“Can’t Be Done”:

• “You can’t stand for five minutes without moving, if you are blindfolded.”
• “You can’t stand at the side of a room with both your feet lengthwise touching the wainscoting.”
• “You can’t get out of a chair without bending your body forward, or putting your feet under it; that is, if you are sitting squarely on the chair, and not on the edge of it.”
• “You can’t break a match if the match is laid across the nail of the middle finger of either hand, and passed under the first and third finger of that hand, despite its seeming so easy at first sight.”
• “You can’t stand with your heels against the wall and pick up something from the floor.”
• “Don’t try to rub your ear with your elbow, for it will be a failure.”
• “It takes a clever person to stand up when placed two feet from a wall with his hands behind his back and his head against the wall.”

— Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks, and Conundrums (With Answers), 1914

You can float in the Dead Sea without getting your newspaper wet.

The water’s saltiness makes floating objects unusually buoyant.

Famous people who died of pneumonia:

• William Henry Harrison
• Leo Tolstoy
• Jim Backus
• Lawrence Welk
• Billy Wilder
• Charles Bronson

Standing shoulder to shoulder, all the people in the world could fit on the Indonesian island of Bali.

A 2003 survey of Domino’s Pizza managers in Washington D.C. found that Dec. 13, 2003, the day Saddam Hussein was captured, was the biggest day of the year for tips.

The world’s longest diary is kept by Robert Shields of Dayton, Wash. Since 1972 he has spent four hours a day typing a record of everything that happens to him. Sample:

July 25, 1993, 7 a.m.: I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.

He stores the diary, now 38 million words long, in more than 80 cardboard boxes.

Egypt’s Great Pyramid weighs 5,750,090 tons.

In 1956, an expedition to the South Pole found a tin of Edam cheese left behind by Robert Scott’s party 44 years earlier.

It was still edible.