In the 1880s, a young woman was found floating in the Seine River in Paris. It was exactly like the beginning of The Bourne Identity, if that movie had been 10 seconds long and about drowning. The police fished her body out of the water and sent her off to the coroner, because the 19th century was a time when investigative techniques went about as far as checking the immediate area for evil spirits and then going back to the police station to wait for someone to confess to the crime. The coroner became smitten with the corpse and took her body straight to a molder to have a plaster cast made of her dead face, because everything was terrifying back then.

Before the coroner could come back to pick up his plaster corpse mask, random customers in the molding shop took notice of the piece and began requesting duplicate casts of their very own. Because money often helps you ignore the pleas of your conscience as it is torn apart by foul wrongness, copies of the anonymous dead girl's face were soon mass produced. By the turn of the century, the mask was a must-have across France and Germany, which are a pair of countries that know a thing or two about horrifying craziness.

The fad mercifully waned, but the masks could still be found all over Europe. So when the first CPR dummy was created by a Norwegian toy maker back in 1960, he decided to base its face on the Woman of the Seine's famous lifeless fear helmet, because why the fuck wouldn't he? Every single rescue dummy manufactured since then has had her face, which means that if you've ever been a lifeguard or had to take CPR training in high school, you have wrapped your lips around the mouth of a 130-year-old dead girl. And to this day, nobody has any idea who she was, so odds are she's haunting at least one of us right now.

I was poking around today in Google's new-ish account summary page when I noticed that not only does it store your actually 'OK Google' voice search strings but it even stores the audio clips and you can play them all back from here. I can't comprehend the amount of storage space that must take up.

I was poking around today in Google's new-ish account summary page when I noticed that not only does it store your actually 'OK Google' voice search strings but it even stores the audio clips and you can play them all back from here. I can't comprehend the amount of storage space that must take up.

Not much in my case.

I can't comprehend the amount of storage space that must take up.

Once you run YouTube, you get quite relaxed about data storage. You also learn some new SI-prefixes, like "exa" as in "exabyte."

Overnight in Brum tomorrow added bonus of department curry somewhere in Sparkhill. Should be interesting.

Phwoar, eh, lads?!

I was given a tour, starting at the point where packs of mince were being shrink wrapped and going backwards from there, until there was a live cow standing in front of me.

What if they'd raised the steaks?

What if they'd raised the steaks?

I'm rubbish at this.

Sure it wasn't a Natterjack Turd?

The Oxford Union has today passed a motion that the Union is insitutionally racist, following a public outcry last week over advertising a cocktail in a manner deemed to be racist.

The cocktail was themed to coincide with the debate "‘This House believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies" and was called, 'The Colonial Comeback!'. One version of the flyer depicted black hands in chains.

There is still precious little evidence that the financial system has meaningfully reformed itself. Indeed the saga of corrupted incentives and unjustified greed continues apace. Banks that once had some claim to relative moral authority and practical leadership such as HSBC and JPMorgan have shown themselves to be as out of control as their presumed inferiors.