celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I was struck, on reading through the various obituaries and tributes for music industry mogul and Arista label founder Clive Davis, by his resemblance to actor, comedian and gravelly-voiced professional Londoner Mike Reid.

Reid (who died back in 2007) got a mention (the only one, as far as I can tell) on this blog almost exactly a year ago in a musical context. Reid's voice, general look and mannerisms were, I'd assume, largely the inspiration for the Fast Show's Dave Angel character. Davis, on the other hand, sounds (or sounded, anyway) pretty much exactly like you would expect him to sound. 

celoubrity junkeylikey of the day

Cast your mind back, if you will, to (roughly) this time three years ago, when we'd just moved house and were sifting through the mountain of junk that the previous occupant had left behind. We never actually got to meet him - the closest we got was talking to him through a closed front door when we came to do a second viewing of the house with the estate agent and found him unexpectedly at home, self-isolating after contracting COVID. Perhaps, and I'm being as charitable as I possibly can here, this disrupted his plans to do some clearing out of assorted junk in the lead-up to handing the house over and eventually led to him just saying fuck it, I'm off, and bailing out.

The aforementioned junk was all over the house, in the loft and also in the rickety metal shed occupying a corner of the back garden. The stuff in the shed probably contained the most interesting material, including a pair of handcuffs and a diary which I think belonged to the previous owner's ex-wife and seemed to have been started in the wake of her having been dumped by some subsequent boyfriend.

On a similar theme to the handcuffs, the junk in the loft contained a browned old paper CD/DVD envelope bearing the legend "ORGY" but sadly with nothing inside. Maybe this was the one item the previous owner deemed worthy of packing up and taking with him. 

Also in the loft was an intriguing sepia photo - from quite a few years back, judging by the size of the collars - which could be the previous owner, but could also, judging by the heavy-lidded eyes that have clearly Seen Too Much, be a young Lou Reed. 

Anyway, the rickety metal shed pictured above (the green structure just visible on the right of the first photo) is no more and has been replaced by something unimaginably more fabulous, which I might devote a whole future post to, if I can be arsed. 

spacelebrity doggylikey of the day

Just a quick one today - I have no idea what sequence of clicks sent me down the YouTube rabbit-hole that led to some detailed second-by-second analysis of the Columbia space shuttle re-entry and break-up, but I assume these are things that have been pushed a bit more than usual by the algorithm given the imminence (February 1st) of the 23rd anniversary of the disaster, and indeed the even nearer imminence of the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster (January 28th). Anyway, it struck me, and hear me out here, that the nose of the shuttle, from certain angles, is slightly reminiscent of Brian Griffin from Family Guy. 

criclebrity lookeylikey of the day

Here's a timely one with the Ashes series in Australia about to kick off (tonight, in fact) and all England supporters filled with a mixture of trepidation (the last three Australian Ashes series have finished 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 in Australia's favour) and that most crippling and corrosive of all emotions, hope. I suppose a good start would be the series not being effectively over after the very first ball as it was last time. 

Anyway, here's England's unexpected nemesis from last time Scott Boland and actor Wes Bentley, one of the breakout stars of the multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty, a film which seems to have had a sharp (and probably partly Spacey-related) drop-off in critical regard in the last couple of decades but which I recall seeing a couple of times and quite enjoying, while noting that it seemed to think itself slightly cleverer and deeper than it probably actually was. One odd thing about it, though, is that all three of the young actors who were shot to stardom after playing major roles - Bentley, Thora Birch and Mena Suvari - have, while continuing to work in films, receded into relative obscurity since and not become the major stars that everyone predicted they would be. Bentley seems to have navigated the standard actorly route of sudden colossal stardom -> drug addiction, extreme mental derangement -> sobriety, return to regular film work prototyped by Robert Downey jr. among others. The only thing I'm aware of having seen him in since American Beauty is the remake of Pete's Dragon which also starred Robert Redford.

