and does it tie in to "La Vida es un Sueno" by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, major play in the siglo de oro of Spanish drama? there's a speech in there that goes, (with accent marks that won't show up here)
Que es la vida? Un frensi.
Que es la vida? un ilusion.

And re: chocolatecovered manhole covers: yeah, it's a Niven story. The title is simply "What do you do with a Chocolate-Covered Manhole Cover?" It came up recently a few years ago when the April 1st edition of TechTalk, the MIT student newspaper, pubilshed an article stating that the campus was switching over from the People's Republic of Cambridge Ruble to the MIT $UNIT, which was any circular object more than 1 ft in diameter, and was broken up into 2 pi subunits of radians.

Chocolate Pi (calclating couloumbic potential for hydrogen flouride)