The Blessed Virgin Mary Appears in Como Park

That's right. The Holy Virgin Mary. In St. Paul. My mother, who isn't a Catholic, spotted the miracle on a walk. She enlisted my brother to record the Blessed sign with his camera. Look closely and you can see that Mary is holding the Baby Jesus.

This sort of stuff happens to my family all the time. A few years ago I found a tomato that looked exactly like Jesus Christ -- as a fetus.

Coincidentally, the New York Times has a story today explaining why human beings see faces in the surface of Mars, the grilled cheese in the pan, and the tree in the park. Apparently we identify faces in much the same way a computer would:

When [M.I.T.'s Dr. Pawan Sinha] presented human subjects with blurry face images, containing only 12 by 14 pixels’ worth of visual information, they performed similarly well, recognizing 75 percent of the face images accurately. This suggests that like the computer, the human brain processes faces holistically, like coherent landscapes, rather than one feature at a time.

And Boston University's Takeo Watanabe, a neuroscientist, thinks part of it is the number of faces people see per day that makes us see faces when they aren't actually there. Don't let that make you think that we aren't seeing the Virgin Mary in that tree. God wouldn't screw with us like that.