Okay, we know it feels like Michael Jackson’s face is everywhere these days, but officials at the Field Museum in Chicago weren’t seeing things when they noticed that a 3,000-year-old bust of an Egyptian pharoah bears an uncanny resemblance to the reconstructed face of the late singer.
The distressed face of the stone carving shouldn’t be taken to mean that Jacko’s visage was more natural than we thought: the Egyptian depicted was a woman, and at least part of the compelling similarity is due to the absence of the ancient figure’s nose.

What the resemblance puts one in mind of, besides a science-fiction flick’s cheezy set-up for a sequel, is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandius,” the poet’s rebuke to the impermanence of greatness: finding a monument to a long-forgotten “king of kings” in the sands of Egypt, a traveler ponders its inscription, “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” while all around “the decay of that colossal wreck,… the lone and level sands stretch far away.” Will the King of Pop suffer the same fate?