The basilisk lizard of Central America can run on water for up to 15 feet, thanks to flaps between its toes.
It’s known as “the Jesus lizard.”
Trivia
Trivium
When walking, a 100-pound woman in stiletto heels exerts more pressure per square inch than a 6,000-pound elephant.
Well Named
Fly due south from Key West, Fla., and you’ll pass entirely west of South America.
Trivium
The state nearest Africa is Maine.
“Nor Any Drop to Drink”
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.
Trivium
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.)
Noisy Neighbors
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.
Trivium
The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
“Geographical Fact”
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
Encore!
One candidate for 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.
But shorter still may be Samuel Beckett’s 1969 play Breath, which lasts 35 seconds. As we view a bare, litter-strewn stage, we hear a baby’s cry, a person inhaling once and then exhaling, and then another cry. At the play’s West End debut, one audience member said, “I just want to put on record that I thought the whole evening was completely bogus and pretentious.”
(Thanks, Adam.)