Pareidolia and The Chaser

We all love pareidolia.

Whether it be the Virgin Mary in tea leaves, or a Jesus piss stain on the wall of an alleyway, the very idea that a random colouring somewhere will look like a bearded person (Christ) or a non-bearded person (Mary) seems to confirm that old chestnut about a billion monkeys bashing away on typewriters.

I've often wondered why it's never Vishnu, or or the Jade Emperor.

Anyway, the Chaser boys had a crack at pareidolia on Wednesday night.

It's tasteless, cynical and of course, you have to love it.

Easter. Yay!!

I'm thinking of doing an annual Easter blog post with my thoughts on this joyous time of year.

I did one last year, and it was, after I re-read it, quite interesting I thought.

So this time around, I thought I'd look at the central underlying concept behind this annual free-for-all. The central essence. The meaning of it all. The one single most important thing that binds humanity at this yearly love-in:

Chocolate.

Yep. The wondrous brown stuff that we all love.

I was reading a book by Allan Pease, recently, titled Why Men Don't Listen, And Why Women Can't Read Maps, and there was an interesting bit about taste.

Now this book is a few years old, so the bit about taste has undergone a scientific paradigm shift since the book was written. Mainly in that science now acknowledges a fifth taste, now, that being "umami", or savoury.

Also, we now know that the taste centres on the tongue are not as clearly delineated as what we previously thought. But we still think that sweet is still there.

Consequently, the stats that the book quotes that have women as being more likely to be chocoholics than men still holds, although this is probably has to do with a lot more than just taste centres in the brain and tongue. Dopamine receptors is one. There are others.

Chocolate has been around for quite a while, but it was the Aztecs and Mayans of Central America who started cultivating it in a big way. I found a Wikipedia reference that had the Mayans consuming it as long ago as 2,600 years ago.

It comes from cocoa, which is itself produced from seeds found in the seed-pods of the cacao plant.

They basically brewed it into a drink, much like the hot chocolate that we drink now, although I can't find any info anywhere to suggest that they might have sweetened it at any stage. I did find out that the Aztecs liked theirs bitter and spicy, mainly due to the fact that they liked to try to concentrate the theobromine content. Theobromine is a bitter alkaloid with properties similar to caffeine - although it's not quite as strong a stimulant.

And, just like caffeine, theobromine is a mild diuretic which also increases serotonin production, although in large doses, theobromine also increases melatonin production as well in the human body.

The Aztecs called it Xocoatl.

Anyway, in Jamaica in 1689, a pharmacist named Hans Sloane is credited with inventing what we now know as milk chocolate.

Basically, Sloane had tried chocolate in its Indian form and found it vile. But when he mixed it with milk, he found that it was much better tasting.

Meanwhile, chocolate was becoming a much sought after commodity in Europe. The Cadbury brothers, John and Benjamin, were importing cocoa and selling it. The Cadbury brothers bought Sloane's recipe and found it to be massively popular when they started producing cocoa in Britain in the town of Bournbrook, which they got renamed, Bournville.

Bournville is now a suburb of the city of Birmingham, Britain's second largest city.

It wasn't long before solid chocolate was invented. Firstly, in the form of dark chocolate, and then later milk and white chocolate.

Today, most of the world's cacao is grown in Western Africa, with most of that grown in the Ivory Coast, or Cote d'Ivoire, if you like.

Chocolate is considered an addictive substance, with several chemicals contributing to this:

• Sucrose - the predominant sugar found in chocolate these days. I have seen diabetic chocolate which uses, amongst other things, fructose as a replacement. Not very diabetic friendly.
• Caffeine - the stimulant which gives tea and coffee their kick. Not much of this is in chocolate, but enough.
• Theobromine - this is chocolate's main stimulant. It's not as powerful as caffeine, but still reasonably potent.
• Anandamide - this is a cannabinoid which is also created in the human brain. Love this one.
• Tryptophan - this is an amino acid required for human nutritional needs. An excellent reason for eating chocolate. Tryptophan is used in the human body's production of serotonin, melatonin and also nicotinic acid, otherwise known as niacin, or vitamin b3.
• Phenylethylamine - this is an alkaloid and aromatic monoamine, which, it is suggested, may have psychoactive properties in large consumption.

At Easter, which is a global festival celebrating all things chocolaty, we celebrate this amazing food by eating loads of chocolate eggs, rabbits and chocolate in general.

In Australia, there is increased consumption of chocolate bilbies - the bilby is a large-eared marsupial which is the largest member of the bandicoot family.

