/hi-fi experience. Just goes to show how these urban legends get perpetrated, I suppose.
( Olembe Refuses to write in this space, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 8:05, Reply)