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.
(Wix) The Pitcairn Islands are a group of four volcanic islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. They’re some of the smallest, most isolated, and most sparsely populated landmasses on the planet: home to just 54 people (mostly all descendants of the crew of the HMS Bounty), the Pitcairn group covers just 18 square miles and lies some 1,300 miles from its nearest Oceanic neighbour, Tahiti, and more than 3,000 miles east of New Zealand. It is also, according to the CIA World Fact
The new Google Maps update was next to useless. (Pixabay) Here’s a quick trivia question to kick things off: what do Russia, Turkey and Egypt all have in common? Have a think. I’ll wait. If you know your world geography then you’ll doubtless have worked out that these are the world’s three “transcontinental” countries—nations that straddle the traditional boundaries between the continents. So with the Ural Mountains taken as the boundary between Europe and Asia, Russia falls
Ahh, the beautiful game. No, not Hungry Hungry Hippos, we’re talking football. And in particular, football in, er, Greenland. The people of Greenland—that gigantic ice-covered island in the north Atlantic Ocean—love their football, with a staggering 10% of the entire adult population said to regularly play or take part in it. Greenland also has its own local governing body for football, and has done for almost 50 years after the foundation of the Grønlands Boldspil-Union, or
Good old Guam, getting its second shoutout here on the Yes or BS blog. One more and we might have to think about giving it its own category tag. But what makes Guam worthy of two blogposts in six months? Well, everyone’s favourite western Pacific island is a lot more interesting than you might think. For one, it has no railways. Two, it has no motorways. And three, it has no sand. Yep, the “sand” on all those beautiful, tropical Guamanian beaches is actually mostly hundreds o
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
Missouri: So flat, those people who left your house yesterday are still on the horizon (Pixabay) In 1961, a map called ‘Family Vacationland’ was produced by the Missouri State Highway Commission, listing all of the state’s major tourist attractions. Unfortunately, one of the state’s most popular, most lucrative, and most isolated tourist hotspots—the town of Noel in McDonald County, in the far southwest of the Missouri—was accidentally omitted from the map. A simple mistake,