Gene Ruebsamen forwarded me an email and asked me to post it:
Dear Friends, Please take a look at the attached picture of this victim from Tsunami. If you do not know him, please forward his pictures to your friends or organization in your country for further publication. This boy is about 2 years old. Found and taken from Khao Lak Resort Area, the southern part of Thailand. His parents are missing. His nationality & identity cannot be identified. Please contact Dr. Anuroj Tharasiriroj of Phuket International Hospital Phone: +66 76 249-400, http://www.phuket-inter-hospital.co.th I thank you all for extending kindness to this boy. With kind regards, Tess Ruktapurana Thai Airways International PCL
It’s a longshot, but if anyone has any information, please call the number above.
Also, if you haven’t donated anything to the relief effort yet, please do so: Oxfam, UNICEF, the American Red Cross.
(Update) Anders points to an article (in Swedish) that mentions that the boy was found by his father a week or so ago. So yay.
(Update, again) People have emailed me and called my post a hoax.
Apparently, these people don’t know what the word “hoax” means. So here is a definition:
hoax
n : something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended
to gain an advantage [syn: {fraud}, {fraudulence}, {dupery},
{humbug}, {put-on}]
(my favorite synonym is “humbug”.)
Just because it has already been solved (thankfully with a happy ending) does not make it a hoax. Neither does the fact that it has been forwarded around and posted on various web pages make it a hoax. Even the fact that it’s on snopes.com doesn’t make it a hoax. I am just slow. And idiot perhaps. Late like the people who just discovered “All your base are belong to us” last year and thought it was the funniest thing. (But I’ll offset that with the fact that I was one of the first to blog about Jon Stewart on Crossfire, in an attempt to maintain some pride.)