For extra credit: math and other problems waiting for an answer.

[Q:] If a man is walking south along a beach at 1 mile an hour and a woman a mile behind him is walking south along the same beach at 2 miles an hour, at what point will they just totally misunderstand each other and fail to communicate in even the simplest and most basic ways about anything and everything including sex, money, disciplining the children, where to vacation, and the whole tiresome argument about whether the dishrack should be wood or steel?

[Q:] A falcon flying at 50 miles an hour spots a duck flying at 30 miles an hour and a pigeon flying at 20 miles an hour, in that clunky, flaring weird-bird way that pigeons fly, you know how they careen through the air sometimes like someone hit them with a broomstick? You know what I mean? And why do they do that funky shaking-their-groove-thang walk anyway? Is it a put-on? Are they just totally goofing on human beings or what?

[Q:] If a deer and an elk mate, whose insurance plan covers the children?

[Q:] A train going 700 miles an hour encounters a vole. Why exactly is the train going that fast? Does being in such a hurry mean that you are important?

[Q:] You are playing golf, and your partner lashes a terrific eight-iron shot from about 100 yards out in mucky conditions, the shot of her life, and her ball just catches the fringe above the hole, and what appears to be a gust of wind nudges it just at the crucial second, and the ball heads straight for the hole, and is at most, like, 10 inches away, on a true line, as far as you can tell. But suddenly, O my God, a heron lands on the green! And eats the ball! Which it cannot properly digest! And the bird keels over dead as a door right there on the green! Do you concede the putt?

[Q:] A poet gives a reading of his new experimental work, which surges past the cultural need for narrative or indeed form of any kind whatsoever, and approaches, as he says eloquently in his prefatory remarks, pure poetry, which does not need words, nor music, nor the usual culturally fascist insistence on sense or story. How long should he be sentenced to community service cleaning public toilets?

[Q:] Three novelists eat a vast and sumptuous dinner, complete with several bottles of terrific wine and more oysters than you can shimmy your jimmy at. The waiter, with some trepidation, brings the bill. How many hours do the novelists wait at their table for an editor to happen by?

[Q:] You are fishing a tiny stream in Oregon. Many years ago this stream, during the fabulous salmon runs of yore, was crammed with so many salmon returning to spawn that a man could haul a small piano out onto their backs and run through the collected works of Liberace without ever getting his feet wet. However, what with pollution and logging runoff and overfishing and all that Liberace, no wild salmon in 50 years has run up your stream ... until today! You hook the amazing creature, and wrestle it to shore, and face a moral dilemma. White wine or red?

[Q:] A boy goes to the store and buys 10 apples for five cents, five oranges for three cents, and 19 pears for two cents. What planet are you on to get such prices? And who gave the kid the dime? Is that the dime I left right here on this table not five minutes ago? How many times have I told you that every penny counts in this family, not to mention dimes? Do you want to eat nothing but air for the next eight years? What exactly am I going to do with 19 pears? Do you want salmon with pear sauce? Should we invite the novelists?

By BRIAN DOYLE, editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and author of six books, most recently The Wet Engine, (Paraclete Press).