So there I was in class
and this was one of those vaguely BSy Communications cores called Rethinking Culture, right, so we spent a lot of time talking about What Things Mean, No, I Mean, REALLY Mean, You Know? and referencing long dead French buggers in our essays.

So one day we are in class Discussing Texts. And the tutor (who was actually a nice bloke who seemed to like me but despair of my inability to insert random references to aforementioned dead blokes when I'd actually reasoned the whole essay from first principles, can you tell I am bitter? One time he actually wrote a sadface emoticon on my essay, sideways and everything) asks us What Is A Text with the purpose of showing that anything can really be a text provided it purposefully communicates something, but please don't analyse any hand gestures in your final essays.

So people come up with the standard books, TV, advertisements that we already did in high school English classes, then at his encouragement venture a little further afield into Hallmark cards and pamphlets handed out by religious nuts on street corners...

And the tutor says "Yes, those can be texts, but I'm thinking of something a little more off the wall..."

And Myself throws up hands and blurts out "Grafitti!"

There is a brief silence.

"Because... it's... off the WALL..."
(Lieutenant Colonel Oblivious brought to you by intravenous sugar, Sun 8 Mar 2009, 13:14, Reply)