I was walking in Glen Ridge, NJ recently after a light rainfall, and found myself noticing interesting images on the sidewalks. I lived in Glen Ridge for about 17 years, and during the time I lived there, I would notice things on the sidewalks on a regular basis while walking my dogs. What makes the sidewalks unique there is that many of them are made from old slate stones, and the surface quality will range between stones, and they are rarely as uniform or perfectly flat as a more-common concrete sidewalk. So as you can see in the image above, the rainwater collected in some of the grooves of the slate sidewalk, and created this “abstract art” image … don’t you think it’s cool? In some ways, the two circles and the line under it almost looks like a face to me, eyes and a slight smile. But there’s also something about it that seems like a spear … what do you see?
Being intrigued by this, I started looking for more images on the sidewalk as I continued to walk. I know this is all a case of pareidolia, which is defined as “a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist, for example a face in a cloud.” Or in my case, a face in a sidwalk. Do you see what I see below?
Here’s another “face” that I noticed on the same walk … in this case, the guy has a goatee, or at least it looks that way to me.
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
The second one looks like Homer Simpson!