How the christ does the Y Combinator work?

Fuck, I've been rereading http://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html for the past several hours and it might as well be written in Esperanto. Am I just not cut out for EXPERT PROGRAMMING‽

Wait a second...

So Y is just a fancy way to write ff=Y(f); ff(arg) (forgive my C roots) instead of f(f,arg)?

Wow. And I thought is was something serious.