She's a brick....house

At times, LEGO bricks feel like memories trapped in plastic for me. And so this morning, when I discovered that a British teenager had built a bust of Amy Winehouse -- I immediately was brought back to that swinging summer of 2008. Heady times, indeed.

It was just after that summer, in September, when I was touring the LEGO factory in Billund, Denmark. The LEGO Group had caused a sensation by releasing 3-D mock-ups of stars as minifigs, including singer Amy Winehouse to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the iconic little figures.

As I toured the factory with a photographer and writer from a German newspaper, the writer asked our tour guide about the Winehouse minifig.

"Do you have the Amy Winehouse LEGO people here?" she asked.

"No, it was just a promotion, we never actually made them," explained our guide.

"So, do you have them here?" she asked.

It likely happened earlier, but that was one of the moments when I knew I was no longer an objective reporter of the facts as I had to force myself not to intervene on our guide's behalf. I had read months earlier on an adult fan site that the minifigs were never manufactured.

And by that point of the tour, we had reached the first conveyor belt in the factory and LEGO minifig heads were rolling by, so I had much more important matters to attend to, such as not snatching a handful of the heads and making a break for the front door.

Image courtesy of the Sun.