Futility Closet

Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro are the only actors to win Oscars playing the same character. Brando won Best Actor for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, and De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for the same role in The Godfather Part II in 1974.

See Too Much Talent.

SOUTH DAKOTA shares no letters with its capital, PIERRE. It’s the only such state.

PENNSYLVANIA is the only state name typed with all eight fingers.

WELL-EXPRESSED is dialed using only the odd numbers on a telephone keypad.

NONCOMMUNICATING uses only even numbers.

Surely this means something.

• EPISCOPAL is an anagram of PEPSI COLA.
• Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother died in the same house on the same day.
• Only a perfect square has an odd number of divisors.
• “Makes no sense makes no sense” makes no sense.
• The grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol include working oil rigs.
• “Time is the only critic without ambition.” — John Steinbeck

• Georgia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut didn’t ratify the Bill of Rights until 1939.
• Wilt Chamberlain never fouled out of a game.
• 3864 = 3 × (-8 + 6⁴)
• What’s the opposite of “not in”?
• Alaska has a longer coastline than all other U.S. states combined.
• “To do nothing is also a good remedy.” — Hippocrates

When Silvia Morello de Palma was seven months pregnant, she flew to Antarctica to join her husband, the commander of Argentina’s Esperanza research base.

When their son, Emilio Marcos Palma, was born safely on Jan. 7, 1978, he became the world’s southernmost birth — and the only person in recorded history to be the firstborn on a continent.

The highest point in the contiguous United States is less than 80 miles from the lowest point.

Mount Whitney, in California’s Sequoia National Park, rises 14,505 feet above sea level.

It’s 76 miles west of Badwater, in Death Valley National Park, which is 282 feet below sea level.

On Aug. 10, 2004, Cincinnati Reds first baseman Adam Dunn hit a ball entirely out of Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park. It landed on Mehring Way, 535 feet from home plate, hopped another 200 feet or so, and came to rest on a piece of driftwood on the edge of the Ohio River.

That part of the river belongs to Kentucky. This makes Dunn the only player in major league history to hit the ball into another state.

See Pop Fly and Four-Dimensional Basketball.

• Douglas Adams claimed that the funniest three-digit number is 359.
• Romeo has more lines than Juliet, Iago than Othello, and Portia than Shylock.
• Friday the 13th occurs at least once a year.
• “By nature, men love newfangledness.” — Chaucer
• John was the only apostle to die a natural death.