Yes we McCann

Some years ago, I remember seeing an artist's representation of all those too-fast-to-live rock stars, and how they’d look if they’d made it into their 50s and 60s. I was particularly taken by Jimi Hendrix who, had he lived to take part the Miles Davis collaboration that still captures the imagination of people who like noodly jazz-funk-rock fusion with occasional loud bits, would now look like Lester Freamon from The Wire. Apparently.

Of course, these reconstructions can have a practical benefit, especially when it comes to working out what missing children might look like. If Madeleine McCann is still alive she will now be six years old, and her parents have released an image depicting what she might look like. Of course, what they’re really doing is acknowledging that, what with the credit crunch and Jade Goody and swine flu and Susan Boyle and everything, even the mid-market tabloids had completely forgotten about her, so they needed a useful gimmick to get her back on our radar, if not to the days when her fate was so central to our very existence.

In the absence of anything approaching solid evidence, I guess they’ll be commissioning similar images every couple of years, and the media will feel duty bound to publish them. They know what sells.

So, in 12 years’ time, will we be able to enjoy reconstructions of what Madeleine McCann might look like, pissed and bleary, snapped from the gutter, as she stumbles out of a nightclub with her knickers on display?

Less than Jake

Apparently, Brokeback Mountain was shown on Italian TV on Monday night without the gay bits. Which is more ludicrous than Hamlet without the prince. Paris without the Eiffel Tower? Jethro Tull without flute solos? Your turn.

PS: More disappearing homosexuals here.

From despair to somewhere

Richey Edwards, lyricist, ideologue, stylist and half-assed guitarist for the Manic Street Preachers has finally been declared dead, nearly 14 years after his disappearance; as such, he warrants an obituary in the Daily Telegraph. I can't help but think that, had his body been found in 1995, he wouldn't have earned such a niche among the war heroes and Tory MPs. So essentially he's being honoured for his post mortem achievements, and the hotly debated Cult of Richey; we are encouraged to remember the myth and the mystery rather than the man.

Wot no chameleon circuit?

From the background notes for Dr Who, in the BBC archive, to which James Blue Cat so kindly directed us:

"Therefore, we do not see the machine at all; or rather it is visible only as an absence of visibility, a shape of nothingness..."

Production meetings in those days were clearly spun off from Cambridge philosophy tutorials. It amazes me that the show ever made it to the screen.