toothpaste for dinner

This is one of many awesome installments of the webcomic toothpaste for dinner. It's darwn by a research chemist named Drew who lives in Columbus, Ohio. It's really hit-and-miss, but sometimes it is hilarious. Slate featured it in a Slideshow Essay. Check it out.

Looking for Scarlet

The other day I got an awesome e-mail. Here's the essence of it, some quoted and some paraphrased:

"To some of you I am going to come across as being crazy and to some I may be viewed as being romantic and I'll deal with however I'm judged if it means finding the girl who took my breath away." I'm looking for a woman named Scarlet from University X and this was my only hope of finding her. We met at the airport in City X while waiting to board a flight to city Y, and we also talked when the plane landed. Scarlet had an "electric personality," "amazing eyes," and "long straight brownish blond hair." I should have asked her for her number but I was too afraid. "If you're not her and don't know her, I apologize for wasting your time but I had to make an atempt to find the girl of my dreams."

The "To:" line of the e-mail included dozens of addresses, all of women with the first name "Scarlet." Apparently he went to the University directory, typed in "Scarlet," and e-mailed everyone who popped up.

Creepy? Or has someone just seen too many romantic comedies?

My problem with myspace

The career services office at my school recently reminded my fellow students and me that potential employers, in addition to reading our cover letters and resumes, might research us on the internet. They warned us to clean up any myspace accounts or blogs that might place us in an unfavorable light.

I don't have a myspace account, and I'm pretty anonymous here. Someone truly dedicated, like a stalker, could probably figure out who I am, but a potential employer would be unlikely to put in the required effort. Anyway, there's not much here that's embarassing.

So what's the problem? When you google my name (in quotation marks), you get eleven hits. Ten of them are me--my name is unusual. These hits all correspond with my resume in a way that would say to an employer, "There's only one Scarlet Panda in the world." One of the hits, however, is a myspace page that belongs to the world's only apparent other Scarlet Panda. In addition, the google listing for this page shows a, shall we say, "off-color" poem involving my (her) name. I will not repeat the poem here. Those who know me (or any stalkers) can find it for themselves--you have to click on the Google's "cached" version to see the whole thing.

I find this upsetting. What can I do? Can I sue someone? Get my own myspace page so that it's obvious there are two of us?