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.
In March 1707, midway through morning mass in the parish church of St Coultha, a tiny village near Stornaway in Scotland’s Western Isles, a gigantic hailstone smashed through a window at the back of the church, and struck the unfortunate priest—noted only in the parish records as a Father JR Robertson—on the side of the head. The poor padre promptly collapsed to the floor, with a considerable wound to the side of his head, and was rushed back to his quarters to recover. Alas,
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
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