A Human Irony

Newfoundlander Mike Parsons has been catapulted into internet stardom after unwittingly photographing an iceberg that looks exactly like Batman.

By Wednesday, the Batman photo had made the rounds of websites and newspapers the world over, including the New York Daily News, the Mirror and the gossip site PerezHilton.com.

Human beings have this remarkable ability to anthropomorphize.  We see faces in the clouds, in trees; we go so far as to envision God in our image.  It's a skill that's particularly useful to babies (recognizing a human face out of the morass of images helpless infants are confronted with) that plays fun games with our minds as we get older.

At the same time, we have a remarkable ability to dehumanize actual people.  We are very good at not looking in the eye of a homeless person or someone manifesting mental illness on the street - or dying in a foreign land of war or starvation, or suffering under our very nose.

Such is the human condition, I guess.