Today’s rabbit hole

Easy Peary. The answer is 25 animals.
1 rabbit
12 monkeys
12 parrots.

Or the answer is 5, depending upon how you read it. The elephants didn’t get to go to the river. It’s a red herring. The  question is how many animals are going towards the river, forget about the elephants. Though I don’t see why they wouldn’t go the the river too, they love water. There are no elephants in the room, or in the equation either—unless you’ve been drinking before 5 PM, and you know it’s always 5 PM somewhere, around the world.  And your deductive reasoning skills went right out the window.



The question is:
1 rabbit
2 monkeys
2 parrots

But, let’s face it, the puzzle is ambiguous, poorly written, too many red herrings—which is why I suck at math, but then, I have dyslexia. these kinds of questions are möbius traps—8s sleeping on their sides—laying down on the job (as in intransitive verb)—they also beget more unanswerable questions. Nor the variables, imagined, or otherwise. Which is why I could never finish my math tests on time.  Is this the right time to introduce collective nouns?

And while we’re at it, the word animals should not be capitalized—random common nouns embedded mid-sentence do not require capitalization, unless Animals is the name of another shady character in this weird collective, or maybe we’ve been teleported back to the 17th c.

And the right eejit who said parrots are not animals needs to go back to school. Unless they’re dead parrots. Give him an F, or an A—depending on if the parrots are still breathing, or not. Are they still parrots if they’re dead? It’s not a question of one rabbit seeing 6 elephants while going to the river, it’s a question of how many animals are going to the river. Besides, everybody knows rabbits can’t count.

And the answer is one rabbit and two monkeys, if you can trust the rabbit. I wouldn’t. Besides, they can’t count. The  verdict’s still out on the monkeys. Not to mention how many parrots there are.

Were the elephants white, or pink? Inquiring minds want to know. What were they drinking? So how long did it take them all to gather at the river? O brother, where art thou? Maybe the rabbit was white? Was it the first day of the month? Where’s Alice? And what is a rabbit doing in the jungle, anyway? Is this the middle, or the end, of a Monty Python sketch? Or the end of life as we know it?

It’s all pretty damned fishy, if you ask me. And while we’re at it, you do know that the word every is a singular adjective, while their is a plural possessive pronoun? Yep. Each elephant or every elephant? Which throws the monkey puzzle right out the window—the parrots too—even if there are no windows in the jungle. Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know. All the rabbit holes are loaded and it’s the top of the ninth.

Wait, I think I need a drink. Forget about the answer. Everything is post coronavirus these days. Bring on the otters. They do love fish. What was the question?