I'm not going to do a separate post for it, but we haven't done an "incidental music spot of the day" for a while so I will just draw your attention to the trailer linked above making use of Baba O'Riley by The Who, a song which has featured here before, back in 2007. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Seen on Facebook this week, this short video inviting "wrong answers only" to the question of who the mystery golfer is. There's limited fun in this, as his identity is revealed in the caption at the bottom, but I do have a suggestion. So here's Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik (for it is he, sporting a moustache and bouffant hairdo combo that he didn't have during his prime playing days of the late 1990s and early 2000s) and American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

I've no idea of the date of the footage; I don't want to assume it's recent just because the algorithm threw it into my timeline in the last couple of days. All I can tell you is that Parnevik didn't have the 'tache/'fro combo when he bagged his only PGA Champions Tour victory in 2016, so it's probably more recent than that. He doesn't play much these days.

Anyway, both of these guys have featured on this blog before: Vonnegut twice as a book featuree (Cat's Cradle and The Sirens Of Titan) and prior to both of those on the occasion of his death in April 2007, and Parnevik in the course of a throwaway aside at the end of this post about Ayers Rock/Uluru in late 2019. Parnevik also continues the strong tradition of golfers featuring in this category, as evidenced most recently just a couple of months ago. 

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I've got two for you today, which it seems to me fall into the categories, respectively, Fairly Commonplace and Incredibly Niche, although that is of course partly a matter of perspective.

Firstly, JJ Spaun, this year's US Open champion and unwitting instigator of incredibly laboured punnery (see below), and Jeffrey Wright, fine actor with a wide and varied body of work but pictured here as James Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter, solely because while playing this role he happened to have roughly the right sort of beard. 

finally - FINALLY! - after a couple of near-misses, I get to do the YOU SPAUNY GET joke. holing a 64-foot putt for it (with the caveat that he did have a spare one if he'd needed it) makes it even more perfect #golf #USOpen https://t.co/vbe07yEf1l

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 16, 2025

I try not to get in my own way too much with a lot of self-analysis once my brain has popped one of these unbidden into my head, but of course when people of colour are involved you have to ask yourself: am I, even entirely subconsciously, Doing A Racism here? I think there are two answers to that: the first one is, well, I can't possibly know for sure, so probably best not to worry about it, and the second is that I'm pretty confident a jury would not convict me of this pair being the most tenuous and squint-requiring supposed resemblance on this blog. Even applying the incredibly restrictive condition of only considering US Open golf champions I think most people would agree that the Lucas Glover one was more obscure. The Webb Simpson one was pretty good, though, although technically he wasn't a US Open champion at the time of the post.

Secondly, American stand-up comic - well, not exactly stand-up, as you'll see if you follow the link - Fiona Cauley and wild warrior woman Ygritte from the TV series Game Of Thrones, as played by Rose Leslie. I should point out that I have never watched an episode of Game Of Thrones, or, as Stewart Lee would have us call it, Peter Stringfellow's Lord Of The Rings. This is partly because I just don't watch TV very much, partly because there's just SO MANY SEASONS of it to get through, and partly because it's firmly in swords and sorcery and Things Of Power fantasy territory, something that doesn't really do it for me, tits notwithstanding. I really am only aware of either Fiona Cauley or Ygritte because some ill-judged clicking on some short videos a while back has unleashed the fearsome power of the Facebook/YouTube algorithm on me and now I get an unavoidable steady diet of stand-up comedy and Game Of Thrones clips presented in my feed, during the course of which I happened to see these two people in quickish succession.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are author Harlan Coben and actor, author, amateur chef and mixologist Stanley Tucci.

The only Harlan Coben book I have ever read is Tell No One, which I read a copy of owned by my then-girlfriend shortly after its 2001 publication in a desperate holiday running-out-of-books frenzy, something I would obviously never allow to happen nowadays. I would describe it as enjoyable, gripping and utterly ludicrous, which is all absolutely fine for a fairly pulpy thriller. Like many primarily plot-driven things it and its many successors in Coben's oeuvre are prime material for film and TV adaptations, and sure enough there have been a whole raft of them, most recently the Netflix series adapted from Run Away, which seems to feature a cast of mainly British actors.

Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, is probably right now deep in some method-acting preparation for the plum role of me in the movie of my life. For him to be a perfect fit appearance-wise I probably need to get slightly balder, something which I'm pretty sure will happen all too imminently. 

did an icebreaker at a work meeting the other day where the question was "who would play you in a movie of your life". panicked slightly trying to think of bespectacled bald fiftysomethings and said Stanley Tucci. increasingly convinced of the genius of the idea

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 17, 2023

smallebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are my son Huw and 1970s yellow cartoon weirdo Bod. Small skinny-legged person, three-letter name, voluminous upper garment coming down below waist level, profile view that makes them appear to only have one leg.

A bit of context for both halves of the image: the thing Huwie is standing on is a groyne (no, stop it) on Southbourne beach where we were last weekend, and the thing Bod is looking at is, and I quote: "an enormous bowl of strawberries and cream". This is from the episode Bod's Dream which can be seen here. The thing people who grew up in the 1970s forget about Bod is that the animated bit was only the first 4-5 minutes of a 15-minute show, and the rest of it was filled with some stuff-spotting puzzles, random songs and the interminable adventures of Alberto Frog And His Amazing Animal Band, culminating in the impossibly thrilling climax wherein Alberto chose a flavour of milkshake for a reward (for solving some mystery or other) from a shortlist of about three. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I experienced a jarring moment while reading about the upcoming change in presenter on the Radio 2 breakfast show. I should make it clear that while I do listen to the show, in very specific circumstances that we'll come to in a second or two, I don't really care who presents it, and I find both Zoe Ball and Scott Mills fairly uninspiring as radio presenters. The reason I listen to it at all is that it's the noise that my alarm clock/radio is programmed to make at the appointed hour in the morning, on weekdays anyway. I can't say I actually pay much attention to the show's contents, but instead generally whack the snooze button once and then when it goes off again heave myself out of bed, mostly drowning out the radio with a cacophony of groaning and creaking and farting noises. 

But why Radio 2? The rudimentary reasoning goes as follows: Radio 4 might either be not loud enough to wake me up, or the topics discussed on the Today programme might distract me into shouting at the radio or something and make me late. Radio 1, on the other hand, is probably a bit brash and noisy and inclined to Young People's Music which, honestly, is just shouting with a beat. What about craftsmanship? Ballads? Anyway, Radio 2 it is. The added advantage of Zoe Ball's show in its current form is that she does a sort of version of Thought For The Day (called, if you please, Pause For Thought) just after the first snooze interval elapses, so that gives me a good incentive to get up and turn the radio off before Kate Bottley or someone similar comes on and tells us all about how if Jesus were here today (and of course he is, in a very real but also not actually real sense) he'd be down at the local multi-storey car park doing some sick parkour in baggy shorts and a hoody, or something.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but no harm done. The point is that the article on the BBC News website included a picture of what appeared to be a crude and slightly cruel effigy of Scott Mills hewn from shiny pinky-orange wax and then left in a room that was slightly too warm for a couple of hours, but was in fact, it turns out, the actual Scott Mills. The first thought I had was that he looked a bit like those two guys who'd had their chins extended (among various other procedures) so that they ended up looking a bit like Vic & Bob's The Ponderers, only with more terrifying hair and teeth. The trouble was, I had no idea of their names. Luckily I am pleased to be able to report that a Google search for "weird plastic surgery guys" proved instantly fruitful and revealed their identity: Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, both of whom died within a week of each other of COVID-19 in early 2022. That's Grichka in the photo below, or so the internet tells me, but it doesn't really make much difference.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Special recently deceased sporting celebrity slash dreadful 1980s music throwback edition today, as we see recently deceased former Olympic shot putter, World's Strongest Man and budgie enthusiast Geoff Capes face off against Joe Fagin, singer of various songs soundtracking the hit TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (a show I should say I have never seen even a single minute of) one of which, That's Livin' Alright, gave him his solitary chart hit in early 1984. 

