Tuesday, October 20, 2009

A Mystery for Our Time

My fairly lofty opinion of McClatchy Newspapers may need to be dialed back a notch or two after this lede this morning:
MERCED, Calif. — Nobody can say why the Virgin of Guadalupe would appear on a hunk of rock formed millions of years before the birth of Jesus.

But David Nunez says the image is unmistakable — a bluish-black stain on the football-sized rock outlines what looks like the Holy Mother.

Friends have called it a miracle.

Really? Nobody can say? It seems like somebody could say, though, and it turns out a couple of people actually can, so thank Mary-in-a-rock the reporter decided to ask them. One is a priest, and the other is a geologist. What does the priest think?

"People see what they want to see," said [the Rev. Harvey] Fonseca, who hasn't examined the rock.

Well then. Scientist?

[Rob] Rogers, the geologist, said he couldn't see the image in the e-mailed photos of the rock. "I must lack imagination," he said.

And science lives to fight another day.


Personally, I think it looks like a giant Cretaceous almond. You know, the kind of big ol' nut T. rex was given those pointy teeth to crack open before Eve ate the apple and brought planet-wide veganism to a crashing halt. Can't you see the long gougy toothmarks? Does that make it a slightly cooler miracle? I think so.

3 comments:

Damien said...

Sorry, but that can't hold a candle to the grilled cheese sandwich appearance. I guess those zealots are becoming too easy to impress these days.

fev said...

Eh ... Merced is fairly new to McClatchy, but it was acquired before the K-R merger, and most of McClatchy's current glory comes from the K-R side's (bold and highly justified, but distinctly pre-merger) skepticism in Washington about the alleged case for war with Iraq.

The individual papers themselves have always been pretty uniformly gullible when it came to deities on foodstuffs, and that sort of stuff just gets amplified when it's sent to Washington and recirculated to the provinces.

Sorry, had to complain.

Homer said...

Looks like a spoiled squash to me. Praise Jeebus