Friday I was actually working.
In a sense.
So no posts.

I've been taking advantage of a completely misguided scheme run by one of the universities where you can get credit for life experience.
On the basis of my utterly dubious musical renown and my mother's genuine rep. as an anthropologist, I've been granted 12 credit points for contributions to ethnomusicology.
Whatever that is.
This allows me into First Year Sociology.

Sometimes, we even get travelling tutorials instead of having to do it all on the net.
Such was Friday.
The topic was "social deviance" and the tutor was, if you'll forgive the expression, banging on about sexual deviance.
Sleazy little bugger was talking about people sticking owls up each others' bottoms, and such.

What I don't get is why anyone should either get upset by, or make a big political deal out of, what goes on in peoples' bedrooms -- providing they give consent and are capable of consent.
There used to be a "love which dare not speak its name".
Now it seems there are millions of loves that won't shut up about themselves.

As a very wise person once said: thank god there's a public space called "the private".

Now, for my major essay, I'm contemplating deviance on a really big (national) scale.
It's called the 100th anniversary of Australian Rules "Foot" Ball which we're "celebrating" this very day.
Surprised there isn't yet another long weekend.
Why deviant?: not very Australian as I know it; not a lot of rules; rare use of the foot; and ... can that possibly be a ball?
My father only ever saw one game and didn't understand it until another ex-POW Italian explained it as being like real football ("soccer"?) for 36 goalkeepers.
Someone standing next to Dad and his mate got excited by a goal scored from 50 metres (possibly yards then) between bloody great posts and such that you still get a point if you miss.
"Look at a real goalkeeper", he said, "has to kick it off the ground, not out of his hands, more than 75 metres ... and to a player".

So my argument is going to be: if there are national "cultures", they're located by finding the forms of (by any reasonable human measure) deviance they permit.
I'm looking forward to failing.

Sledge