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Tuesday 5 May 2009

Our Lady of the Griddle



Oh, gawdelpus! Here we go! It’s Rorschach time again.

Every so often someone sees something resembling an allegedly divine face, whether it’s in brickwork, a hamburger or, in the latest case, a griddle in a restaurant in the border town of Calexico in California.

The story appears in several places, but my source is the Los Angeles Times, which says:


A cook at Las Palmas restaurant was the first to see the image.

“She started to cry and didn’t want to clean the griddle anymore,” said Brenda Martinez, who manages the family-owned restaurant.

The griddle has been taken off the stove and is now displayed in a room behind the kitchen that is quickly filling up with rosaries, flowers, votive candles and other offerings left by visitors from the Imperial Valley and from Mexicali across the border.

My first question with these things is always this: how the hell do they know what the Virgin Mary or any other allegedly historical figure looked like?

My second question is this: how the hell do we know it’s not (a) a hoax or (b) a means of getting thousands of column inches of publicity – especially since anything Mexican may be just a tad unfashionable in these days of the overplayed “pandemic” of swine flu?

Another thing to bear in mind is that the human brain makes sense of random squiggles, scratches and swirls. Have you never seen an image in the clouds? In tealeaves (I suppose some people still brew using leaf tea rather than teabags)?

Don’t psychologists use the Rorschach test linked to above – the so-called inkblot test – to elicit subconscious information from clients?

Perhaps swine flu has affected their brains.

3 comments:

Baal's Bum said...

I swear these are getting dafter.
If a vague image can look like a long haired man with a beard its jeebus if it's almost like a woman with a covered head it's mary and I suppose if you squint hard and see what looks like an old man with a six year old girl on its lap it must be mohammed.
All I can say is these people should take more care of which mushrooms they a cooking with.

Anonymous said...

The stain and the statue next to it are rather phallic. It's just a cooking stain, nothing more.

Anonymous said...

we are seeing a epidemic of stupidity