The internet is a weird and random place. One day, 11 years ago, when researching robots via Ask Jeeves (or was it dogpile?), I came across this adorable site called happyrobot. Mostly there were pictures of cats and funny quizzes and pictures of adorable people living in New York. I wanted to be friends with them. And it totally happened! Through that one chain of events, so many great things unfolded, most notably, my sister met, married, and procreated with Matt Johnson (What Would Matt Johnson Do?).
Sure, bad stuff can happen via the internets. People get their twisted rage on in the comments sections of blogs and news sites. Your personal information can get exploited for scams and other nefarious purposes. You can't live down embarassing moments the way you used to. That picture of you barfing wild turkey at the side of the road will be tagged with your name on it before you are even sober enough to tag it with a witty disclaimer. Internets: You have to be on your toes.
But what I most cherish about the internet? The sadly decreasing element of random. Which is why I was tickled when this morning, Abi emailed me a link with the subject line "Is this you?" and a link to a photo. At first I thought it was a phishing scam (popular line for twitter fishing scam was 'OMG,is this you?'). But the link looked pretty trustworthy, so I clicked, and here's what I found.
A photo that Rannie took of me as part of his "My Toronto Includes" series was used in an educational seminar: Food Insecurity Among Latin American Communities in Toronto. I am neither Latina nor insecure with food, but apparently someone who is lazy with photo research, dislikes serifs, has Microsoft Paint, and works are Ryerson liked my picture. Random.
