A Canadian Core of Belief

Mary on toast: Hollywood icon for sure?

About two years ago a woman who lives down the road from me, sold on E-bay what was purported to be an image of the Virgin Mary still visible on a decade-old toasted cheese sandwich. The Hollywood, Florida-made morsel fetched a tidy $28,000 when the bidding ended despite the fact that the iconic face resembled Toronto-born film star Mary Pickford more than any Holy Virgin of note.


Still, in age where cynicism and gloom are rampant, it is uplifting to note another faith-related event that took place last month in the Alberta township of Cowpie Corral, about 50 km southeast of Calgary. During the bus ride to Meadow Muffin Middle School, eighth-grader Barton Gilhooley opened his lunch box and discovered, staring back at him from the obverse side of his Granny Smith apple the discernible image of a youthful Pope Benedict XVI (!) as identified by bus driver Blanche Slocum.

The 12-year-old, not knowing whose image it was, promptly took the possibly miraculous fruit to the school office where stunned counselors and an assistant principal summoned a priest, a rabbi and an orthodontist to examine the object more closely. Upon closer inspection, the somewhat indistinct image was determined not to be the pope at all but, in fact, the controversial British patriot Benedict Arnold! At that point, the priest, New York-born Father Elvis Flanagan declared the apple to be possessed and telephoned the Archdiocese in nearby Moose Poop Flats to arrange an exorcism while Rabbi Sharon Shipperton and orthodontist Javier Kawasaki got into an argument over the proper pronunciation of the town name. Newcomers prefer the vaguely French-sounding “Ko-PAY Corral” to the earthier original. Old-timers say such trifling with tradition would only confuse the town with Tombstone, Arizona and a celebrated gunfight there.

Benedict or Arnold? We'll never learn the apple "apparition"

But before any of this could be satisfactorily resolved, a ravenous sixth-grader, Wendy McDonald, sent to the office for tardiness, grabbed the apple from the assistant principal’s desk and gnawed it to the core, utterly obliterating the image. And despite the frantic efforts of orthodontist Kawasaki to extract evidentiary fragments from the child’s braces, the apple apparition was irretrievably lost.

The most remarkable thing about the entire episode was that young Wendy later that day passed her first history quiz since third grade. It has to make you believe.

Are we there, Yeti?

Still in the Canadian hinterlands, we are greatly relieved that our sources report that those repeated sightings of a “Big Foot” or Susquatch in the Yukon Territory on two November weekends has turned out to be nothing more frightening than US Vice President Dick Cheney returning from previously undisclosed hunting forays in over-sized Wal-Mart sportswear. Though, the notion of “Robo-heart Richard” with any sort of weapon in hand is a bit scary.

Meanwhile, those who sought to connect the repeated “creature” sightings with a recent spate of cattle mutilations in Northwest Canada will have to look elsewhere for a culprit. Equally remarkable, none of the veep’s hunting companions were injured on this trip but an angry grizzly bear (whom the NRA life member missed by a mile) nearly advanced incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to within an unassisted heartbeat of the presidency until Secret Service agents and an off-duty Mountie rescued the surprisingly agile 65-year-old from the branches of a Whitebark Pine near the Alaska border.

Cheney: missed the bear by a mile but thankfully shot no humans

Perhaps the Moonwalker was really there

It may sound incredible but our intrepid psychic investigator Herschel Gomez of Miami confides that those Michael Jackson child molestation accusations of the 1980s and 90s have turned out to be absolute fabrications perpetrated by malicious extraterrestrials.

Gomez says he has been allowed to see compelling evidence that one of the purported 13-year-old “accusers” is actually an octogenarian alien named Merzunngthhh from the Crab Nebula and that poor Michael himself is the product of clumsy extraterrestrial experiments performed at a secret lunar base on an otherwise normal but talented black child briefly abducted from a concert tour with his brothers in 1977.

The ghastly pallor, disfigured nose and limp stringy hair were all produced by exposure to intergalactic isotopes that likewise rendered Jackson incapable of relating to beings his own age unless they are chimpanzees.

Rising Number One Son

Determined to rebound from 2006 Congressional losses, Florida Republican party stalwarts have just about persuaded dashing Fort Lauderdale tax attorney Fu-Tze Fong Feldman to make a race for the U.S. House in 2008 and win back the in the state’s 22nd district from freshman Democrat Ron Klein.

Should he secure the nomination it will be “Footsie” Feldman’s task to convince thousands of Northeastern retirees that they would not be losing a Jewish voice in Congress but gaining a Chinese mensch on Capitol Hill.

One thing is certain, a Feldman campaign wouldn’t be likely to run short of cash thanks to doting Hawaiian-Chinese grandparents controlling the multi-billion dollar Fong-Wam-Bang Electronics empire based in Hong Kong. Back in 1968, these folks spent $750,000 on Footsie’s bilingual (Hebrew-Cantonese) bar-mitzvah at the Honolulu Hilton which featured Jan Peerce, Don Ho and maternal uncle Senator Hiram Fong on the electric horse-headed fiddle.

Professor Kurt Stanislaw Jacobi, a native of South Central Wallachia, holds a Ph.D. psychotropic engineering from the Comenius University of Bratislava, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1948. During the late 50's, Dr. Jacobi was a visiting scholar on the faculty of CCNY where he first postulated his now famous integrated theory of inversional constructs (ITIC) which ultimately made possible the Apollo moon landings, the Camp David Peace Accords and the introduction of Pizza Hut outlets to Antofagasta, Chile.