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.
Did Ethel Merman deal with her short-lived marriage by including a blank page in her autobiography? Remember when Britney Spears and Jason Alexander got married in 2005, and then split up 55 hours later? No, me neither. They probably don’t either. And speaking personally, I’m not 100% sure what exactly ‘Brittany spears’ are. And wasn’t Jason Alexander that guy from Seinfeld? But, I digress. This fact is actually about another famously rocky and short-lived Hollywood marriage.
We all know about official state birds, state trees, state flowers, and the like. There are even official state dances (spoiler alert: 25 of them are square dancing), and thirteen states have even gone so far as to nominate official state dinosaurs (shoutout to Hypsibema missouriensis!). But thus far, California is the only US state to have nominated an official state element. And it’s all down to Judy Garland. According to the memoirs of George Cukor, who directed Garland in
Horsing around: Charlton Heston takes the reins in Ben-Hur (Public domain/Wikimedia Commons) If you’ve never seen Ben-Hur, the 1959 biblical epic starring Charlton Heston, then you’re missing out on a film so long and expensive that its director spent one-eighth of his entire $15 million budget just on camera film. A film that required the longest soundtrack in movie history—a staggering 110 minutes of original music. A film that won 11 Oscars, the most of any picture to date
If you’ve never seen the 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark, you’re seriously missing out. It’s about a young blind woman named Susy (played by Audrey Hepburn) who becomes inadvertently embroiled in a violent drug smuggling heist. The vast majority of the film is set in Susy’s flat, where she is slowly and nail-bitingly terrorized by an ever-more psychotic criminal (played by Alan Arkin) in a nerve-shredding game of cat-and-mouse. But it’s not what happens on screen in Wait Until
Boxing clever: Yes, we only used this photo because there are no public domain images of Russell Crowe (Pixabay) Gather around the fireplace, ye brethren, and harken to me—for I am here to tell you The Curious Story of Russell Crowe’s Boxing Jockstrap. No. Really. In 2005, Australian Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe appeared in Cinderella Man, a highly-acclaimed biopic of early twentieth century boxer James J Braddock, who was named world heavyweight boxing champion for thre
Who doesn’t like silent films, eh? Apart from, you know, practically everyone born since 1930. But apart from them, everyone knows silent films are great. But according to the brilliantly-named American inventor Charles Pidgin, you know what totally ruins silent films? The intertitles—that’s those pesky frames of dialogue or explanatory text that crop on screen up every few seconds to, y’know, tell you what’s going on. What a day Minta was having: An intertitle from Hitchcock