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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.

(I might have accidentally deleted something important when I was consolidating things) 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.

The comic shows Cueball reading off bad trivia questions which are either confusing or don't have an answer.

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, or it was a year when the calendar changed.) 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).

A more usual type of question might be to ask which member celebrates a particular milestone birthday in the current year.

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. The solids have, respectively, 6, 12, 8, 30, and 30 edges (also occasionally called sides colloquially).

More usual questions might be 'How many Platonic solids are there?' or 'What is the highest number of faces on a Platonic solid?'.

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.

An acceptable question might ask what is recognised by the Guinness World Records as the world's smallest lake.

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

Problem: Trivial

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, containing zero shark attacks^{[citation needed]}. Unlike the previous unanswerable questions, this is a question that no reasonable person could get wrong.

5. How many planets were there originally?

Problem: Ambiguous

5 billion years ago, in the nascent solar system, there were countless planetesimals that would eventually form the planets. 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?

Problem: No answer

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. Is it any points scored in any game at all (e.g. Scrabble or Root?) except football, or is it points that are not part of any game at all (e.g. "Wow, you made a good point, I need to reconsider my position.")

Normal questions might be about who scored the most points in a game, a season, or a career.

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 most recent one. Alternatively, if 'the last one' means 'the last one ever', then it probably hasn't been built yet (and hopefully won't be built for a long time).

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

Problem: Unknown, and possibly unknowable

This is an open question in math. Known as Goldbach's Conjecture, mathematicians widely believe that it is true, and it has held true for every number we've checked (and we've checked a great many numbers) but since almost all numbers have never been checked, we can't generalize that it will hold for ALL even numbers without proof. Since it is known that something can be true but impossible to prove or disprove, this may be the situation forever.

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

Problem: No answer

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 their 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. There is a cheeky answer too: "A".

Common questions similar to this might concern countries which have multiple capitals, where the capital has moved, or, as in this case, where it is not the most well known city in the country.

10. Who played the drums?

Problem: Ambiguous

Lots of people have played the drums^{[citation needed]}, through the ages. 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.

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.

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