These alleged tactics included slashing car tires, throwing dirt clods at surfers descending the bluffs and full-on fistfights in the water.

Whether it's a twig, a pebble or a clod of dirt, the randomness you get on a large scale is the same.

So many fit the man-child: “light of brain,” “clod of wayward marl,” “bolting-hutch of beastliness,” but specifically to his inability to speak the truth there’s the perfect “infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker.”

As Teichman looked on, a few farmhands gingerly coaxed the cuttings out of the plastic sleeves, exposing young roots tangled in clods of soil.

To be fair, there is more to Johnson's story than him simply being a clod when it came to dogs.