Politics

How to find a lost canoe

December 07, 2007
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I was delighted to learn that the key evidence to emerge thus far in "canoegate" (a place where spurious etymology meets lazy journalism) emerged not via the expert efforts of Interpol but via an anonymous woman going onto google images and typing in the words "John", "Anne" and "Panama." At which point the crucial image appeared, apparently showing amnesiac canoeist John Darwin safely standing next to his wife in Panama in 2006, an inconveniently long time before he was officially due to return from the dead.

Intriguingly, after all the recent media coverage, the trick still works. Simply go to google images, type in those three words in that order, and you'll find staring back at you the now-infamous mugs of two of "our customers" from the move to Panama website. And while you're at it, take a look at the top few image results for the words "tony" and "blair." Clearly some kind of truth-gremlin has taken up google residence…