Sideswipe: January 26: You named your bookshop what?

Thrilling in the name.

Proving Santa exists

In the US, the Rhode Island Department of Health says it was not able “to definitively confirm or refute the presence of Santa” in a young girl’s home after she requested to have a partially eaten cookie and a couple of gnawed-on carrot sticks tested for DNA to see if Santa Claus is real. The department tweeted: “We all agree that something magical may be at play.” The department said it found no complete matches to anyone in the Combined DNA Index System but said there was a partial match “to a 1947 case centred around 34th Street in New York City”, referring to the movie Miracle on 34th Street. It said it would need more DNA samples “from other known Santa encounters to make a definitive match”.

No bathroom apartments

Increasing numbers of young residents in Tokyo are deliberately choosing apartments that are so inexpensive that they don’t have a shower, then making use of one of the city’s declining number of sentos - public bathhouses. There’s a risk involved: sentos aren’t open 24 hours a day and the average cost of a single use is about 500 yen ($5.90). But this option is popular enough that there’s now a website that specialises in helping people find apartments without baths within a short walking distance of a sento.

Relatable tweets

A head of the game.

1. “I get Botox, not for ageing reasons, but to stop my face from being able to react to things before my brain gets a chance to weigh in.”

2. “My wife is on a Facebook group called Buy Nothing, where people list stuff they’re giving away. The other day a lady came to our house to pick up two muesli bars we didn’t like.”

3. “Found out tonight that my son thought there was an item on the McDonald’s menu called Phillip the Fish.”