Faithful see vision of Virgin Mary on school pizza

[Randall Lord]

abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=local&id=5063342

2/23/07 - KTRK/HOUSTON) - Many Houstonians say they see something on a pizza pan that's nothing short of a miracle. And now, hundreds are flocking to an east Houston house on Leslie at Hahlo to get a peek.
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Apparently, they're serving something special at the cafeteria of Pugh Elementary. On Ash Wednesday, HISD employee Guadalupe Rodriguez was washing and scrubbing a sheet pan when she noticed something.

"On the third rinse I started watching it, trying to discover what it was," she recalled.

So moved by the discovery, Rodriguez took the pan to her manager, who saw the vision too.

HISD employee Coralia Pacay said, "I know it's something good for this community, and especially for this school."

What the women saw was an image that is unmistakable to them. It drew so much attention the pan was moved to a nearby home, where it has become the center of a shrine.

"I see an image of the Blessed Mother," said worshipper Vincent Santiago. "That's what I see."

Santiago came to the home to pray on the first Friday of Lent.

He said, "This is a sign that something in the world is going to happen. We don't know, but we have to keep our faith very, very strong on her."

A pilgrim from down the street, like so many whose faith is strengthened by what they know they see. And for the hard-working woman who found it? She feels blessed to be the messenger.

"It's all about faith," said Rodriguez.

More than 200 of the faithful attended the shrine on Thursday, and dozens more arrived on Friday. A service was planned for Friday evening.
(Copyright © 2007, KTRK-TV)

[janet]

Hahahaa! ;D

That's almost as good as the face of jeezus cooked into a tortilla in Mexico.

We need to do more baking around here and get some donations for holy sheet pans.

Holy sheet, Guadelupe! Did you try rinsing that pan one more time with a hot rinse?

[Bean]

How is this stuff news? Of course, The Shreveport Times has all kinds of religious articles, too, ranging over a wide variety of faiths: Baptist, Southern Baptist, Primitive Baptist, Catholic. Sheesh. (not a slight to you guys, just the paper printing this stuff as "breaking news.") Make me wish for a grilled cheese sandwich.

[Bean]

Is it Jeebus in the Road Side?

Sheesh.

[Randall Lord]

I just wanted to post an article that explains why people "see" Jesus, Mary or other holy figures in such ordinary objects:

www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=13&articleID=000EB977-12BE-1264-8F9683414B7FFE9F

Turn Me On, Dead Man
What do the Beatles, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, Patricia Arquette and Michael Keaton all have in common?
By Michael Shermer

In September 1969, as I began ninth grade, a rumor circulated that the Beatles' Paul McCartney was dead, killed in a 1966 automobile accident and replaced by a look-alike. The clues were there in the albums, if you knew where to look.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band's "A Day in the Life," for one, recounts the accident: He blew his mind out in a car / He didn't notice that the lights had changed / A crowd of people stood and stared / They'd seen his face before / Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords. The cover of the Abbey Road album shows the Fab Four walking across a street in what looks like a funeral procession, with John in white as the preacher, Ringo in black as the pallbearer, a barefoot and out-of-step Paul as the corpse, and George in work clothes as the gravedigger. In the background is a Volkswagen Beetle (!) whose license plate reads "28IF"--Paul's supposed age "if" he had not died.

Spookiest of all were the clues embedded in songs played backward. On a cheap turntable, I moved the speed switch midway between 331/3 and 45 to disengage the motor drive, then manually turned the record backward and listened in wide-eared wonder. The eeriest is "Revolution 9" from the White Album, in which an ominously deep voice endlessly repeats: number nine ... number nine ... number nine.... Played backward you hear: turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man....

In time, thousands of clues emerged as the rumor mill cranked up (type "Paul is dead" into Google for examples), despite John Lennon's 1970 statement to Rolling Stone that "the whole thing was made up." But made up by whom? Not the Beatles. Instead this was a fine example of the brain as a pattern-recognition machine that all too often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life.

What we have here is a signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association learning--associating the causal connections between A and B--as when our ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals. We are skilled enough at it to have survived and passed on the genes for the capacity of association learning.

Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations--A appears to be connected to B, but it is not (the baseball player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on false association learning.

Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition (Google key words for visuals): the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

Anecdotes fuel pattern-seeking thought. Aunt Mildred's cancer went into remission after she imbibed extract of seaweed--maybe it works. But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. Only when a group of cancer patients taking seaweed extract is compared with a control group can we draw a valid conclusion.

We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes. The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon has endured the winnowing process of natural selection. The Darwin Awards (honoring those who remove themselves from the gene pool), like this column, will never want for examples. Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.