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.
The Machs Factor: a sonic boom (Pixabay) In February 1964, NASA and the US Federal Aviation Administration began conducting what they knew as “Operation Bongo II”. Alas, no, this was nothing to do with learning to play the drums. Nor resurrecting Oingo Boingo. Instead, with an eye to investigating the implications of transcontinental supersonic air travel, NASA and the FAA began investigating the effects of sonic booms on urban areas, their buildings and other structures, and
The Sultan of Brunei: so rich, his title has become a metaphor for wealth and opulence. But when it comes to cash flow, rather than pure wealth—and when it comes to pure hedonism rather than opulence—perhaps the current Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, isn’t quite the metaphor we’re after. Instead, we need to turn to his brother, Prince Jefri, who (if statistics are to believed) has personally spent more money than any human being in history. It may be Jefri’s brother who
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,
“The upstairs bedroom offers unbroken views of the surrounding area” (Wix) You know how it is in the rental market these days. Prices skyrocketing. Slum landlords rampant. Damp patches breeding their own ecosystems. But surely there’s an easy way out of the rental trap? Well, if you happen to be French lawyer André-François Raffray, apparently there is. In 1965, Raffray accepted an offer made by his then 90-year-old landlady, Jeanne Calment, to pay a monthly rent of 2500 fran
Guilt can be a terrible thing. It can makes people do the most extraordinary things. Like confess to the murder of someone who died one and a half millennia before they were born. (Wix) In 1961 a man named Peter Rayn-Bardt brutally murdered his wife in the town of Wilmslow, Cheshire, and buried her remains in a peat bog on the outskirts of the town. Although police suspected that he was somehow involved in her disappearance, at the time there wasn’t enough evidence to pin the
It’s illegal to throw confetti in Mobile, Alabama. In Iowa, it’s illegal for a moustachioed man to kiss a woman in public. In Vermont, a married woman is technically still legally obliged to ask her husband’s permission to wear false teeth. And in the tiny Montana town of Summer Junction, it’s illegal to dance across a pedestrian crossing. Yep, weird laws still survive on the statute books—in surprisingly robust numbers—all over the place. But in 1997, that gave the good peop