If you have a wish for 2023, it can be a part of New York City’s famous New Year’s Eve Times Square celebration, albeit in a small way. In early December 2022, organizers for the New Year’s Eve party unveiled a “Wishing Wall,” which allows people to write their wishes on pieces of confetti for 2023. The same confetti will be released over the crowd on New Year’s Eve.

The Wishing Wall can be found in Manhattan at the Times Square Plaza between 46th and 47th streets, and will be open every day of December except for Christmas Day, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., until Dec. 29, 2022. For people who cannot submit wishes in person, a digital option allows submissions through an online form until Dec. 28, on the Times Square website, or on the website of its sponsor, Planet Fitness. Digital wishes submitted after that date will be saved for next year’s New Year’s celebration.

Recently a meme claimed, inaccurately, that a year-round visitor center wall would also allow people to share their hopes and dreams on Post-it notes that would be later used as part of the confetti drop on New Year’s Eve. However, submissions are not accepted year round, contrary to the Pinterest post below:

According to the official website for Times Square:

Whether it’s a personal goal, a dream for the future or doing something for the very first time, these wishes are added to over a ton of confetti that floats down at midnight onto the revelers gathered in Times Square in celebration of the new year. Be a part of this most magical night by making your wish in person through our mobile Wishing Wall on the plazas or by sharing your New Year’s wish with us below or on Twitter and Instagram using #ConfettiWish. We will add it to the thousands of others released above Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve for all the world to see!

In addition, this is not the first Wishing Wall in Times Square, and according to one report in the New York Post, it has appeared every December since 2007. Around 3,000 pounds of confetti reportedly will shower down on New Year’s Eve to mark the beginning of 2023. The confetti showering has taken place in Times Square since 1992.

Claim – The confetti that drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve bears people’s hopes and dreams, written or printed on each piece of paper. People can write these hopes and dreams on Post-it notes year round at the Times Square Visitor Center.

• True – From Dec. 1, 2022, to Dec. 29, 2022, people can write their hopes and dreams on confetti at a Wishing Wall in Times Square — the same confetti that will shower down on Times Square on New Year’s Eve. People can also submit entries digitally until Dec. 28, 2022. But …
• False – There is no year-round option to submit hopes and dreams on Post-it notes. The only way to submit them is during the month of December at a designated location or online.

In conclusion, Falling confetti in Times Square on New Year’s Eve does carry people’s hopes and dreams, but there is no option to submit them via Post-it notes year round. As such, we rate this claim as “Mostly True.”

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In July 2021, the Occupy Democrats Facebook page posted a meme that quoted rapper Ice-T as saying, “I can’t believe people are comparing Trump to Satan. Yes, he’s evil, but he’s certainly not as evil as Trump.”

Did Ice-T Tweet This About Comparing Trump to Satan, and has been circulating since 2020?

Ice-T did, in fact, tweet exactly those words from his verified account on Nov. 6, 2020:

I can’t believe people are comparing Trump to Satan.  Yes, he’s evil, but he’s certainly not as evil as Trump.

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 6, 2020

And that tweet was liked by more than 120,000 Twitter users. And apparently, some other Twitter users repeated the quote verbatim, without attributing it to Ice-T.

It wasn’t difficult to confirm that Ice-T was the originator of the quote, however, given that the earliest tweets containing those words on Twitter’s timeline were Ice-T’s, followed immediately by two tweets directly crediting him for the quote:

Since Ice-T was the originator of the quote, we rate this as Correct Attribution

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Officially, martial arts and film legend Bruce Lee died in 1973 from cerebral edema, or swelling of the brain, caused by a reaction to prescription medication.

But that simple explanation as to how an apparently healthy young man who seemed invincible onscreen was taken down so suddenly did not sit well with fans, and since his passing, many have proposed their own theories. Was it an assassination by a crime syndicate? An ancient curse on his family? Was it due to his previous life karma? Murdered by an alleged mistress in a crime of passion worthy of the silver screen? None of these notions are proven, but, perhaps due to Lee’s status as cultural icon, researchers have persisted fifty years after his death.

In somewhat more grounded explanations, some have combed over his autopsy report, coming up with various medical hypotheses. For example, a 2018 biography proposed that Lee died from heat stroke, accounting for the fact that he had some of his sweat glands surgically removed.

Claim – Martial arts and film icon Bruce Lee died from drinking too much water.

It sounds far-fetched, but a condition called hyponatremia can result from having too much water in the system. In November 2022, kidney specialists published a paper floating a new theory: Did Lee die from a condition called hyponatremia, which results from an abnormally low balance of sodium in the system? In a paper for Clinical Kidney Journal, scientists proposed that Lee may have had too much water on the day of his death, and his kidneys lacked the ability to sufficiently shed it from his system:

The necropsy showed cerebral oedema. A prior episode was diagnosed as cerebral oedema 2 months earlier. We now propose, based on an analysis of publicly available information, that the cause of death was cerebral oedema due to hyponatraemia. In other words, we propose that the kidney’s inability to excrete excess water killed Bruce Lee.

The researchers believe that Lee had several risk factors for the disease, including factors promoting “high chronic fluid intake,” such as marijuana use, and factors that would decrease his ability to excrete enough of it, like prescription drugs. Lee also had a history of intense and prolonged exercise (to put it mildly) and kidney injury. They also noted “evidence that he was repeatedly drinking water on the day of his death.”

The notion that Bruce Lee may have died from a condition called hyponatremia is an unproven hypothesis put forward by medical researchers. Drinking water may seem like the most innocuous and even healthiest activity, and in the overwhelming majority of instances, it is. But in rare cases, if someone drinks too much water and doesn’t pee it off, it can throw the body’s chemical balance dangerously out of whack and turn deadly. Such was one such case cited by the researchers in the paper about Bruce Lee.

Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old from Northern California, died in 2007 after participating in a radio station’s contest called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii,” in which contestants drank large amounts of water and didn’t urinate, in hopes of winning a Nintendo Wii. Bay Area news website SFGate reported that although Strange was the only person who died as a result of the contest, other contestants became severely ill.

We are rating this claim “Unproven” because it is merely a hypothesis put forward by medical researchers. We shall update this story when and if we encounter further evidence supporting or negating it.

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