Just The Gist

While chatting this week in Breakin’ Nooz about 50 Cent’s new Diddy documentary ‘Sean Combs: The Reckoning’, Rosie mentioned the episode we did about ‘The Diddy Situation’ back in 2024 for Patreon members. We were travelling around the country and still calling Breakin’ Nooz ‘From The Van’! There’s obviously been a couple of updates in the case since then, but it’s a good breakdown of Sean ‘Puff D...

In 1976 in Chowchilla, California, an entire school bus filled with children disappeared without a trace. Less than a day later, all 26 of them, along with bus driver Ed, escaped from a hole underground with a terrifying story about being taken by three masked men. Soon, three very wealthy young men, from some of the most well-off families in town, were found with a piece of paper with the word ‘P...

There was screaming. There was crying. It was one of the most iconic TV moments of all time - on September 13, 2004, Oprah gave all 300 members of her talk show audience a brand new Ponitac G6 Sedan. But, while the rest of us ended up with possibly the greatest meme in internet history, the audience members each ended up with a bill for thousands of dollars, because their brand new ‘free’ car wasn...

DIVORCED, BEHEADED, DIED, DIVORCED, BEHEADED, SURVIVED. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr (yes - there were that many Catherines). It’s Henry VIII’s wives bébé! But the way you wish it had been told in history class. … We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's Breakin' Nooz, JTG After Show AND Bonus eps! You can acces...

In 1985, a man called Andrew Thornton II crash-landed in a random driveway in Kentucky after his parachute didn’t open. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest, night vision goggles and a pair of Gucci Loafers. He also had a duffel bag filled with 35kg of cocaine. But Thornton originally had 75kg of cocaine, and it wasn’t until two months later, when a North American Black Bear was found to have had a...

Beginning in the 1950s, you could take any patient into a local doctor’s office, pay $200, have an ice pick inserted through their eye socket and then hammered into their brain. The whole thing took less than five minutes and was considered as unremarkable as getting a flu shot. Called the ‘lobotomy’, Dr Walter Freeman had invented the procedure as a ‘miracle cure’ for any and all mental illness -...

Right now Ariana Grande is getting Oscar buzz for her turn as Glinda in Wicked: For Good, but back in 2018 she was mostly making headlines for her intense romance with the guy who made ‘BDE’ a thing: comedian Pete Davidson. Within two months, they met, got matching tattoos, moved in together, got more matching tattoos, got a pet piglet, got more matching tattoos, got engaged and… got more matching...

In 1985, Disney released a sequel to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz , with production involvement from legends of cinema George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. It was directed by Oscar winner Walter Murch and starred a 9-year-old Fairuza Balk (who later went on to star in The Craft ) as Dorothy. With that pedigree, you’d think an ‘Oz’ sequel would be a slam dunk, but this film did not h...

British man Malcolm MacDonald spent SIX YEARS with a penis grafted to his arm after complications during surgery meant it couldn’t be attached to… the regular spot. He thought he might spend the rest of his life with it just swinging there, but in 2022, Britain’s Channel 4 made a documentary about Malcolm called ‘The Man With a Penis on His Arm’. It detailed the infection that led to the loss of h...

You know who doesn’t know much about much unless she hyperfixates on it because she’s researching for an episode? Rosie. So occasionally we’re gonna get some experts in to give us Just The Gist on what they happen to be experts in.  This week: Oshie’s Hair (and the man beneath it - iconic TV host Osher Günsberg) tells us all the things about The Bachelor Universe! From what goes on behind the...

On January 28 1986, 'America's Favourite Teacher', 37-year-old Christa McAuliffe, boarded the Space Shuttle Challenger, after beating out 11,000 applicants to become the first regular civilian NASA would ever take to space. Satellites had been sent to schools around the country so children could watch the shuttle launch live from their classrooms. But just 73 seconds after launch, the Challenger e...

This story in The New York Times Magazine went ridiculously viral last week because… ooft. ‘ She Was Ready To Have Her 15th Child, Then Came The Felony Charges ’ was brilliantly written by David Gauvey Herbert, and tells the story of MaryBeth Lewis; a woman who has been having babies via IVF since her mid-forties and doesn’t want to stop - no matter what she has to do to make it happen.  This...

