In what is perhaps the strangest tech news of the last week or so, John Lennon has been digitally brought back from the grave in order to star in a video advert for the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
28 years after he was brutally murdered in cold blood outside his apartment building in New York, everybody's favourite hippy Beatle pops up on YouTube to tell us all about the joys of giving cheap, solar-powered computers to the world's poor.
"Imagine every child, no matter where in the world they were, could access a universe of knowledge," Lennon's image is cleverly made to say in the commercial.
Creepy? Or clever?
It continues, in an increasingly unsettling way, with the dead Beatle adding: "They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want. I tried to do it through my music, but now you can do it in a very different way."
Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono has apparently given her approval for the commercial.
BoingBoing sums up our feelings about the whole matter rather well, noting that: "Resurrecting the dead to shill modern products is not going to catch on. Digitally, it's creepy, and reeks of defilement no matter how well done."
Check out the ad over on YouTube. Clever p*ss-take or geniune ad? Make your own mind up.
