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Pub Trivia

Title text: Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a TRIVIAL BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

The comic shows Cueball reading off bad trivia questions which are either confusing or don't have an answer. The caption states that this is because he was paid to sabotage other bars that offer trivia so that people will want to go to the one that hired him.

1. Which member of BTS has a birthday this year?

Problem: Multiple answers

BTS is a K-Pop group. Every member would have a birthday each year. In fact, all humans have a birthday every year. (Unless you were born on leap day and trying to be pedantic.)

2. How many sides does a platonic solid have?

Problem: Multiple answers

There are five platonic solids, with 4, 6, 8, 12, or 20 faces (colloquially called sides) in Euclidean 3-space.

3. What is the smallest lake in the world?

Problem: Arguable

Unknowable as there are many small bodies of water in the world, and determining which is the smallest while still being large enough to count as a lake is a complicated question.

4. Which Steven Spielberg movie features more shark attacks? Jaws (1875) or Lincoln (2012)

Problem: Trivial

Jaws, as Lincoln has a surprising lack of shark attacks.^{[citation needed]}

5. How many planets were there originally?

Problem: Ambiguous

Question lacks context, since it doesn't define what originally means, and there is no way to know when humans first found out that the wandering stars were actually other worlds, or that Earth is a planet. And if this includes exoplanets, it's unknowable since we have no way of detecting these planets in ancient times.

Or it could be trivially 0, if "originally" means when the universe first formed in the Big Bang.

6. What NFL player has scored the most points outside of a game?

Problem: No answer

As points are not usually scored outside of games, this is a nonsense question.

7. The Wright brothers built the first airplane. Who built the last one?

Problem: Unknowable

Since airplanes are built continuously, there is no way to know who built the last one. Alternatively, if 'the last one' means 'the last one ever', then it probably hasn't been built yet.

8. Is every even number greater than 2 the sum of two primes?

Problem: Unknowable

This is an open question in math.

9. Not counting Canberra, what city is the capital of Australia?

Problem: No answer

Nonsense question, since Australia has only one capital. Unless you count 'A'.

10. Who played the drums?

Problem: Ambiguous

Lots of people have played the drums^{[citation needed]}, famous or not. This question needs context.

The alt-text bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

Problem: Multiple answers

All choices are technically correct as they are various geographical areas that include the city of London, England. (d) incorrectly conflates Europe, a geographical area that London is located in, with the EU, which the UK (and consequently London) has not been in since Brexit in 2020.

|}

This is apparently deliberate (at least on behalf of the organisers), perhaps to upset or otherwise impede groups of overconfident quizzers who would otherwise dominate any genuinely good quiz. -->

Many pubs have trivia nights, where patrons form teams and compete to best answer questions about a range of topics. Cueball has apparently been hired by one bar to infiltrate other bars' quiz nights and write particularly bad questions for them, which he has accomplished using different strategies. The idea is that by making the trivia nights at other pubs horrible, he will drive business to the pub that hired him.

1. Which member of BTS has a birthday this year?

Since everyone has a birthday every year (with the exception of those born on February 29), this question does not have unique answer. And since this comic was published in 2024, even the possible February 29 exception does not apply (and no BTS member was born on February 29).

2. How many sides does a Platonic solid have?

This question is ambiguous in at least two ways. First, a solid does not have "sides"; it has edges and faces. There are five Platonic solids, with 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20 faces, and 6, 12, 8, 30, and 30 edges.

3. What is the smallest lake in the world?

A lake is defined by Wikipedia as a "relatively large and fixed body of water." As there is no universal definition for how large and how fixed a body of water must be in order to qualify as a lake, this question is impossible to answer.

4. Which Steven Spielberg movie features more shark attacks - Jaws (1975) or Lincoln (2012)?

Jaws is a famous movie about a killer shark, and features at least five fatal shark attacks. Lincoln is a movie about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and contains zero shark attacks. Unlike the previous unanswerable questions, this is a question that no reasonable person could get wrong.

5. How many planets were there originally?

The ancient Greeks named seven planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Eventually, it was decided that the Earth is also a planet, and that the Sun and the Moon were not. Uranus and Neptune were eventually discovered, followed by Ceres, Vesta, Juno, and Pallas, all of which were considered planets prior to the invention of the term "asteroid". Then Pluto was discovered, and the count of "planets" stabilized at 9 until 2006, when the discovery of Kuiper Belt objects larger than Pluto led to creation of the term "dwarf planet", leaving us with 8 known planets and 5 known dwarf planets. Today there are also thousands of known exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than the sun). The joke here is that "originally" is so poorly defined that it could mean anywhere from 0 (the number of planets prior to formation of the solar system) to infinity (number of planets in the universe if the universe is indeed infinite).

6. What NFL player has scored the most points outside of a game?

American football has a somewhat complicated scoring system, and record keeping involves (for instance) crediting the 6 points for a touchdown to both the receiver and the passer in some situations. This question does not address any of this complexity, but adds a new level of ambiguity as the "points" a player can score outside of a game are undefined.

7. The Wright Brothers built the first airplane. Who built the last one?

It is exceedingly unlikely that the last airplane has been built, and because plane assembly is complicated, it is difficult to assess when a particular aircraft counts as complete, so this is another unanswerable question.

8. Is every even number greater than 2 the sum of two primes?

This is Goldbach's Conjecture. Mathematicians widely believe that it is true, and there is substantial numerical evidence to suggest that it is true, but there is as yet no accepted proof. The joke is that trivia questions should have clear and agreed on answers, and this question does not.

9. Not counting Canberra, what city is the capital of Australia?

Canberra is the capital of Australia. Sydney is larger and possibly more famous, so that asking the capital of Australia would be a good trivia question: people who know there capitals would respond with Canberra and less knowledgeable people would guess Sydney. Australia is divided into states and territories, each with its own capital, but this would leave multiple equally valid answers to the question.

10. Who played the drums?

If this question asked who played the drums for a particular band or on a particular album, track, or performance, it would be an example of a good trivia question. As it is, it has many possible answers and no way to choose between them.

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