January 2, 2026
Tailspin logic wars
Round the tree, yes, but not round the squirrel
Internet spirals over “Did he go around the squirrel” debate
TLDR: A man circled a tree while a squirrel kept facing him, sparking a fight over whether he truly went “around” the squirrel. Comments split between absolute motion and perspective-based definitions, tossing in moon-orbit and rolling-wheel analogies—proof that how you define “around” can change the whole story.
A woodland game of peekaboo turned into a full-blown comment war when a man claimed he circled the tree but not the squirrel—because the squirrel kept turning to face him. Cue chaos. Half the crowd screamed “If you go around the tree, you go around the squirrel!” while the other half shouted “Not if you never get behind it!” One baffled fan admitted, “It took me longer than it should to get this,” perfectly capturing the collective brain cramp.
Then the thread went cosmic. One commenter argued the moon orbits the sun, so wobble doesn’t change the fact you’re going around. Another dropped the rolling wheel analogy: a wheel moves like it’s rotating around the ground point, not its center. Meanwhile, a philosophy squad demanded definitions: “What even is ‘circling’?” And the reference-frame crowd (that’s just fancy talk for “whose viewpoint you’re using”) chimed in: from the squirrel’s perspective, the guy stayed in front the whole time, so no “around” happened. Jokes flew—“Schrödinger’s squirrel: both circled and not”—as readers confessed the riddle “tickled” their brains in a good way. In short, this glade became a gladiator arena for Team Tree vs. Team Tail, and nobody left without a new opinion—or a headache.
Key Points
- •A man recounts circling a tree four times to observe a squirrel hiding behind its trunk.
- •The squirrel continuously turned to face the man, preventing him from ever seeing its back.
- •A listener argues that circling the tree implies circling the squirrel since the squirrel is on the tree.
- •The man disputes this, claiming he did not circle the squirrel because he was never behind it.
- •The dialogue centers on differing definitions of “circling”: geometric path around a center versus orientation-based criteria.