– The location must have been great: I guess if you really want to rent an apartment in London:

At a London apartment the rent is too damn high, and the ceiling is too damn low.

A landlord has been fined for renting out a studio apartment that could only be entered by crawling on all fours. Not only could the apartment itself only be entered on all fours, but to get to the tiny front door tenants needed to first crawl up a set of stairs in the same fashion, with the ceiling varying between 27 inches at its lowest point and 47 inches at its highest. The Guardian points out that this would be too low for the average 3-year-old to stand upright.

Landlord Yaakov Marom had been warned by the city that the apartment was not fit for renting, but he failed to comply with the warning and was discovered to be renting to the room to a couple for about $700 per month.

Yes, $700/month to have to crawl into your domicile. Now, to be fair, maybe the apartment itself was really nice.

Also, to be fair, I haven’t rented for a few years, so maybe $700/month actually is a good deal. Sigh.

– Not a pearl necklace: (Warning, sophomoric sex humor ahead.)

I recently learned of the anatomical term baculum, which refers to the penis bone found in many mammal species. It is found in most primate species, but not humans or spider monkeys, for unknown (to me) reasons. Why us and spider monkeys? If you understand that, I suspect you will understand a great deal more than the rest of us about the fate of our world.

Sometimes they are sold as souvenirs, known as oosiks, and that’s why I bring them up here. Presenting the “Oosik Baculum Wire Wrapped Necklace,” from Furburger on Etsy:

And here’s the sophomoric sex humor, as promised, from the product description:

At one juncture in their lives these little oosik\/baculums could have made pearl necklaces but now they are part of a necklace.

Question for people who know Latin: would the plural of “baculum” be “bacula” or “baculi”?

– No sex in the champagne room: As a general rule—and, actually, a law in many places, including the setting of this tale—strippers are under no obligation to have sex with you, even if you paid for a large number of dances. Once the dances are finished, so is the transaction. So if you are mad that the stripper won’t have sex with you, you have no recourse, and you most certainly should not call the police about it. Take it away, Chris Rock:

– Stomach pain may be a sign of a more serious problem: A 60-year-old woman in India recently sought medical attention for stomach pain and other ailments. A lump found by doctors turned out not to be cancer, but something much stranger:

Dr Murtaza Akhtar, head of surgery at the hospital, told Daily Mail, “After she went for an MRI and CT scan we could make out that it was actually a matured skeleton encapsulated in a calcified sac.”

Apparently, Thakre had become pregnant in 1978 at the age of 24, but was told that the fetus most likely wouldn’t survive because it was an ectopic pregnancy, which means that the embryo implanted outside the uterus. Although she lost the child, she was too scared to have the fetus removed via surgery, so she just medicated the pain until she assumed that the situation resolved itself.

“The amniotic fluid that protects the fetus might have been absorbed and the soft tissues liquefied over time with only a bag of bones with some fluid remaining,” said Dr. Mohammad Yunus Shah, another physician on Thakre’s team.

***

It turns out that Thakre had actually been carrying the skeleton of the unborn baby for 38 years. Her surgical team did some research and found that the longest case of a woman carrying the remains of an ectopic pregnancy was 18 years by a Belgian woman.

Just a reminder that not everyone is happy to break a world record.