The trash fire human formally known as ‘Prince’ Andrew is now just a regular person, only worse. Same as his former wife Sarah Ferguson, who until recently was still referred to as ‘Sarah, Duchess of York’. It was huge news in October 2025 when King Charles finally released a statement from Buckingham Palace, officially stripping Andrew of all his official titles and kicking him (and ol’ Fergie) o...

All the kids are saying it. Teachers are banning it. South Park did an episode about it. And it was just named D ictionary.com ’s 2025 Word Of The Year. So where did 6-7 come from? WHAT DOES IT MEAN? Rosie did some research to get to the bottom of it all, including getting the scoop from Official JTG Kidz Correspondents: her 12-year-old nephew Malekai and 6-year-old twin nieces Layla and Layelle....

There is a movie that exists that is SO bad, the lead actress who signed on had to be legally forced to finish filming it. In 1996, recent Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg had signed on to star in a gritty, sci-fi drama, but the final script had turned it into a buddy cop film in which she starred opposite a talking dinosaur puppet wearing Converse sneakers and a backwards cap. Whoopi tired to back ou...

IT’S THE DELIGHTFUL CAPER WE ALL NEEDED. On October 19 2025, four thieves (in disguise!) stole $102million worth of jewels from the Louvre Museum in Paris. They casually parked a basket lift truck out the front of the building, rode it to the first floor balcony and stepped right inside the Apollo Gallery - home to what’s left of France’s ‘Crown Jewels’. One glass cutter and a couple of minutes la...

In May 2013, Nigerian cook Harrison Okene was sitting on the toilet when his tugboat capsized in a freak wave, trapping him 30 meters underwater in complete darkness. While his 11 crewmates drowned, Harrison found himself in a tiny air pocket, listening to their final screams before silence fell. For 60 hours, he survived on a can of Coke and sardines, fighting off crayfish that fed on his body, p...

In December 2001, Winona Ryder was arrested for shoplifting nearly $6,000 worth of designer clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue, sparking one of the most bizarre celebrity trials of the 2000s. The '90s indie queen claimed her director told her to shoplift for a role, but the jury convicted her of felony grand theft anyway. From the iconic "Free Winona" t-shirt movement to Marc Jacobs making her their c...

In 1999, The Blair Witch Project became a cultural phenomenon when audiences believed they were watching real found footage of three film students who disappeared in the Maryland woods. But film directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez had actually just created one of the most successful marketing hoaxes in movie history, using fake missing person posters, a fake Sci-Fi Channel documentary, and...

In what eventually became known as ‘THE CRAPPENING’, a Dave Matthews Band tour bus dumped 800 pounds of toilet waste while driving across the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago in 2004. And in an example of what might be the most perfect - yet unfortunate - timing ever, there just happened to be an open-air sightseeing tour boat passing directly under the bridge at the exact same time…  Dave Mat...

In 2014, Elizabeth Holmes was hailed as the youngest female billionaire in America, promising to revolutionize healthcare with her blood-testing company Theranos. With just a drop of blood from a fingerprick, she claimed her Edison machines could run hundreds of tests faster and cheaper than traditional labs. But behind the black turtlenecks, deep voice, and Steve Jobs comparisons was one of the b...

In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar vanished during a family fishing trip to Swayze Lake in Louisiana, sparking a massive eight-month search. When authorities found a boy matching Bobby's description in Mississippi with traveling handyman William Walters, the Dunbar family claimed him as their son. But another woman, Julia Anderson, recognised the boy's picture in the paper and insisted he was act...

Remembered for being one of the most famous murderers of the 20th century, there's not many people who don't know about Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate/LaBianca murders. But it tends to be one of those topics everybody assumes they know everything about, until they hear the bizarre details. Did you know that Manson didn't actually kill movie star Sharon Tate himself, or any of the victims that...

It was supposed to be the biggest streaming service the world had ever seen. Launched in 2020 by industry heavyweights Jeffrey Katzenberg (the former head of Dreamworks) and Meg Whitman (former CEO of Ebay), Quibi was expected to end up bigger than Netflix and Youtube combined. It had two billion dollars invested in it and the biggest talent in the world - everyone from Reese Witherspoon to Steven...

In 2012, a six-year-old beauty pageant contestant named Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson became America's most controversial reality TV star, thanks to her 'Go-Go Juice' and brilliant catchphrases like "A dollar makes me HOLLAR (Honey Boo Boo Child)!" What started as an appearance on TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras turned into the phenomenon reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, following Alana's entir...