Of course I remember Hofstadter. During our move chorale and I discussed whether to keep Le ton beau de Marot on our shelves, and that inspired me to learn "Villon's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves" by heart, and get out the OED to look up as much of the Victorian thieves' cant as possible. And a week ago at dinner my host was asking me what I thought of Hofstadter's idea that the self is a strange loop.

I'm fond of the three-people-do-X genre. My friend caprine tells an especially recondite (and self-referential!) one (<lj user="caprine" also frequently cites the Bechdel test, by the way): Noam Chomsky, Kurt Gödel, and Werner Heisenberg walk into a joke together. Heisenberg says, "I can't tell if this joke is funny or not." Gödel says, "Of course you can't; you're inside the joke." Chomsky says, "Of course it's funny. You're just not telling it right!" But I also like A mathematician, a physicist, and a biologist are sitting on a park bench with a view of a house. As they talk, two people enter the house. Fifteen minutes later, three people leave. The physicist says, "It seems that people are not conserved!" The biologist says, "Obviously they've reproduced." The mathematician says, "Now, if one person goes into that house, it will be empty." I think the best intellectual joke I've made up Synecdoche is a figure of speech that stands for the state of New York.