Jai alai comes from the Basque words meaning "merry festival".
Tod obliquely mentions the paradox of Buridan's Ass, which refers to an old philosophical puzzle by Jean Buridan, a French philosopher in the 14th century who used the idea of a mule situated equidistant between two bales of hay as a way of examining free will. Buridan wondered if a mule would starve if it couldn't decide between two equivalent choices, since both choices were the same and one had no more appeal than the other. If the mule did choose one of them, the question would be what factor lead to the mule's choosing, and was that actually an exercise of free will.