[mattlutze]

A: 42

Q: How many people that have been a part of my life are having sex at this moment?

A bit disappointing if so, but it would at least satisfy those mice's desire for a salacious topic to tour the galaxy's talk show circuit.

To the second part, it doesn't seem like that theory of vocal grooming would need to be the genesis of syntactic speech.

Complex verbal communication could have come about for completely other reasons, and, as we standardized around words and sentences and the like, vocal grooming likewise could have grown from simple noises to these similar more-complex mechanisms.