Christians celebrate a festival at this time of the year, too, also called Easter. They have widely co-opted the chocolate motif, and shown great creativity by selling things like chocolate crosses and chocolate anatomically-correct effigies of Jesus. Sometimes this is considered controversial.

Man, I love chocolate. I'm pushing hard for an international chocolate festival in Melbourne during the Easter weekend in 2008.

It's just a shame that it would conflict with other major events.

The major one being the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

But anyway, have a good Easter. Partake of the chocolate sacrament.

Easter re-visited

I was recently prompted to re-visit an old post of mine ("Uoy Sevol Natas") that I stuck out there in April 1998.

My post was an attempt to put two and two together on some logical inconsistencies that struck me about Christian dogma.

More recently, I have become convinced that it will take a mind a lot more powerful than mine to put it all together in a way that doesn't use God's "get out" clause. That is, His "ineffability".

To gist my post from that period, the key points that I made were as follows:

1. At least some of the Bible is a lie;
2. God was not a good bloke;
3. God is a homophobe;
4. Judas Iscariot was a saint;
5. The Holy Spirit is none other than Satan; and
   
6. God is neither perfect nor omnipotent.

Anyway, it was with some interest that I read an article this week about a Gnostic Gospel according to Judas which has been recently discovered.

On top of this was an interesting doco on the ABC, narrated by Christopher Eccleston, which investigated who was responsible for Christ's death, called "Bible Mysteries".

Now, while I'm not so quick as some to judge who did what to whom, it always struck me that pinning the blame on Judas Iscariot was more a convenience thing, if nothing else.

What Bible Mysteries did was examine who the prime suspects were, and narrowed it down to three:

• Pontius Pilate
• Caiaphas; and
• JC Himself.

Leaving JI out as a suspect caught my interest.

Actually, in hindsight, I'm gunna start calling him by his name, or at least his "surname". JI sounds a bit like "Jemaah Islamiah".

The doco went through and itemised why it believed that these three were responsible.

I felt that Pilate's inclusion was clutching at straws a little bit.

Basically, Pilate told everyone that he was washing his hands of the whole thing. Well, what was he to do, really?

Caiaphas, Annas and the rest of the Sanhedrin had whipped up a lynch mob which was out for blood. Should Pilate have encouraged them by saying that this gathering was illegal and that if they didn't disperse, there would be carnage?

Pilate, as governor of Judaea, a self-governing Roman province, would not have had any interest in potentially losing troops from the local garrison if he could help it. Yet Pilate handed JC over to the mob despite the fact that he considered Christ to be innocent - again, what was he to do?

The Council of Nicaea sealed Pilate's fate by stating unambiguously that "Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate", indicating that Pilate should shoulder some of the blame for this, but is this warranted? Anyone would have caved in to this mob.

After all, when threatened by the church, Galileo recanted his views. We don't regard Galileo as having "sold out" - we regard Galileo as having been sensible.

Caiaphas was an obvious choice. But no Annas?

It does appear that Caiaphas would have had more impetus to shaft Christ - after all, he was the current sitting high priest. Annas was 'retired'.

I sided with the producers on this one.

If anyone killed JC, it was Him.

The evidence was compelling:

• Christ came in to Jerusalem in what would have been a pretty defiant entry that would have ruffled a few feathers.
• Christ was out to get attention when He unleashed a six-pack of whup-arse on the commercial activity in the temple forecourt; and
  
• He did, point blank, command Iscariot to betray Him.

I had to agree that if anyone was out to get Jesus here, it was Him.

The programme's producers were perhaps a little oblique about this, but the truth of the matter is that they could have summed all this up in a few short sentences:

1. He had to fulfil a celebrated prophecy by dying and coming back to life again.
2. He had to give just enough powerful people the shits for them to want Him dead
3. What better place to annoy a concentrated bunch of powerful people than the biggest city in the area, home to the Sanhedrin, and capital of the province?
4. How better to get noticed than by running amok in the temple forecourt?
5. He had to arrange for someone to betray him. Judas was a pawn who was used.
6. He had to be put to death. This would have been easy if you had got the first 5 of these points right.
7. As high priest, Caiaphas would have been forced to do something. Threatening the power of the high priest by claiming to be the Son of God probably sealed it.
8. Pilate would cave in to a lynch mob. "Incidents" would have been frowned upon back in Rome.
9. To summarise, Christ himself played everyone like they were accordions. Not even Macchiavelli could have done it nearly as well.

As far as I can tell, Christ was dead lucky that he wasn't born in this day and age.

Except for a few African countries, lynch mobs are harder to whip up now.

People tend to forget your name if a few thousand others get massacred at the same time.

2 and a half crosses for stringing me along. 2 more for actually having a Semitic-looking cast.