I certainly wouldn’t want to share my name with a famous movie character. Lately I’ve heard the tale of not just the movie Harry Potter, but two real life Harry Potter’s.

Two weeks ago I heard that a Brantford, Ontario Harry Potter was besieged with calls about the new Harry Potter book and movie and now I’ve just read about a 78 year old Florida man who’s name happens to be Harry Potter. He too has been getting calls from children every time a new book in the wildly popular series comes out.

“The kids want to know if I’m Harry Potter,” he said. “I tell them I’ve been Harry Potter for darn near 80 years!”

Chongqing China has begun to use outdoor toilets on it’s famous “Foreigners’ Street”. The pubic toilets cover a mans privates but not his face, which has obviously aroused some curiosity. Local guards and employees in the area have used the outdoor restrooms, but most men find it much too embarrassing to use. The womens version of the outdoor bathroom covers the person entirely.

It’s amazing what you’ll find if you stare at your food long enough. Bodega Chocolates in Fountain Valley California says it found a 2 1/2 inch piece of chocolate that resembles the virgin Mary. A worker noticed the glob of chocolate in a mixing vat and thought that it had an amazing likeness to the Virgin Mary standing in prayer. “It’s absolutely a miracle,” said Jacinto Santacruz, 26, a Roman Catholic who in August discovered the 2 ½-inch-tall apparition at Bodega Chocolates.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard of religious images appearing in food or other items, for example they’ve been seen in bricks, logs, the gritty underpass of a Chicago expressway, a Tennessee coffee shop called Bongo Java and, last month, a tiny gold nugget found in the Arizona desert.

In 1977, a woman making burritos in Lake Arthur, N.M., saw the face of Jesus in the pattern of skillet burns on a tortilla. She was so enthralled by the tortilla that she built a shrine to house the Jesus tortilla, which was blessed by a priest, and thousands of people from across the country came to gaze and pray for its divine assistance in healing their ailments.

Muslims have also found Arabic script for Allah or Muhammad on fish scales, chicken eggs, lambs and beans.

Scientists call this phenomenon Pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none is intended. One professor who has studied this phenomenon says that it’s really just how humans are hard wired - “It’s really part of our basic perceptual and cognitive situation,” said Guthrie, a cultural anthropologist, retired Fordham University professor and author of “Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.”

“It has to do with all kinds of misapprehensions that there is something humanlike in one’s environment, when really there’s not.”

At the root of the phenomenon, he said, is the survival instinct.

“It’s a built-in perceptual strategy,” Guthrie said. “In a situation of uncertainty, we guess that something is caused by the most important possibility.”

Hence, if you’re alone and hear a strange sound, even on a gusty night, you’re more likely to ask, “Who’s there?” than think it’s the wind. And if you happen to be religious, Guthrie said, your answer to “Who’s there?” may well be God. More specifically, Jesus in a fried tortilla.

The feelings generated by these perceptions can be powerful.

At Bodega Chocolates, Santacruz and her co-workers placed the chocolate Madonna in a small plastic case, and as news spread, crowds of the curious and devout began making pilgrimages to the shop, where they prayed, crossed themselves and knelt.

“It’s really emotional,” Santacruz said. “I can’t describe the feeling; the emotions make me cry.”

Other alleged miracles have proved profitable: A 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich with a pattern resembling the Virgin Mary sold on eBay in 2004 for $28,000; a pretzel in the shape of Mary cradling the infant Jesus fetched $10,600; and a water-stained piece of plaster cut from a shower wall bearing what looked like the face of Jesus brought in nearly $2,000.

Some manifestations get worldwide attention.

In 1996, the owner of Bongo Java in Nashville, Tenn., said he discovered a cinnamon bun bearing the likeness of Mother Teresa in profile.

Dubbed “the miracle nun bun,” the pastry got so much notice worldwide that he parlayed it into a commercial venture, selling nun-bun T-shirts and coffee mugs on the Internet.

The items were taken off the market when Mother Teresa complained, but he refused to stop exhibiting the renowned sweet, even after she died.

Eventually the bun was stolen during a 2005 Christmas Day break-in.

But it was the famous Jesus tortilla of New Mexico that some believe set the world standard for claims of miracle sightings.

After discovering it while making her husband’s breakfast, Maria Rubio mounted a display of the tortilla.

She quit her job as a maid to become full-time attendant to the shrine of the tortilla constructed in her home. And although a few competing miracle tortillas cropped up in subsequent years, none attracted anything approaching the fan base ascribed to the original.

Religious traditions are filled with tales of apparitions.

On Dec. 12, Roman Catholics celebrate the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who they believe was first seen by a Mexican Indian named Juan Diego in 1531.

Similar apparitions of a gentle woman speaking soothing words have been noted worldwide.

Church officials say they don’t encourage such interpretations.

“The church encourages Christians to see the face of Christ in the homeless, the poor, the destitute and the immigrant, not in a plate of pasta,” said Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

If you are a Roman Catholic and you’ve vowed to make the pilgrimage to Fatima in Portugal, famous for religious visions, but you can’t fulfill your promise you can now rent-a-pilgrim.

Pilgrim Gil will make the journey in your place for the low fee of 2,500 euros (1,671 pounds), and he’ll even send you a certificate stamped along the way to prove he walked your every step.

Carlos Gil, 42, is also a rent-a-pilgrim. He took up this practice four years ago when he suddenly “felt an urge to walk to Fatima” and said charging each client was simply a way to keep doing what he loves. Gil says “It is a romantic way for my clients to thank God for what they have, like buying a candle or a plaster statue of Fatima,”.

To guarantee to his clients that he made the trip on foot, Gil has a system of handing his customers a certificate after every journey with various stamps from places along the way.