Futility Closet

The state nearest Africa is Maine.

Where can you draw potable seawater even when no land is in sight?

Offshore of the mouth of the Amazon, which supplies 20 percent of the fresh water entering the world's oceans.

In any given year, the dates 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12 fall on the same day of the week.

(Also 9/5, 5/9, 7/11, and 11/7.)

Jimi Hendrix and George Frideric Handel lived in adjoining houses.

Handel lived at 25 Brook Street in London from 1723 until his death in 1759.

210 years later, Hendrix moved in at number 23.

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

The shortest line that can be drawn on the earth's surface, one end of said line being at the mouth of the Rio Grande river in the Gulf of Mexico, and the other end at Pekin, in China, will cross Behring's Strait. If you doubt it, take a large terrestrial globe and some thread and convince yourself. This truth may be of far greater value than we now know. What say you, gentlemen? Shall we begin the Pekin and Denver road at its Asiatic terminus, and so let the road bring along the labor that is to build it?

– Bizarre Notes & Queries, April 1886

Reportedly the world's shortest play is The Exile, by Tristan Bernard.

The curtain rises on a mountaineer in a remote cabin. An exile knocks on the door.

EXILE: Whoever you are, have pity on a hunted man. There is a price on my head.

MOUNTAINEER: How much?

The curtain falls.

The shortest decisive tournament chess game ever played was Dordevic-Kovacevic, Bela Crkva 1984:

1. d4 Nf6 2. Bg5 c6 3. e3

3. … Qa5+ wins the bishop. Dordevic resigned.

History's 10 deadliest natural disasters:

1. Yellow River flood, China, summer 1931: 1 million to 2 million dead
2. Yellow River flood, China, September-October 1887: 900,000 to 2 million dead
3. Bhola cyclone, East Pakistan, Nov. 13, 1970: 500,000 to 1 million dead
4. Shaanxi earthquake, China, Jan. 23, 1556: 830,000 dead
5. Cyclone, Coringa, India, Nov. 25, 1839: 300,000 dead
6. Kaifeng flood, China, 1642: 300,000 dead
7. Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami, Dec. 26, 2004: 283,100 dead
8. Tangshan earthquake, China, July 28, 1976: 242,000 dead
9. Banqiao Dam failure, China, August 1975: 231,000 dead
10. Aleppo earthquake, Syria, 1138: 230,000 dead

Six of the 10 occurred in China. See also Death Tolls.

At the Panama Canal, the Pacific is east of the Atlantic.