Let’s talk about something else… how about some math?

Later that night the employed boxer dreams a terrible dream. He can’t escape from a miserable asylum where his flat-affect fellow patients have names like Philately, Numismatics. and Computer Repair.

“Let me out,” he screams. “I don’t belong in isolation with these boring freaks! I play an essential role in every science!”

“So do I,” say Computer Repair, “and they won’t let me out either.”

Wake up, John! It was just a bad dream, and the gym never closes.

But unless you can punch your way out of it, instead of running away after one little jab, you’ll be back at the same old party with Mr. Philately tomorrow night.

“Self-answering questions” are such peculiar entities that it’s fair to say every “self-answering question” raises more questions than it self-answers, but unfortunately if you ask the typical “self-answering question” any of the interesting questions that it raises, the “self-answering question” refuses to answer them!

This brings us back to the notorious discussion of the written word in the Phaedrus:

“I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.”

You can’t really pin a motive on “hippodrome” specifically, even by alleging “intent to be funny” in addition to the other charges, since any other member of the family of curious words would serve as well, and even the larger family is perfectly dispensable, if “…containing an apparently unmotivated mention…” is replaced by “…eliciting a misspelling of the name “Jacob.”

So “hippodrome” walks on all charges, math cop, and you get to spend the next six years handing out arithmetic tickets on Staten Island!

(By the way, The Unapologetic Mathematician is prominently displayed on my blogroll at Daily Kos.)