Despite the one-off nature of this brush with the charts, Fagin had the barefaced chutzpah to entitle his 1996 compilation album All The Hits Plus More. The cover images available on the internet for his earlier album Time Is A Thief reveal an amusing typo in the title of the song Love Hangs By A Thread which puts a whole new Berlin leather bar spin on it:

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and our current deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and, hem hem, adult entertainment performer Lauren Phillips (that link is safe, search for anything else and you're on your own). I mean, obviously it's mainly the hair. Anyway, one of them has regular encounters with Black Rod, and the other is a British politician; I expect you can make up your own jokes.

Leaving aside the knob jokes for a moment, I suspect Ashton-under-Lyne is one of the most commonly mis-spelt British place names, in that many people will assume it mirrors the form of the slightly better-known Newcastle-under-Lyme and therefore put an "m" in it. Ironically both suffixes seem to derive from words meaning "elm", in this case presumably elms on a hill, since the "under" conjunction usually (as you might expect) denotes that the thing after it is either the name of a nearby hill or a prominent thing on a nearby hill. 

There are quite a few place names of this type in Britain, some hyphenated, some not, including the splendidly named Weston-under-Lizard, which, like Newcastle-under-Lyme, is in Staffordshire, and not, as you might imagine, Cornwall. 

Anyway, other easily mis-rendered place names include Mevagissey (which is in Cornwall this time) which I genuinely spent a good chunk of my life assuming was called Megavissey, which not only rolls off the tongue more easily but also allows me to adapt the joke I made here and here and suggest that you get there by going through Millivissey and Kilovissey; if you get as far as Gigavissey you've gone too far. There is also the strange case of the Scottish town of Dumbarton (with an "m") being in the county of Dunbartonshire (with an "n") which can only be a cruel joke designed to catch people out. 

celebrity deathylikey of the day

The large number of photographs of Italian footballer Salvatore "Toto" Schillaci on the internet this week, in the aftermath of his death aged 59, prompted me to notice that he looked a bit (to me, as always, just to pre-empt any "no he doesn't" nonsense) like comedian Geoff Norcott.

Schillaci was one of those sportspeople who, rather than having a long and glorious career, flowered briefly and gloriously and then didn't do much else - Bob Massie rather than Glenn McGrath, say, or Vinod Kambli rather than Sachin Tendulkar. Seven of his sixteen international caps, and six of his seven international goals, came during the 1990 World Cup where he won the Golden Boot, although, oddly, it was known as the Golden Shoe at the time. 

Geoff Norcott's USP seems to be that he is a rare "right-wing" comedian in a profession dominated by instinctively left-leaning people. Personally I'm not convinced these terms have a great deal of meaning, and certainly if you watch Norcott's stand-up routines he comes across as a fairly engaging blokey sort of bloke, rather than, say, Hitler. 

lookeylikey slash headline of the day

Is it just me who has trouble parsing this headline I saw the other day?

OK, so let's start at the beginning: "I'm a Wimbledon champion marrying fan" - well, OK so you're a fan; I might have hyphenated "Wimbledon champion-marrying" or even "Wimbledon-champion-marrying" just to make it clearer, but let's carry on ... wait, now the rest of the sentence doesn't make sense.

Back up all the way to the beginning and it becomes clear that the starting "I'm" relates to "champion" rather than "fan", and that it was the fan who stopped the champion for a selfie. It didn't help that I initially read "help run tennis" as "help ruin tennis", but that's the fault of my appalling age-related vision deterioration, not the headline writers. 

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that assuming "fan" to be the subject of the first line is the more natural reading. It would really only have taken the addition of an "a" before "fan" to flip the default reading around, though. I'm not sure whether this is more properly classified as a garden-path sentence or a noun pile-up, or maybe even a crash blossom.

