This is the Yes or BS blog, where you can play the game for yourself. Either pick a random story from the pictures below, or choose your specialist subject from the categories listed here. Just read the story through and decide whether, YES, you think it’s true, or no, you think it’s total B.S—then click you answer in the box at the bottom of each post to see if you’re correct.
If you had to think of somewhere associated with tornadoes, chances are the midwest of America might spring to mind first. Less likely to spring to mind? How about eleventh-century London. But it just so happens that on 17 October 1091, during the reign of William II, what we would now class as a category F4 tornado formed over southeast England and headed directly for what would go on to become the city of London. Winds in excess of 200mph destroyed more than 600 wooden buil
Wakey wakey: A bird’s-eye view of Wake Island (NASA/Public domain) Wake Island is a tiny isolated coral atoll in Micronesia, more than 1,000 miles east of Guam, in the central Pacific Ocean. Just 2½ square miles in size, the island is arguably best known for the Battle of Wake Island, which took place on 8 December 1941 (the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii) and eventually saw the island occupied by Japanese forces. Ultimately a major component of the Pac
Everyone knows that Shakespeare’s Macbeth is supposedly a cursed play. Quite where that reputation comes from is unknown, but tales of nightmarishly ill-fated performances have cropped up in theatrical folklore for centuries. Macbeth strikes a pose: I hope that’s a sword hanging down there (Wikipedia/Public domain) But of all these disastrous stagings, perhaps the most accursed was an amateur production of “The Scottish Play” put on at the Cavalcade Theatre in Andersonville,
When the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy struck the coast of New York in late October 2012, it flooded streets, submerged subways, and caused billions of dollars in damages. It also gave a Mr John Whittier Norris of Montauk, NY, a somewhat unexpected addition to his garden pond. The tiny hamlet of Montauk lies on the northernmost tip of Long Island. It escaped the worst of New York’s flooding, but was still badly effected by the storm, with waves crashing far up the islands’ b
The big top: smell the popcorn; run from the incoming electrical storm. (Wix) Next time you’re in the circus and the house band starts playing John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever, abandon your popcorn, throw the nearest clown out of the way, and run for the exits. In circus (and, once upon a time, theatrical) contexts, Sousa’s popular Stars and Stripes is infamously known as the “disaster march”: house bands in circuses only ever perform the piece as a warning i