Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

"That guy on Mars? Yeah, he's a distant cousin. Kind of the family black sheep."

So thanks to this guy at the left, whom I found loitering outside the water dispenser at a local gas station, I learned a new word today: pareidolia. Seeing faces in, say, a jar of peanut butter or an extraterrestrial landscape. Even Lenin in a shower curtain.

Couldn’t find “pareidolia” in my American Heritage Dictionary, though. Not on Merriam-Webster, either. (Although among M-W.com’s suggestions as to what it thinks I meant to type are Parida, La, paradiddle, and, inexplicably, Barred Owl.) Possibly the word is too new and too infrequently used, or maybe even unnecessary.

At any rate, I’ve had fun poking around the examples at Fortean Times, forgetomori and Flickr. Sadly, when I filled our water jugs, I accidentally blotted the guy’s eye out and turned his nose into an exploding cartoon cannon.