Anyway, the actual story relates to 2017 Wimbledon champion Garbiñe Muguruza, the only player to defeat each of the Williams sisters in Grand Slam finals, and, and I hesitate to say this these days for fear of being LITERALLY CANCELLED, possessor of a very lovely pair of legs. The guy she was accosted by for a selfie in New York just happens to be a top model who was working for Tom Ford at the time, just in case you want to calculate your chances of being able to successfully pull off a similar manoeuvre on the top tennis star of your choice without getting your ass tased and ending up with an ASBO.

Impossible to comment on women's tennis in any way without sounding like a colossal sex pervert. #Wimbledon2014

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 28, 2014

Anyway. it also struck me while looking through some photos of Muguruza for, hem hem, "research purposes" that she looks a bit like Imogen Heap, who I see I used the phrase "strange equine beauty" in connection with here, and also compared with Ronni Ancona. I actually think the Muguruza-Heap resemblance is closer, but I include all three anyway; make up your own mind.

snorklebrity lookeyspikey of the day

Today's pairing features my son Huw, in the pool at our holiday house in Brittany a couple of weeks ago and borrowing some of his big sister's swimming accessories, in particular her face-mounted snorkel, and also the strange underwater artificial dinosaur hybrid submarine that I drew for my school yearbook at Bandung International School in Java in about 1979 (when I would have been about nine). Obviously the shape and positioning of the snorkel is the thing that brought the two together in my mind.

The drawing was accompanied by the following explanatory (well, sort of) text:

It's interesting to unpick all the things that (consciously or unconsciously) influenced both the drawing and the text in my nine-year-old mind:

• The BBRFC on the creature's sleeve, and indeed the rest of the design of the T-shirt the creature is wearing, is a reference to Bandung Barbarians Rugby Football Club, a loosely-organised group of expatriates from various countries (mainly the UK, Australia and New Zealand) for which my father used to turn out. My recollection of the various rugby days out we went to during our time in Java was that they were mainly a pretext for epic beer consumption, probably mainly the product of the Anker brewery with whom the club seemed to have cooked up some sort of endorsement/sponsorship deal, judging by the club T-shirt I am wearing in the images below (probably taken at Pangandaran). The beardy guy piloting the craft is also probably modelled on my Dad, though I should point out he has never smoked a pipe as far as I know.

• The general concept for the creature is clearly adapted/stolen from the Tintin book Red Rackham's Treasure which I read approximately a gazillion times. The smaller shark-based craft there was the brainchild of eccentric genius Professor Calculus. That's his English name, anyway, he was called Tournesol in the original French books. Translations into other languages are available, including, rather marvellously, Welsh; who knows what his name is there. 

• Obviously kids love dinosaurs, and you can see bits from at least three separate dinosaurs in the design of the creature: the head with its distinctive crest is clearly a parasaurolophus, the big fin thing on its back looks as if it's from a dimetrodon, and the spiked tail is a bit like that of a stegosaurus, informally known in slightly tedious paleontological nerd humour circles as a thagomizer. The fins at the rear are presumably a hangover from the fish design I stole the idea from, and I have no idea why the front limbs seem to have their elbows on backwards.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Anyone been wondering: what's that lanky guy out of The Verve been doing for the last 20-odd years? No, me neither, and to be honest you won't find out by reading this article on the BBC website which is basically just a promo piece for some upcoming solo gigs. What you will find, though, is that having avoided the stereotypical fiftysomething route of just getting really fat and bald, he's (we should give him a name: Richard Ashcroft) instead just got slightly more big-nosed and wrinkly while seemingly still retaining the leonine rock star mane - I say "seemingly" because he could of course be completely bald on top under the hat, indeed the whole hair could be one of those comedy hairpieces that's attached to the hat and lifts right off. 

