The trouble with rocket-powered roller skates is that you can’t steer.

To remain on land as long as possible, we suggest you start in northern Siberia (99°1’30E 76°13’6N) and point yourself due south. That’ll take you through 4,717 miles of Russia, Mongolia, China, Burma, and Thailand before you splash into the South China Sea.

Or start at 48°24’53N 4°47’44W in northern France and head east. An unswerving course will take you through Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, and Russia, covering 6,665 miles before you hit the Sea of Okhotsk. Good luck.

See also Point Nemo.

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.”

When walking, a 100-pound woman in stiletto heels exerts more pressure per square inch than a 6,000-pound elephant.

Fly due south from Key West, Fla., and you’ll pass entirely west of South America.

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 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