Just before the weekend began, I stopped by the office of a professor of Political Science for a chat, and got a complementary Solzhenitsyn Reader for the effort. Only at Assumption College! While my summer reading is already overbooked, there is always room for one more conservative anthology on my shelf.







As a bonus, I even got to tell him a surprisingly sophisticated revolution joke from the fine anime Maria†Holic, which he enjoyed as a scholar of revolutions. It may be seen here at 15:10 in. For the lazy, I will repeat its pure genius here:

Kiri has just received a bamboo scroll from a mystery man who keeps giving her love letters on a train. She unrolls it. "What's this? The word 'Revolution' is written on it so much that it seems as if he's going to stage a revolt..." There is an exhaustive list of revolutions with their dates:

1688 The Glorious Revolution
1775 The American Revolutionary War
1789 The French Revolution
1804 The Haitian Revolution
1830 The July Revolution
1848 The Revolution of 1848
1917 The February Revolution...

"A timeline?" Kiri says. "If you define revolutions as 'an act where the people rise up in revolt to change a country', there's none that appeared in Japanese history. Makes it seem more like he's planning a revolt."

"For some reason," her friend Ryuuken notes, "revolutions known only by a niche group are mixed in with the other revolutions on the list."

"'The difference in our age," Kiri breaks in, "is just a minor gap if you compare it to the world's history. We should follow in the footsteps of our predecessors and start a great revolution.' That's what he told me."

"That's quite creative," remarks Ryuuken. "He might be surprisingly fun to be with if you date him."

A Berlin Wall joke follows, but you'll just have to see it for yourself. Were I an Assumption professor of Political Science (hint hint), that'd be my excuse for watching Maria†Holic in class!

The awesome ending theme, "Kimi ni Mune Kyun".


[On the cover to the Maria†Holic OP, the protagonist Kanako rockets off in a perverted nosebleed as she admires Mariya~ best album art all time]