Ashcroft and The Verve have parlayed quite a long and intermittently successful career of the back of maybe two years in the late 1990s when they coincided with the Zeitgeist, basically around the time of their third album Urban Hymns. In hindsight a lot of it sounds a bit one-paced and dreary these days - Sonnet would probably be the one to hang on to. 

Anyway, Ashcroft resembles no-one these days so much as 70s and 80s cannabis-smuggler, Welshman and late-90s celeb (surfing the same vaguely Loaded-esque ladsy Zeitgeist as Ashcroft) Howard Marks. You can make up your own The Drugs Don't Work jokes if you like. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Masters weekend has just been and gone, and as usual provided some memorable golf as well as a few memorable incidents. I mean, nothing as dramatic as last year with actual trees falling over and endangering lives (thankfully and slightly miraculously no-one was injured), but there was an interesting incident during first round leader Bryson DeChambeau's slightly more chaotic second round when he pushed his drive at the 13th and decided to take an unorthodox route to the green via the 14th fairway. It all worked out pretty well in the end but did require the removal of an obstruction - a large wooden sign. DeChambeau's taking this task into his own hands provided an image which reminded me of something else, specifically the crucifixion procession in Monty Python's Life Of Brian. 

Out of the clubhouse, line on the left, one scorecard each.

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I have two for you today - now in theory I could parlay that into two posts in a pathetic and transparent bid to bump the blog stats up, post frequency and aggregate numbers not being what they once were back in the pre-marriage, pre-kids glory glory days of 2008, but you know and I know that that would be a shameful and hollow sham and a travesty and I respect you (yes, even you) too much to do it.

So here's Dan Hartman, successful songwriter of the 1970s and 1980s and occasional solo artist in his own right (1985's I Can Dream About You is probably the one you remember if you're of a similar age to me), and Kim Hughes, Australian batsman of the late 1970s and early 1980s, most remembered - rather unjustly - for his luckless stint as captain during the 1981 Ashes series when he was on the wrong end of Ian Botham's various legendary deeds, and for resigning the captaincy in a tearful hot mess in 1984. 

Secondly, Huwie recently got Neil Gaiman's Pirate Stew out of the library, and among Chris Riddell's many splendid illustrations of the motley piratical crew is this flamboyant chap, who, I'm sure you'll agree, closely resembles Dave Navarro, guitarist with Jane's Addiction since their formation in the mid-1980s and with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for quite LIDDERALLY One Hot Minute in the mid-1990s. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Red Bull Formula 1 head honcho Christian Horner, currently *cough* in the midst of some, erm, personal issues, and Scottish comedian and internet provocateur Limmy, whose current incarnation as a video game streamer on Twitch I find somewhat baffling but which clearly makes him happy and pays the bills, so it's all good. The longer-form TV stuff he used to do is pretty good, and the things like the compilation of short clips originally posted to Vine featuring his increasingly deranged plasterer is a thing of bleak Beckettian brilliance.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I can't remember how I came across this video featuring former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic (among others, including Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil - a much longer version can be found here) but it struck me that firstly I had no idea what he'd been up to for the last 30 years and secondly that actually one thing that he evidently had been doing was turning into Hank Kingsley from The Larry Sanders Show, as portrayed by Jeffrey Tambor.

islebrity moomeylikey of the day

In these febrile and uncertain times, a man likes to be able to fall back on certain, well, certainties - the depressing ones like death and taxes, sure, but also the slightly happier stuff like the certain knowledge that if you spend enough time looking at maps you will eventually come across an island that looks like a house, or a horse, or a cock, or a horse cock, or one of any number of other amusing things. 

I think I spotted the thing I'm about to share with you while watching this video about fascinating border anomalies in Australia, including the excellent snippet that despite Tasmania being an island, it and Victoria share a land border, albeit a very short one. While the whole video is worth a watch, the thing that caught my eye did so very early at about 11 seconds in, and it is this: the largest island in the Bass Strait, Flinders Island, situated off the north-east corner of Tasmania, closely resembles one of Tove Jansson's Moomins. See for yourself: