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 the Incan Empire have a system of ultra-marathon running messengers? At its greatest extent, the Incan Empire stretched down almost the entire west coast of Latin America, further than the distance from New York to San Francisco. Despite that vast size, however, the entire empire endured for less than a century, collapsing during the Spanish conquest of the Americas in 1533. The last bastions of the Incan resistance finally disappeared in the 1570s. Famously (and perhaps
Word origins are frequently utterly ludicrous. Avocados and orchids take their name from words for testicles. Girls were originally girls and boys. A dogsbody was originally a misshapen boiled pouch of seafarers’ meal. We could go on. But as word origin stories go, one of the most peculiarly convoluted is that behind the word cabal, meaning “a group or sect of like-minded people,” often with the implication that those involved in the cabal are up to no good. It just so happen
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
The flag of Massachusetts: That motto means “Learn to spell” (Wikipedia) Let’s face it, some words are just too goddamn hard to spell. Are there really two Rs and two Ss in embarrassed? And the fact that it’s calendar with an A but cemetery with an E just seems downright sadistic. But thank duck that these days we’ve got autocorrect to help us out. So long as by “help us out” you mean remind us to pick up the dry cloning when we go shipping after work. And when that fails, th