Recently in Sao Paulo Brazil a 66 year old man wrestled with a 15 foot anaconda for close to half an hour in an attempt to free his grandson from the snakes deadly crushing grip.

The boy, Matheus Pereira de Araujo, 8, would more than likely have died if his screams for help hadn’t been heard by his grandfather.

This anaconda was approximately 80 pounds. Anacondas are the largest snake in the world. They live in swamps and rivers and kill their prey by asphyxiation or drowning.

Araujo had been playing with his cousin in a creek bed on his grandfathers farm when the snake made it’s move.

“It was very fast. I didn’t have time to do anything,” the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper quoted Araujo as saying. “My grandfather is a hero — I was so afraid of dying.”

When the boy was attacked his cousin Flavio, also 8 years of age, ran to get help. Joaquim Pereira, the grandfather, had been driving home when he heard the screams of Matheus and Flavio. He quickly jumped into the ravine and wrestled with the snake, which started to coil around him as well.

“I started fighting the animal and tried to loosen its grip on the boy’s neck but the snake was too strong,” Pereira told the Bom Dia newspaper of Sao Jose do Rio Preto.

When his efforts failed he resorted to attacking the snake with stones and a machete.

“I kept hitting it with the machete but it felt like a rubber tire, it wouldn’t tear,” he said. Pereira eventually killed the snake after a long struggle, freeing the boy who needed 21 stitches to his chest where the snake had bit him.

“It was the most terrible scene that I’ve seen in my life,” Pereira said. “It was totally coiled around him while he was screaming that he was dying.”

Know anyone who’s performed a heroic act? Tell me about it.

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.

Election foul ups

I didn’t know you had to mark all the boxes when you were picking ONE candidate? Apparently a badly trained Kentucky election worker didn’t either because he physically tossed a voter out of a polling station in Louisville on Election Day because he hadn’t marked all the offices on his ballot.

Then there’s the case of a voter in Allentown, Pa., was arrested after he suddenly erupted in the voting booth and began pounding the machine with a paperweight. He must have thought it was a vending machine that didn’t give him his goods?

Wow how could this happen? In elections for sheriff, Chris Abril was elected in Polk County, N.C., despite his arrest in August on years-old charges of statutory rape, which Abril said he would straighten out as one of his first orders of business. Yeah, probably to have the charges dismissed.

Then there’s, Rick Magnuson who was soundly defeated for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., after “all of my skeletons (were) exposed,” he said, in the course of the campaign. Among the skeletons was a stint in alcohol rehab; his unauthorized use of a criminal database; his onetime letters to Osama bin Laden as part of an “art project.”

Why is it that people that dedicate their lives to helping others or rescuing animals often live in conditions that are worse than the ones that they are rescuing others from? And that they often have their rescuee’s living with them in horrid conditions? That’s no rescue to me:

An investigation by a state agency is under way in Revere, Mass., of a residence condemned by local officials as, according to a neighbor, “worse than any Stephen King movie” because it reeked of garbage, feces and cockroaches.

It is the home of Andrea Watson, a child-rights advocate who lived there until the condemnation with her two children and two grandchildren. Watson’s colleagues told the Boston Herald that she is a tireless activist for children who put her “heart and soul” into Parents for Residential Reform.