Newark, NJ – As a society, we seem to have grown accustom to finding religious images in strange places. It seems like every day the likeness of the Virgin Mary shows up in a cloud formation or the veins of a corn stalk. This reporter once found the face of Jesus himself in the grains of a piece of wood. Usually, these things leave a lasting impression on the person who finds them. Last Thursday, Ben Riley, of Newark, New Jersey, found a face of someone in his breakfast toast, and it, too, left him a changed man. To bad the face in his breakfast was Michael Richards.

“Usually, I’m not a toast person,” Riley said in our phone interview. “I almost always eat Choco-chunks for breakfast, but that day I was running a little late for work, and figured that if I didn’t eat something, I wouldn’t be worth a darn all morning. So, I settled for some dry toast.”

Breakfast turned out to be more than Ben Riley bargained for. After grabbing his breakfast out of the toaster and heading for the door with it shoved in his mouth, he looked down to fid the face of Michael Richards, most famous for his stint on the television show “Seinfeld” and a racially charged outburst at a comedy club.

“When I first saw it,” said Riley, “I thought it was sort of funny. You know, a novelty, or whatever. I decided that I wasn’t going to eat it and started showing it to my friends, who found it funny too. But the day after it all happened, I…”

Riley had a hard time continuing, but in between sobs of despair, expressed that his life had been changed forever. At first, it was just the offhanded racial joke, but as time went on, it grew into a major problem. He found himself spouting off racial slurs at every opportunity. Given that Mr. Riley lives in a predominately African-American neighborhood, the opportunity happens often.

“I don’t understand it. I’ve never been like that before,” Riley said. “I blame Michael Richards for this. It wasn’t until I saw that damn piece of toast that I started acting this way. Now, I get beat up at the drop of a hat. I can’t so much as go to the local grocery store without having to endure a good, old-fashioned ass-whooping.”

While Mr. Richards was not available for comment, we were able to make contact with his attorney, who flat out denies that his client should hold any of the blame. “Everyone that has seen a picture of Adolf Hitler doesn’t go around exterminating entire races. The same goes here. Just because my client is racist, that doesn’t mean that seeing his image burnt into a piece of toast can make you racist.”

Meanwhile, other members of Ben Riley’s family have fallen to similar fates. His father blames his rampant love affairs on reading a Wikipedia article on Giacomo Casanova. His sister, June, became an alcoholic after seeing a picture of Ernest Hemingway in her American Literature class. A few weeks later her class began studying the works of Hunter S. Thompson, and she fell into the habit of heavy drug use. Ben’s wife, an avid baseball card collector, blames her ALS on her Lou Gehrig card.

“I’ve tried to live a good life and keep myself free from bad influences,” Ben said as we left the room, “but I guess Michael Richards just wasn’t happy ruining his own life. He had to ruin mine, too.”